Abstract
The 1953 Coup d’état in Iran dramatically changed the course of history of that country. It represented not only a blatant violation of the sovereignty of Iran and the freedom of the Iranian people to choose their own political path, but also created a precedence that was later used for similar overthrows of regimes in third world states during the Cold War. In international politics, a debate on the role of outside (e.g., structural level) and inside (e.g., unit level) factors and their role in policy-making is probably as old as the discipline itself. While this argument does not seem settled, the prevailing feeling in the field is that, for the most part, structural elements have a large impact on the behavior of the states in the international political system. Structural Realist, or Neorealist, theory of international politics is a parsimonious but, at the same time, efficient way of explaining state behavior, including Cold War era episodes like the Coup in Iran. Nonetheless, this paper will try to show that by incorporating the Classical Realist approach and considering history and collective memory, as well as study of personality, one can get a much fuller and more comprehensive picture of the background forces that contributed to this event.
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Notes
Iranian crisis was sometimes perceived as the event that defined the origins of the Cold War, as the United States began to view its interests in terms of Soviet geopolitical threat and the significance of the Middle Eastern oil fields (Foran 2000). It was the first time the United States used covert operations during peacetime to overthrow a sovereign government of another country and set a precedence that the U.S. later followed in 1954 and 1973 (Gasiorowski 1987). This had a profound influence on the policymakers in the United States as it convinced them of their ability to shape world events (Foran 2000).
See Foreign Office document F0371/104614 PRO FO to Washington (7 March 1953) quoted in Ruehsen (1993), 473.
For more information, please see the document “State Department, Memorandum of Conversation, Byroade to Matthews, "Proposal to Organize a Coup d'etat in Iran," Top Secret, November 26, 1952”, National Security Archive, accessed January 2018, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//dc.html?doc=3914379-01-State-Department-Memorandum-of-Conversation.
For more information, please see the document “State Department, Memorandum of Conversation, "British Proposal to Organize a Coup d'etat in Iran," Top Secret, December 3, 1952”, National Security Archive, accessed January 2018, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//dc.html?doc=3914380-02-State-Department-Memorandum-of-Conversation.
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The author holds a Master’s degree in the area of Middle Eastern Studies from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (class of 2014) and started an English language-taught Ph.D. degree programme in International Politics at SIRPA Fudan University in September 2016.
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Šćepanović, J. Looking Back at the 1953 Coup in Iran: Structural- and Unit-Level Views. Chin. Polit. Sci. Rev. 3, 345–358 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-018-0100-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-018-0100-8