Nixon armed him. Then the Shah set the price of oil | HE WAS NEVER THEIR PUPPET — Part 6

History Onion · Part 6 · 2:58

Saadabad Palace, Tehran, 31 May 1972. "Protect me," Richard Nixon told the Shah, and by the end of the meeting he had agreed to sell Iran laser-guided bombs, the F-15 and the F-14 — the Navy's newest fighter, which no other foreign air force would ever fly. Eight weeks later Henry Kissinger wrote to the secretaries of state and defense that decisions on arms "should be left primarily to the government of Iran." Over the next four years Iran bought ten billion dollars of American arms, more than any other customer America had. This is the part where the Shah looks most like a client — so Part 6 argues it head-on. Then the same government's own paper. That October Egypt and Syria attacked Israel; America flew weapons to the Israelis; and the Arab oil states answered by cutting America off. Iran did not join them — Iranian oil kept flowing to the West, to Israel, and to an American carrier in the Arabian Sea. He would not use oil as a weapon. His quarrel was with its price: "You've increased the price of the wheat you sell us by three hundred percent," he told Oriana Fallaci that autumn. "It's only fair that you should pay more." On 23 December 1973, in Tehran, he gathered the Gulf producers and set the price at $11.65 a barrel — more than double October's price, four times what it had been a year before. Nixon sent word of his "deep concern"; Kissinger's cable put the cost at "at least $10 billion" on America's oil bill in one year, as much as Iran had spent on American arms in four. The Shah answered that the price was a step toward a rational solution and that he would lower it when Venezuela, Nigeria, Indonesia, Libya and Algeria lowered theirs. They did not. A client takes the price he is given. He set the price. The money came home faster than Iran could spend it, and historians of the revolution count that boom — and the reckoning after it — among the reasons the crowds came. He fell in 1979. When Iraq attacked in September 1980, seventy-nine of the eighty F-14s he had bought were in Iranian hands, and they flew from the first days — for the state that had overthrown him. Sources: • "Protect me"; laser bombs, F-14s and F-15s — Memorandum of conversation, Saadabad Palace, 31 May 1972, FRUS 1969–76 vol. E-4 doc. 201: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve04/d201