On January 23, 1943, the Division of Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department set out the US’s new policy on Iran. Written by analyst John Jernegan, it was highly critical of both Great Britain and the Soviet Union as occupying wartime powers; neither was trusted to preserve Iran’s independence or to protect her territorial autonomy. The “result” of the British and Soviet occupations, wrote Jernagan, “has been interference with the internal affairs of Iran, amounting at times to a virtually complete negation of Iranian sovereignty and independence. . . largely because of this occupation of Iranian territory, the governmental machinery of Iran, and its economic structure, have been seriously weakened.” The US policy, by contrast, was to strengthen Iranian independence by strengthening her institutions. The objective was, in Jernagan’s words, the “development, with American assistance, of a stable Iranian government and a strong Iranian economy.” At the war’s end Iran was no longer to be under British trusteeship or Soviet tutelage: she was to be secured as a sovereign nation.
At the Tehran Conference of 1943, the Allies discussed the shape of the postwar international order and the place of Iranian sovereignty within it. President Franklin D. Roosevelt is credited with the view that Iran would be a “test case” for the success of the postwar order embodied by the United Nations. Yet his view did not shape the years to come. Between the Tehran Conference, the Azerbeijan crisis, the heating up of the Cold War and the onset of war on the Korean peninsula, this paper traces the US position on Iran and the UN from Roosevelt to Truman and from an endorsement of Iran’s sovereignty to a willingness to subvert it. It highlights the ongoing conflict between the United States and Great Britain regarding Iran, which was not solved in 1945, as well as the dramatic transformation of US policy between 1943 and 1953.
