n the sixteenth of January 1979, the Shah of Iran left his country for Egypt. President Sadat met him at Aswan. He would never see Iran again.
For sixteen months, no country wanted him for long, while his cancer advanced. America turned him away for months. Then Kissinger and Rockefeller lobbied Carter, and he was admitted for cancer treatment. Two weeks later, revolutionary students seized the US Embassy. US-Iran relations were severed — and remain so today, forty-six years later.
On the twenty-seventh of July 1980, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi died in a Cairo military hospital. He was sixty. His father had died in Johannesburg almost exactly thirty-six years earlier. Both kings of Iran. Both in foreign exile. Two days later, his coffin moved through Cairo on a gun carriage drawn by six horses. Sadat — his close friend — was the only sitting head of state to come. Nixon attended as a private citizen and called America's treatment of the Shah shameful.
The world that followed was one his critics had not predicted. An eight-year war with Iraq. A million dead. Lebanon got Hezbollah. The region became a proxy theater.