Another new history of US-Iran relations is by Dalia Dassa Kaye, an Israeli American long-standing former director at RAND, effectively the in-house think tank of the Pentagon, which, despite being afflicted with the American exceptionalism common to Beltway establishment think tanks, is relatively sober in its analysis, even on Iran. Dassa Kaye asks why the US policies remain perennially ill-disposed toward Iran, defined as they are by “hostility, isolation, and containment,” canvassing the views of US officials at the apex of Iran policy over the past forty years. She asks why Iran occupies this anomalous position, when, for instance, the United States had been willing to mend fences with Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and China.
This is a well-defined and legitimate question, but Dassa Kaye offers few answers in her ponderous and rather bloodless book. Most of the book implies something of an institutional traumatic anger and suspicion on the part of US policymakers following the turbulent decade after the revolution. After Carter fell over events in Iran, Ronald Reagan then nearly lost his presidency when Iran leaked its back-channel arms purchases from the United States, via Israel, which resulted in huge numbers of senior American officials, both in government and at the CIA, with much egg on their faces.
She reports the twists and turns of the nuclear saga, but none of her sources tell her that the United States was threatened by Iran’s nuclear program, which is consistent with both US and Israeli intelligence assessments for twenty years. She also devotes much of her final chapter, titled “Change is Hard,” to a boilerplate critique of the revolving door that exists between the US security state and consultancy and think tank jobs, bankrolled by “Saudis and Emiratis,” incentivizing hawkishness among policymakers Iran.
While these factors have certainly aggravated US-Iran relations, they are hardly convincing explanations for the state of a relationship half a century out from the revolution, which has led the United States to adopting a war posture against Iran. Arab money and “lavish parties” seem at best a partial account, and the notion that the United States is still licking wounds sustained in the 1980s does not explain why, as Dassa Kaye herself points out, America pursued détente with other former Cold War enemies. But there is one factor, which Dassa Kaye tirelessly argues is definitely not decisive in explaining US antipathy to Iran: Israel.
Her book’s contrarian position is based on the reasoning that Israel’s influence on the United States is “exaggerated” because it does not always get its way on policy. When it does, these lobbying efforts are not “decisive” because it is preaching to the choir. Considering the current moment, as the world waits for Israel to resume its war against Iran, with US weapons, intelligence, and, it hopes, more US strikes, it is remarkable that Dassa Kaye has published a book that simply rejects out of hand that Israel has been decisive in shaping America’s negative attitudes to Iran.