The Shah that emerges from these pages would be almost a tragic figure, if they gave us a better feel for him as a person, that is to say as a living being rather than a mere policy-maker. He was by nature a vacillator, thrust by inheritance and a destiny beyond his control into a position in which vacillation would eventually prove fatal. In addition to self-doubt, however, he was also inclined to vainglory, oscillating between the two, retreating from crises and ostentatiously parading himself, and boasting, when things seemed to be going well. He thought that he had both the right and the duty, genuinely for the sake of his country, to rule rather than reign, but while he had the ideas of an autocrat, he also had those of an ordinary decent person who baulked at the shedding of much blood, the only way, in the end, that he could have preserved his throne (and possibly not even then).
He was intelligent and wily, and his achievements were not negligible. He managed to wrest control of Iran’s oil first from the British and then from the international oil consortium that succeeded them. He played the oil market with great skill. He instituted an important land reform that genuinely benefitted the peasantry, expanded education, and had a full understanding of the importance of technology in the modernization of Iran necessary if it were to be anything other than a dependent state. His foreign policy was flexible, pragmatic, and shrewd. He needed the Americans but did not trust them (or anybody else, for that matter), realising that in politics there were no friendships, only common interests. This was to be borne out in the most terrible and tragic way during his last few years of exile, with which this book does not deal. Where there is no friendship, there is no gratitude for services rendered.
His failures were at least as great as his successes, and in the end more important from the point of view of his personal destiny. He so hollowed out political life in Iran, in order to exercise power as a true autocrat, that it came to have two poles: sycophancy and plotting against him. Sycophancy is a terribly addictive drug, no doubt a permanent temptation of the powerful (and therefore a good reason to restrict political terms of office); you can never have enough of it, nor can it ever be outrageous enough.
Unfortunately for the Shah, no one is sycophantic from principle, indeed sycophants tend (rightly) to despise themselves, fully aware that they are acting from the most naked of self-interest. There is no rat that leaves a sinking ship faster than a sycophant deserting a lost cause. A sycophant will take a risk to preserve his skin, but not to preserve his master.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Downfall of the House of Pahlavi”, The Iconoclast, 2021-03-03.
