In 1980, former president Richard Nixon wrote a book titled The Real War detailing how the United States was losing ground to the Soviet Union on the world stage. One of his central concerns was the effects of the then recent fall of the Shah of Iran.
Though Leftists (and Ron Paul-types) would never admit it, there was a significant threat of Soviet expansion into Iran and toward the Persian Gulf in the post-war period, which was thwarted only thanks to the Shah. Nixon witnesses this as vice-president in the 1950s, and by the time he became president the shah’s value as an ally to the United States had been cemented.
Nixon gave a short recounting of the benefits of our alliance with the Shah that he witnessed during his term:
After the British withdrew in 1971 Iran had taken their place as the military power that guaranteed stability in the Gulf. On the eve of the British withdrawal Iranian forces occupied the strategically located islands of Abu Musa and Tumbs overlooking the Straits of Hormuz. In 1973 the Shah sent Iranian troops to Oman’s Dhofar Province, where Marxist guerrillas supplied by neighboring South Yemen were threatening the Sultan of Oman’s regime. The Shah ordered work begun on a naval base at Chah Bahar in Iranian Baluchistan to guard the entrance to the Straits of Hormuz.
In addition to refusing to participate in the Arab oil embargo of 1967 and of 1973, the Shah had continued to recognize Israel, provided oil for our Mediterranean Fleet, and kept Iraq from playing any significant role in the Yom Kippur War by moving troops to the Iran-Iraq border and by giving covert support to rebellious Kurdish forces, thus tying down the Iraqi Army. During that war his was the only country in the area to prohibit Soviet overflights; he also rushed oil to an American carrier force in the Indian Ocean to keep it in operation. When our allies were asked to send arms to South Vietnam before the Paris accords forbade it, the Shah stripped himself of F-5’s to accommodate us.
With the fall of the Shah, all of those advantages were reversed. Additionally, 1980 was still too early for many to predict the catastrophe that the reemergence of militant Islam would have in the decades to come, so we in hindsight see what Nixon could not.
It was a disaster that could have been avoided if we would have stood strong with our ally. It is a lesson we should not soon forget.