In King of Kings: The Fall of the Shah and the Revolution That Forged Modern Iran, American journalist Scott Anderson revisits a question that still divides Iranians: did the United States abandon Mohammad Reza Shah and clear the way for Ruhollah Khomeini? The French edition, published under a title that translates as How America Gave Iran to the Mullahs, sharpens that accusation for effect. Anderson’s argument is more complex. Washington did not devise a plan to replace the Shah with Khomeini. It overestimated its knowledge of Iran and interpreted the crisis through categories that had ceased to explain the country.
The United States knew the Iranian military, the royal court, SAVAK, arms contracts and the oil economy. It maintained one of its closest political and security relationships with the Iranian state. Yet this formidable store of information was largely knowledge of the government and its elites. Once Iranian society began to move, it became clear that knowing a regime was not the same as understanding a country.
Did Washington Abandon the Shah?
Two rival accounts continue to shape the debate. The first holds that the United States supported the Shah for as long as he served American interests, then sacrificed him and deliberately facilitated Khomeini’s rise. The second explains the monarchy’s collapse entirely through its internal contradictions: authoritarian rule, inequality, economic disruption, weak representative institutions and a protest movement that escaped government control.
Anderson resists both exclusive explanations. The Carter administration remained committed to the monarchy for much of the crisis, but it gradually fractured over what to do. By November 1978, Ambassador William Sullivan’s Thinking the Unthinkable cable was already contemplating a future without the Shah, while Zbigniew Brzezinski continued to advocate much firmer support. There was neither a long-standing American design to install Khomeini nor unbroken support for the Shah until his final day. By the time Washington understood the extent of the disintegration, its policy was divided and its room for manoeuvre severely reduced.
The Cold War Lens
In 1978, American officials still viewed international crises primarily through the confrontation with the Soviet Union. Iran shared a long border with the USSR, held major oil reserves and occupied a central place in Washington’s regional strategy. The first question prompted by any radical upheaval therefore concerned communist influence, the Tudeh Party and the Iranian left.
That concern was not imaginary, but it distorted the reading of the revolution. The United States knew how to identify a Soviet threat; it understood far less about the capacity of revolutionary Islamism to turn religion into a principle for reorganising the state and society. American diplomats had in fact reported the depth of the Shia revival and Khomeini’s symbolic position. The failure was not a total absence of warning, but the marginalisation of such warnings inside a system captive to other priorities.
Khomeini’s associates in the West — including Ebrahim Yazdi, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh and Abolhassan Banisadr — understood American anxieties. Several still assumed that the exiled cleric would exercise moral authority after the revolution rather than govern directly. They also helped present the movement as a force capable of preventing a communist takeover. To an administration preoccupied with Soviet expansion, that assurance mattered.
It would be misleading to say that Washington consciously preferred a theocracy to the monarchy. It is more accurate to say that some American officials regarded an anti-communist religious movement as less threatening than Iran’s absorption into the Soviet camp. Familiarity with conservative Muslim monarchies allied to the United States had not prepared them to distinguish a traditional religious order from a revolutionary Islamist project seeking to refashion law, government and society.
The Shah in Crisis
American error does not absolve Mohammad Reza Shah of responsibility. Anderson depicts a ruler who was ambitious yet profoundly hesitant at decisive moments: determined to turn Iran into a major power, unusually dependent on Western approval, suspicious of his allies and increasingly unable to choose consistently between repression and compromise.
His indecision had institutional consequences. Over the years, the Shah had concentrated power around himself and weakened autonomous political intermediaries. As long as he decided, the machinery obeyed. Once he hesitated, a system trained to await instructions from above lost its capacity to act. The personal strength of the monarchy in stable times became its central weakness in crisis.
The Shah’s unwillingness to order unlimited bloodshed should also be taken seriously. It did not, however, transform the monarchy into a constitutional order capable of resolving conflict politically. The regime was neither open enough to permit a genuine transfer of power nor prepared to deploy repression without restraint. It remained caught between the two, without credible institutions through which a settlement might be negotiated.
The Long Shadow of 1953
The overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh in August 1953 cannot by itself explain the 1979 revolution, but it permanently altered the monarchy’s legitimacy. American and British intervention enabled the Shah to consolidate his power while reinforcing the belief that he owed his throne to foreign support. The closer his relationship with Washington became, the easier it was for his opponents to portray him as dependent on the United States.
The legacy of 1953 also produced a contradictory psychology. The Shah needed American backing but feared that Washington might one day decide his fate without him. This mixture of dependence and distrust became paralysing as the 1978 crisis deepened. No one can know how Iran would have evolved without the coup, but it narrowed the prospect of a gradual move towards a genuinely constitutional monarchy and contributed to the increasing personalisation of power.
Modernisation and Social Dislocation
The dramatic rise in oil revenues after 1973 accelerated industrialisation, arms purchases and major development projects. Yet rapid growth did not automatically strengthen the monarchy. It encouraged mass migration to the cities, disrupted established social structures, fuelled inflation and raised expectations that Iran’s political institutions could not absorb.
When growth slowed in the mid-1970s, many recent urban migrants found themselves detached from rural life but excluded from the promise of urban prosperity. Mosques, bazaars and religious networks provided forms of solidarity and mobilisation that banned or weakened political parties could no longer offer. Modernisation had transformed society without opening political channels capable of representing its new demands.
The weakness of intermediary institutions compounded the problem. Iran had no autonomous parties able to organise conflict, no parliament with meaningful power and no free press capable of measuring discontent. In such a system, bad news travelled poorly, and enforced silence could easily be mistaken for consent.
A Revolution Without a Single Cause
The claim that America ‘gave’ Iran to the mullahs has polemical force, but it cannot serve as a historical explanation. American errors mattered, as did the Shah’s hesitation, the monarchy’s institutional fragility, economic upheaval, the strength of religious networks and the political skill of Khomeini and his associates. None was sufficient on its own. Their convergence made possible an outcome that few participants had foreseen and that many still believed they could control.
This is also the critical limit to keep in mind when reading Anderson. His book powerfully illuminates the American foreign-policy apparatus and the blindness of its officials. It is not, by itself, a complete social history of the Iranian Revolution. The liberal, nationalist and leftist oppositions, divisions within the clergy and the independent agency of Iranian actors require other sources and perspectives.
Knowing a Great Deal Without Understanding
The book’s central lesson lies in the difference between information and understanding. Washington did not lack ambassadors, military advisers or intelligence reports. But information was filtered through an overly intimate relationship with the summit of the state and a framework centred on communism. Relevant warnings existed; they failed to acquire sufficient weight in decision-making.
A great power may possess thousands of pages of reporting and still ask the wrong questions. If it searches only for a Soviet hand, it may underestimate a movement organised through mosques, bazaars and religious networks. If it relies chiefly on the security services to describe society, it may receive an account of the regime’s anxieties rather than the country’s transformation. By treating the Shah as the embodiment of Iran, Washington forgot that Iran was more than the Shah.
Could the Same Error Happen Again?
The question raised by this history extends beyond 1979. The United States no longer sees Iran mainly through the Cold War, but it can still reduce the country to nuclear facilities, missiles, the Strait of Hormuz and the calculations of those in power. The Islamic Republic, the Iranian state and Iranian society are not interchangeable.
Continued war offers no guarantee of freedom for Iranians; an agreement with the Islamic Republic offers no guarantee that their interests will be served. Whether Washington chooses pressure or negotiation, it will act first according to its own priorities. Iranians therefore cannot afford to suspend their country’s future on the decisions of a foreign power whose history reveals both considerable influence and persistent limits of understanding.
Anderson’s most durable conclusion is not that an American conspiracy manufactured the Islamic Revolution. It is more unsettling: a great power may know a country’s rulers, military and security services intimately while failing to understand the society that eventually overturns that order. The danger begins when the accumulation of information hardens into certainty.
