The only person Henry Kissinger flattered more than President Richard Nixon was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. In the early 1970s, the Shah, sitting atop an enormous reserve of increasingly expensive oil and a key figure in Nixon and Kissinger's move into the Middle East, wanted to be dealt with as a serious person. He expected his country to be treated with the same respect Washington showed other key Cold War allies like West Germany and Great Britain. As Nixon's national security adviser and, after 1973, secretary of state, Kissinger's job was to pump up the Shah, to make him feel like he truly was the "king of kings."
Reading the diplomatic record, it's hard not to imagine his weariness as he prepared for his sessions with the Shah, considering just what gestures and words would be needed to make it clear that his majesty truly mattered to Washington, that he was valued beyond compare. "Let's see," an aide who was helping Kissinger get ready for one such meeting said, "the Shah will want to talk about Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, the Kurds, and Brezhnev."
During another prep, Kissinger was told that "the Shah wants to ride in an F-14." Silence ensued. Then Kissinger began to think aloud about how to flatter the monarch into abandoning the idea. "We can say," he began, "that if he has his heart set on it, okay, but the President would feel easier if he didn't have that one worry in 10,000 [that the plane might crash]. The Shah will be flattered." Once, Nixon asked Kissinger to book the entertainer Danny Kaye for a private performance for the Shah and his wife.
The 92-year-old Kissinger has a long history of involvement in Iran and his recent opposition to Barack Obama's Iran nuclear deal, while relatively subdued by present Washington standards, matters. In it lies a certain irony, given his own largely unexamined record in the region. Kissinger's criticism has focused mostly on warning that the deal might provoke a regional nuclear arms race as Sunni states led by Saudi Arabia line up against Shia Iran. "We will live in a proliferated world," he said in testimony before the Senate. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed co-authored with another former secretary of state, George Shultz, Kissinger worried that, as the region "trends toward sectarian upheaval" and "state collapse," the "disequilibrium of power" might likely tilt toward Tehran.
Of all people, Kissinger knows well how easily the best laid plans can go astray and careen toward disaster. The former diplomat is by no means solely responsible for the mess that is today's Middle East. There is, of course, George W. Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq (which Kissinger supported). But he does bear far more responsibility for our proliferated world's disequilibrium of power than anyone usually recognizes.
Some of his Middle East policies are well known. In early 1974, for instance, his so-called shuttle diplomacy helped deescalate the tensions that had led to the previous year's Arab-Israeli War. At the same time, however, it locked in Israel's veto over U.S. foreign policy for decades to come. And in December 1975, wrongly believing that he had worked out a lasting pro-American balance of power between Iran and Iraq, Kissinger withdrew his previous support from the Kurds (whom he had been using as agents of destabilization against Baghdad's Baathists). Iraq moved quickly to launch an assault on the Kurds that killed thousands and then implemented a program of ethnic cleansing, forcibly relocating Kurdish survivors and moving Arabs into their homes. "Even in the context of covert action ours was a cynical enterprise," noted a Congressional investigation into his sacrifice of the Kurds.
Less well known is the way in which Kissinger's policies toward Iran and Saudi Arabia accelerated the radicalization in the region, how step by catastrophic step he laid the groundwork for the region's spiraling crises of the present moment.
Guardian of the Gulf
Most critical histories of U.S. involvement in Iran rightly began with the joint British-U.S. coup against democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, which installed Pahlavi on the Peacock Throne. But it was Kissinger who, in 1972, greatly deepened the relationship between Washington and Tehran. He was the one who began a policy of unconditional support for the Shah as a way to steady American power in the Persian Gulf while the U.S. extracted itself from Southeast Asia. As James Schlesinger, who served as Nixon's CIA director and secretary of defense, noted, if "we were going to make the Shah the Guardian of the Gulf, we've got to give him what he needs." Which, Schlesinger added, really meant "giving him what he wants."
What the Shah wanted most of all were weapons of every variety -- and American military trainers, and a navy, and an air force. It was Kissinger who overrode State Department and Pentagon objections and gave the Shah what no other country had: the ability to buy anything he wanted from U.S. weapons makers.
"We are looking for a navy," the Shah told Kissinger in 1973, "we have a large shopping list." And so Kissinger let him buy a navy.
