Volume 33, Number 21 & 22 · January 15, 1987
Iran and the Americans
By Shaul Bakhash
Revolutionary Iran: Challenge and Response in the Middle East
by R.K. Ramazani
Johns Hopkins University Press, 311 pp., $27.50
In the fall of 1985, R.K. Ramazani, a historian at the University of Virginia, urged in an article in Foreign Policy that the United States 'bury the hatchet' with Iran and seek a reconciliation with the Islamic Republic. He emphasized, of course, the strategic importance of improving relations with a country of over 45 million people that borders on the Soviet Union, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Turkey. More important, he detected a new and more pragmatic direction in Iran's foreign policy. This moderating trend, he believed, provided the opening for an American initiative. He felt that exploiting this opening should be a matter of some urgency. 'America's failure to temper its containment policy [toward Iran],' he wrote, 'could destroy any chance for exploring any opportunity for reconciliation that may already exist.'[1]
Review, 4170 words
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