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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
2009 is the thirtieth anniversary of the Iranian Revolution. In 2006 the Bush administration ranked Iran as posing arguably the greatest single threat to America. And throughout 2008 that administration insisted all options were open in dealing with Iran, including preventative strikes. Yet, unlike its decisive intervention to establish Iran as a client state in the 1950s, the US has thus far been unable to force the changes it desires in and from Iran's leadership. This article argues that to help understand this situation it is important to recognize that the Iranian Revolution was and remains nurtured by a contemporaneous “silent revolution” in the international oil industry, even if the Ahmadinejad regime's economic policies especially threaten currently to squander some of the potential afforded by it.
1 United States National Security Strategy (March 2006): 20, http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2006/nss2006.pdf.
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14 Such was their fear of a bad precedent being set in Iran that the oil majors even served as a bulwark against any weakening of resolve to maintain the embargo by either the British or American governments. See Marsh, S., “Crude Diplomacy: Anglo-American Relations and Multinational Oil,” Journal of Contemporary British History, 21, no. 1 (2007): 25–54Google Scholar.
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20 Intensive lobbying by smaller American independent oil companies resulted in the US oil majors reducing their share to 7 percent each, leaving 5 percent to divide between nine independents, which created the Iricon Agency for this purpose. The agreement also awarded the AIOC £25 million compensation from Iran, £32.4 million from other consortium participants in the first year of operations and a further payment per ton of crude oil equivalent to £182 million. Bamberg, History of BP, 509.
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50 This is reflected in growing debate about alternative development models provided by capitalist authoritarian states. For instance, Gat argues that states such as China and Russia “may represent a viable alternative path to modernity, which in turn suggests that there is nothing inevitable about liberal democracy's ultimate victory—or future dominance.” Others argue that such views are based “almost entirely on a spurious correlation between autocracy and expansion.” Gat, A., “The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers,” Foreign Affairs, 86, no. 4 (2007): accessed online from http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20070701faessay86405/azar-gat/the-return-of-authoritarian-great-powers.htmlGoogle Scholar; McFaul, M. and Stoner-Weiss, K., “The Myth of the Authoritarian Model: How Putin's Crackdown Holds Russia Back”, Foreign Affairs, 87:1 (2008): accessed online from http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080101faessay87105-p0/michael-mcfaul-kathryn-stoner-weiss/the-myth-of-the-authoritarian-model.html.Google Scholar
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52 “Russia, Iran and Qatar Discuss Gas Cartel,” International Herald Tribune, 21 October 2008, http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/10/21/business/ML-Iran-Gas-Cartel.php?pass=true.