The Shah gave up Bahrain — then took three islands at Hormuz | HE WAS NEVER THEIR PUPPET — Part 4

History Onion · Part 4 · 2:58

New Delhi, 4 January 1969. Britain has announced it is leaving the Persian Gulf, and the Shah is asked about Bahrain — an island Persian kings had held since the Sasanians in the third century, which Shah Abbas took back from the Portuguese in 1602 and Iran governed until the Al Khalifa, an Arab tribe from the mainland, took it in 1783 — after which Britain bound the family by treaty and made Bahrain its client. Iran never accepted that: it protested to the League of Nations in 1927, and in 1957 the Shah's own parliament declared Bahrain Iran's fourteenth province. Most Bahrainis were Shia, some of Persian descent, and to Iranian nationalists Britain's departure was the moment to take the island back. The Shah's answer: if its people did not wish to join Iran, "we shall never resort to force." Part 4 lays out his position. Nasser's pan-Arabism, the Ba'ath newly in power in Baghdad, and King Faisal's promise to stand with Bahrain meant that a landing on an Arab-majority island would have united the Arab world against Iran the year Britain left — for an island whose people, the UN found in 1970, wanted independence by "the overwhelming majority." So he let the UN ask, let the claim go, took the nationalists' anger (the Islamic Republic still tells it as the loss of Bahrain, not as the trade that gave Iran the islands it holds today) — and on 30 November 1971, the day before Britain's Gulf treaties expired, landed marines on Abu Musa and the two Tunbs at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz. Washington had counselled restraint and was not asked. In the Islamic Republic's 2026 war with America and Israel those three islands were its forward positions in the Strait — "unsinkable aircraft carriers," its own officials call them: the leverage he took in 1971. The historian Roham Alvandi writes that the strategic case for letting go was clear, and that one of the Shah's concerns was his own public. Sources: • Roham Alvandi, "Muhammad Reza Pahlavi and the Bahrain Question, 1968–1970," British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 37/2 (2010): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13530191003794723 • Encyclopaedia Iranica, "Bahrain iii. History of political relations with Iran" (the 1602 conquest, 1783, the 1927 protest, the 1957 law): https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/bahrain-all/bahrain-iii-history-of-political-relations-with-iran/ • "the settlement of the Tunbs and Abu Musa was a prerequisite to the solution of Bahrain"; "jewel in his crown" — US–UK talks, 11 Mar 1969, FRUS 1969–76 vol. XXIV doc. 72: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v24/d72