"since the modern improvements of steam navigation the whole of
the world has become one, and has become one political system."
-- Mr. Spencer Wilkinson, at a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, London, April, 1904.
In April 1904, Sir Halford John Mackinder, a well known and well liked member of the Royal Geographical Society, took to the podium to present his most recent paper, The Geographical Pivot of History. To a well-deposed crowd he laid out his theory: that the geographical region of eastern Europe is a pivot point around which the rest of the world rotates politically. In the 20th Century, when geographical features and distance were no longer an impediment to conquest (in either direction) thanks to the invention of the railroad, Mackinder theorised that whomever held that pivot point could command control of the whole globe.
Some years later, in 1919, Mackinder summarised his theory thus:
Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;
who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
who rules the World-Island commands the world.
His theory, known as Heartland Theory, is alive and well and adhered to in the upper echelons of society with near-religious zeal today.
The Grand Chessboard
Of course, as technologies advanced, and way in which soft power is weilded evolved, Heartland Theory was also adapted by later scholars to meet modern foreign policy needs. One of the most notable of these scholars was Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Brzezinski, (as you may have gathered from his name) was Polish-born. His father was a prominent Polish politician, who, in 1938, was appointed ambassador to Canada; when Communists took over the Polish government in 1945, the family became stranded there. Brzezinski retained a life-long opposition to the Communists, and, conversely, a deep belief in the supremacy of America. He believed the world would be a better place if America could retain in perpetuity her position as the dominant superpower. The way to do that, he argued, drawing explicitly on Mackinder’s Heartland theory (he quotes Mackinder’s summary as given above), was hegemonic domination of Eurasia. And, as President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, he was perfectly placed to put his theory into practice.
In 1997 he laid out his theory in his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. The book was intended, in his words: “For my students—to help them shape tomorrow's world.”
Brzezinski’s book is central to understanding the geopolitics of the late 20th Century and the early 21st, all the way up to today. Why is there a war in Ukraine? Why in Israel? Why with Iran? These conflicts can only be fully understood in the context of Brzezinski’s worldview.
The book kicks off with a brief look at previous successful empires: the Romans, the Chinese, the Mongols, America was greater than all of these, he argued, because she dominates in all four areas in which an empire can dominate: militarily, economically, technologically, and culturally.
“— all of which gives the United States a political clout that no other state comes close to matching. It is the combination of all four that makes America the only comprehensive global superpower.”
Brzezinski believed that through judicious use of all four of these powers, America could hold sway over Eurasia, and thus over the whole globe. He envisioned Euasia as a giant chessboard on which a game was being played:
Explaining the objective of ‘the game’, Brzezinski wrote:
This huge, oddly shaped Eurasian chessboard—extending from Lisbon to Vladivostok—provides the setting for “the game.” If the middle space can be drawn increasingly into the expanding orbit of the West (where America preponderates), if the southern region is not subjected to domination by a single player, and if the East is not unified in a manner that prompts the expulsion of America from its offshore bases, America can then be said to prevail. But if the middle space rebuffs the West, becomes an assertive single entity, and either gains control over the South or forms an alliance with the major Eastern actor, then America's primacy in Eurasia shrinks dramatically. The same would be the case if the two major Eastern players were somehow to unite. Finally, any ejection of America by its Western partners from its perch on the western periphery would automatically spell the end of America's participation in the game on the Eurasian chessboard, even though that would probably also mean the eventual subordination of the western extremity to a revived player occupying the middle space.
In a very broad sweep, what Brzezinski has outlined here is American foreign policy for the last 50 years or more. In each geographic area, America’s various strengths have been brought into play:
The orbit of the West has expanded through NATO and the strategic use of cultural strength;
The South (Middle East) has been provoked into Perpetual War through the use of military power and economic might, preventing any one country from gaining dominence;
And America has attempted (arguably with rather less success) to contain the East economically.
Map onto this chessboard the current flashpoints — those wars that prompt statements from US Presidents, and hours of coverage from CNN:
Ukraine in the West;
Israel / Gaza / Iran in the South;
and in the East, Taiwan is threatening to become the next major conflict.
Much can be said about Brzezinski, his chessboard, and the company he kept. Whole books can and have been written on the details of how the game has played out worldwide over the last few decades; more books will be written about how it is being played out right now (and there will be more articles to come).
In this series of articles, I’m going to take a mad gallop through the key chess moves made in Brzezinski’s ‘South’ — the Middle East — and how it relates to the current Israel / Gaza war. So much more could be written about all of the events here, the people involved, the conflicting interests and how they played out against each other. This series is not intended to be comprehensive by any means; merely to give a flavour of the Grand Chessboard strategy so that people can recognise the pattern in current events. That said, let’s get on with the precursor to the present day, and take a look at how Iran became a rogue state in the first place.
The Game, Part 1: Iran
America In Iran - 1953
It’s no secret that in 1953, the USA and the UK conspired to overthrow the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Shah. The foreign interference is so well known, in fact, it even gets a mention in the opening sequence of the 2012 film Argo:
In 1912, an English speculator, William Knox D’Arcy, was granted permission by the Iranian government to take over the concession on an Iranian oil field; the extracted crude was piped to a refinery built at Ābādān. Two years later, in 1914, the British government became the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s principal stockholder and remained so. More fields were added, and by 1938, Ābādān was the largest refinery in the world, representing a major strategic asset to Britain, particularly during WWII.
So when Mohammad Mosaddegh came to power in 1951 promising to nationalise the oil fields and keep the oil wealth in Iran, Britain was not happy. It recruited the US to help stage a coup to topple Mosaddegh and hand power directly to the Shah who was more amenable to Western interests. According to History.com:
Working with pro-Shah forces and, most importantly, the Iranian military, the CIA cajoled, threatened, and bribed its way into influence and helped to organize another coup attempt against Mossadeq. On August 19, 1953, the military, backed by street protests organized and financed by the CIA, overthrew Mossadeq. The Shah quickly returned [to Iran] to take power and, as thanks for the American help, signed over 40 percent of Iran’s oil fields to U.S. companies.
The following year, The Anglo-Persian Oil Company became British Petroleum Company Limited, known simply as ‘BP’.
In 2013, a year after Argo was released, the CIA publically owned up to its involvement in the coup, and, coincidentally, just last month, the CIA finally admitted what we all already knew: that the coup had been undemocratic. The admission came in a CIA podcast discussing the operation dramatised in Argo, which tells the story of how the CIA extracted six American diplomats who had managed to escape the 1979 American Embassy hostage situation.
The Associate Press explains:
In [the podcast], CIA spokesman and podcast host Walter Trosin cites the claims of agency historians that the majority of the CIA’s clandestine activities in its history “bolstered” popularly elected governments.
“We should acknowledge, though, that this is, therefore, a really significant exception to that rule,” Trosin says of the 1953 coup.
CIA historian Brent Geary, appearing on the podcast, agrees.
“This is one of the exceptions to that,” Geary says. (my emphasis — that’s quite an understatement)
In a statement given to AP, the Iranian Mission to the UN described the 1953 coup as marking “the inception of relentless American meddling in Iran’s internal affairs,” adding: “The U.S. admission never translated into compensatory action or a genuine commitment to refrain from future interference, nor did it change its subversive policy towards the Islamic Republic of Iran.” (My emphasis).
America in Iran - 1979
Popular history holds that the 1953 coup paved the way for the 1979 revolution which brought hard line Islamists to power in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeni. Again, the Argo’s opening montage gives a neat summary here of the mainstream view: the new Shah wanted to westernise the country, the (evil, backwards, Islamist) people didn’t like it, they overthrew him, killed his supporters, and installed the Islamist regime. In other words, the ‘79 revolution is described as an Islamic populist revolution. But was it?
Western popular imagination paints Iran as a failed state run by crazed Ayatollahs with the full support of a bloodthirsty radical Islamist population, all baying for the blood of Americans and Jews. Yet videos regularly emerge from Iran showing that the leadership does not have the support of the people, who actually on the whole are friendly toward both America and Israel.
In the last few years, brave Iranian girls have been fighting back against the Islamic clerics by removing their hijabs and showing their hair. This has prompted a new #IranRevolution waged on social media as much as in the streets, spurred on by the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard last year, after she was arrested for not wearing her hijab.
Note in the last tweet above that the protestors are calling for the return of the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi — the same Shah who was supposedly overthrown by ‘popular’ revolution in 1979.
Mohammed Reza was the eldest son of Reza Khan, an Iranian army officer who rose to power, becoming Shah in 1925 (as Reza Shah Pahlavi). In 1941 Reza Khan was forced out of the country by the British and Soviets who feared he would ally with Germany, and the title passed to Mohammed Reza. In 1953, in the midst of the riots provoked by the CIA’s coup, Mohammed Reza also fled the country, until he was invited back in following the successful deposition of Mosaddegh.
Supported by the US, Mohammed Reza then embarked on a program of Westernisation for Iran, building roads, rail, and air infrastructure; installing dams and irrigation systems to make Iran largely self-sufficient in food; rolling out health and education programs to eliminate malaria and spread literacy within the population.
According to an account of the ‘79 revolution published by The New American:
In 1978, his last full year in power, the average Iranian earned $2,540, compared to $160 25 years earlier. Iran had full employment, requiring foreign workers. The national currency was stable for 15 years, inspiring French economist André Piettre to call Iran a country of “growth without inflation.” Although Iran was the world’s second largest oil exporter, the Shah planned construction of 18 nuclear power plants. He built an Olympic sports complex and applied to host the 1988 Olympics (an honor eventually assigned Seoul), an achievement unthinkable for other Middle East nations.
Reza Shah was also fiercly pro-American, regarding his country as being on the front line against Soviet expansionism. Foreign-affairs analyst Hilaire du Berrier, quoted by TNA, noted:
“He determined to make Iran … capable of blocking a Russian advance until the West should realize to what extent her own interests were threatened and come to his aid…. It necessitated an army of 250,000 men.”
The Iranian airforce grew to be the world’s fifth best.
It’s important to remember here that the purpose of the ‘53 coup was to hand power to a Shah who was more friendly toward the West — and it did just that. Unfortunately, the Shah was too successful at modernising his country. So successful that the Americans feared they could no longer contain him, while for his own part, the Shah came to believe they never would.
In 2005, one of the Shah’s ministers and closest advisors, Houchang Nahavandi, published a book titled The Last Shah Of Iran: Fatal Countdown Of A Great Patriot Betrayed By The Free World, A Great Country Whose Fault Was Success. In it, he details how the Shah was repeatedly warned by various people, including Count Alexandre de Marenches, Head of the French intelligence-services, Djamchid Gharib, a diplomat station in Turkey, and others, that the Americans were set on his removal. The Shah dismissed the warnings.
“I am the best defender of the west,” [the Shah told de Marenches] “in this part of the world; I have the best army and the greatest power: the whole thing is so absurd, that I cannot possibly believe.” […]
There was a glaring error in his analysis; but what did the Americans have against him really? “Megalomania”, they said; but all they meant by that was his country’s rapid rise to power, his proposal to de-nuclearise the region — which was anathema to Israel — and his plan for a security-pact linking the countries with coasts on the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, which would allow them to tackle common problems, themselves.
Then there were the big oil-multinationals, who would not forgive him for the role he played in raising OPEC against them, and in which he had the support of King Feisal of Saudi Arabia — another modernising sovereign, and one who was assassinated, in 1975, in circumstances, which are still unclear.
As an interesting aside, according to Nahavandi’s account, one of the people who warned the Shah was King Hussein of Jordan, who claimed to have been the near-victim of a similar plot. Nahavandi writes:
At Cairo, in 1980, a few days before his death, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi told me: “Hussein [of Jordan] was right: at the beginning of that autumn [1978] he rang me and said, ‘what the Americans are doing in Iran is what they tried to do to me, five years ago’.” [Black September 1973]
Either Nahavandi, or Pahlavi, or Hussein got the date wrong — Black September refers to the Jordanian civil war of 1970-71, in which Jordanian forces led by King Hussein fought the (Communist) Palestinian Liberation Organisation led by none other than Yasser Arafat.
According to Nahavandi, Hussein is said to have told Mohammed Reza:
“But I held on,” […] “crushed the rebellion and forced the subversives to the negotiating-table.
“If,” [Hussein] went on, “you find you cannot give the orders, which meet the needs of the time, let me come to Iran, install myself in a little office next to yours, for three days, and speak for you, and in your name, to tell the military chiefs what to do!
“You'll see,” he concluded, “everything will be all right, and the Americans will abandon their plans.”
If true, this means that the Americans intended the PLO to take control not just of the West Bank, but of the whole of what is now Jordan. This would, in effect, have placed a rogue state of the kind that Iran now is right along nearly the whole eastern border of Israel. Given the scale of carnage the PLO was able to inflict on Israeli citizens through the intifadas, one can only imagine the scale of suffering that would have come of that.
Regardless, as early as 1974, the Americans had already begun advancing the idea of toppling the Shah. But it was the Carter administration, with Brzezinski in situ as foreign policy advisor, that made the decisive move to provoke the revolution under the guise of human rights.
Du Berrier notes:
When the situation was deemed ripe, U.S. Ambassador William Sullivan — the man reputed to have toppled the pro-American government of General Phoumi Nosavan in Laos — was sent to urge the Shah to get out. In December Mr. George Ball, an instant “authority on Iran,” was sent as a follow-up with the same message.
Nahavandi recounts:
George Ball — that guru of American diplomacy and prominento of certain think-tanks and pressure groups — once paid a long visit to Teheran, where, interestingly, the National Broadcasting Authority placed an office at his disposal. Once installed there, he played host to all the best-known dissidents and gave them encouragement. After he returned to Washington, he made public statements, hostile and insulting to the Sovereign.
But we must not forget the venom with which Teddy Kennedy ranted against the Shah, nor that on December 7, 1977, the Kennedy family financed a so-called committee for the defense of liberties and rights of man in Teheran, which was nothing but a headquarters for revolution.
According to The New American:
Suddenly […] the U.S. media found him “a despot, an oppressor, a tyrant.” Kennedy denounced him for running “one of the most violent regimes in the history of mankind.”
Revolutionary forces, both Islamic and communist, whipped up dissent, protests, and rioting within the country, destabilising it. With the stage now set for the Shah’s removal, the international community moved to replace him with their favoured candidate: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Nahavandi takes up the story:
On 6th January 1979, at Guadeloupe, the four, great Western Powers had been assembled, since the previous evening, at the invitation of Valery Giscard d’Estaing, to discuss the crisis in Iran. That day, Jimmy Carter, Helmut Schmidt, James Callaghan and the French president sealed the fate of Iran. […]
One day, the archives will probably reveal the whole truth of this episode. However, cross-checking the subsequent, published, indiscreet references and settling of accounts, permits us to suspect that, although unanimity was reached in favour of Rouhollah Khomeyni's taking power, it was the German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, who was the least enthusiastic of the four, about it.
In 2016, declassified documents revealed the extent of the contact between the Ayatollah Khomeni and the Carter administration in the run up to the ‘79 revolution, dating all the way back to the ‘60s. According to a report in The Guardian, documents obtained by the BBC’s Persian service revealed that the Carter administraion “paved the way for his [Khomeni’s] return [from exile in Paris] by holding the Iranian army back from launching a military coup.”
The man in charge of making sure the Iranian military were stymied was Air Force General Robert Huyser, deputy commander of U.S. forces in Europe. Shah Raza wasn’t even aware that Huyser had entered Iran until he’d been in the country for a number of days; during that time he had busied himself meeting with the Iranian generals, leaning on them to stand aside. His strongarming worked. The army stood down, the Shah was forced into exile, and Khomeni swept in. American officials were present at the parade which heralded his victory.
The Iran-Iraq War, 1980-88
As we’ve seen, the Shah had been deposed because, under his rule, Iran was growing too successful — too independent from American control — and needed to be contained. Now it was Khomeni who needed to be contained. Iraq under Saddam Hussein was the ideal candidate.
According to David Lesch, in his book The Middle East and the United States, in July 1980, Zbigniew Brzezinski met with Saddam Hussein. On his return to the States he filed a report for President Carter on the meeting, in which he stated that a war between Iran and Iraq “was consistent with American policy in the region.”
By withholding intelligence from the parties at certain crucial points, and by providing arms and financial backing at others, first the Carter administration and then the Reagan administration ensured that the war played out for eight long years, costing an estimated five hundred thousand lives in Iran and Iraq.
A blog posted to the Yale Review of International Studies in 2018 notes:
By providing military support and intelligence data to Saddam Hussein and his military, the U.S. sought out a resolution where Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his religious zeal would not prevail in the Middle East. At the same time — as scandalously revealed in the 1985 Iran-Contra affair — the U.S. government under Reagan would still arm and negotiate with the supposed “terrorist state.” There is no simple explanation for America’s conflicting actions, and the superpower played an integral though contradictory part throughout the Iran-Iraq war. Its actions — even if unsanctioned as in the Contra case — benefited neither Iran nor Iraq long-term, but rather the U.S. itself and its material interests in the Middle East. Ultimately, American involvement exacerbated the already bloody conflict of the Iran-Iraq war and further contributed to lasting political insecurity in the region.
A 2005 NPR radio report on the matter went into more detail:
What the Reagan administration did do to aid the war effort of Iraq was to share key battlefield intelligence, intelligence gleaned from satellite photos own by the United States with the Iraqis. And the US made available to Iraq hundreds of millions of dollars in food credits that permitted Baghdad to spend the revenues it might have needed for importing food on weapons. […]
Over the course of the war, Iraq's intelligence service formed a really close relationship with the CIA. This was the CIA of Director William Casey, and there's some evidence that Casey used the Chilean front company to supply cluster bombs to Iraq, which Iraq used to blunt the human wave attacks of the Iranian army. […]
[T]he US was secretly aware that Iraq was using chemical weapons against the Iranians almost daily. There's evidence that the battlefield intelligence provided to Iraq helped the Iraqis better calibrate their gas attacks against the Iranians. […] The economic aid to Iraq started in 1983, and by the end of the war amounted to more than a billion dollars.
[…] it's known that chemical precursors for chemical weapons and tubes for missiles and biological agents, including anthrax samples, were sent by American suppliers. […]
Near the end of the war […] Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against his own citizens, the Kurds. We know a great deal about this now. At the time, the United States prevented a move in the UN to impose economic sanctions against Iraq, saying that the sanctions would be useless or counterproductive. So in effect, the United States defended Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons even as late as 1988, and this kind of a relationship continued through the Reagan administration and into the first President Bush administration until the very day that Iraq invaded Kuwait in early August 1990. […][=—
In effect, the United States chose Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein, to be its surrogate for policy in the Persian Gulf region and to counter the actions of Iran, which the United States, the Reagan administration, saw as the biggest threat.
In fact, the American involvement in the Iraq-Iran war was known almost immediately. In 1992, journalist Seymour Hersch wrote a report for the New York Times on the matter, noting:
The New York Times and others reported last year that the Reagan Administration secretly decided shortly after taking office in January 1981 to allow Israel to ship several billion dollars’ worth of American arms and spare parts to Iran. That intervention and the decision to aid Iraq directly in 1982 provide evidence that Washington played a much greater role than was previously known in affecting the course of the long and costly Iran-Iraq war.
The interventions also raise questions about the White House’s often-stated insistence in the early 1980’s that it was remaining neutral in the Iran-Iraq war, since the United States was arming both sides in its desire to see neither side dominate the vital oil region. […]
The decision to help Iraq was “not a C.I.A. rogue initiative,” a former senior State Department official explained. The policy was researched at the State Department and “approved at the highest levels,” he said. The idea, he added, was not to “hitch our wagon to Hussein.”
“We wanted to avoid victory by both sides,” he said.
What’s important to understand here, when Western politicians and media outlets talk of Iran as a failed state run by Islamic fundamentalists, is that failed, fundamentalist Iran is a product of American foreign policy. The aim was never to normalize Iran — it was just the opposite: as per Brzezinski’s ‘Grand Chessboard’ strategy, the objective, above all else, was to keep the Middle East in a state of perpetual war so that no one nation could prosper enough to become a major player on the world stage.
In the next part, I’ll take a look at Obama’s Middle Eastern foreign policy, followed by Trump’s, which represents a clean break from the Grand Chessboard strategy. Please bear with me if it takes a little while to materialise — my fiance and I have lost our income in this current Israeli - Hamas war and are having to move back to the UK at short notice in the hope of securing employment. In the meantime, if you would like to support us you can leave a tip at Buy Me A Coffee…
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WWIII ends in a month or five years. When it is done, Iran will be free of mullahs who like to kill teenage girls for showing an inch of hair in public. Lebanon will be free of Hezbollah. Hamas will be eradicated. https://open.substack.com/pub/christophermessina/p/tehran-is-begging-for-its-own-destruction?r=erlb4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web