Ten must-read books on US-Iran relations
A s I write these sentences, a massive military buildup - instigated by Israel and its American agents, and mobilised by US President Donald Trump - is encircling Iran for a decisive operation.
Ever since the US and Israel ganged up against the Islamic Republic, seeking to exploit the legitimate uprising of Iranians against their corrupt and incompetent rulers, the looming prospect of an American-led attack has flooded the internet and western media with a deliberate fusion of misinformation, disinformation, propaganda and newspeak.
Much of it has focused on the nature of the enduring hostility between the US and Iran, which the Israeli settler colony - as a singular source of malice and mayhem in the region - has consistently sought to exacerbate. This strategy aims to dismantle the Islamic Republic, and even more perniciously, fragment the country into multiple ethnic enclaves - just like Israel itself.
The corporate (New York Times) and state (BBC) propaganda machines are no better than the wild jungles of social media. In fact, they are worse.
They are abandoning the pursuit of truth - if they ever did that - and putting their journalism squarely at the service of US-Israeli warmongering against Iran.
The best antidote to this massive disinformation campaign, as always, is to read books by learned and responsible scholars and critical thinkers. Read books; don’t get your information from Facebook, Instagram, or the wretched X (formerly Twitter).
Here are 10 books you should keep on your desk and regularly consult in an effort to ward off the evils of the propaganda coming at you daily through your social-media newsfeed.
Dispensing with myths
1) Afshin Matin-Asgari’s Axis of Empire: A History of Iran-US Relations (2026) - One of the most recent books on Iran-US relations, perhaps its most significant aspect is how it begins by dispensing with the myth that the US and Iran began their relationship with a splendid honeymoon, and have now ended it in a bitter divorce.
Matin-Asgari chronicles the ebbs and flows of an imperial hubris seeking to turn Iran into a military base and client state on the model of the Israeli garrison state - a plan that was interrupted in the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian revolution. This book is a potent antidote to the delusional fantasies that the US will bring peace, prosperity and freedom to Iranians.
2) Behrooz Ghamari’s The Long War on Iran: New Events, Old Questions (2026) - Entirely independent of Matin-Asgari’s book, Ghamari’s also shows how US-Iran relations reached this dire point of direct confrontation, a situation that persists regardless of who is in power in Tehran.
Evident in this book are the overriding ambitions of a dysfunctional US empire, and of a militant Islamism that seeks aggressively to protect its spheres of influence. This book is particularly important for tracing and documenting the increasing US structural warfare against Iran, which aims to weaken and subjugate Iran’s rebellious character.
3) Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet’s Heroes to Hostages: America and Iran, 1800-1988 (2023) - This exceedingly important book is based on an impressive body of primary materials rarely known or read in our time. Kashani-Sabet is one of the most prominent historians of her generation, with a doctoral degree from Yale; she now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
This seminal study does not so much map the oscillations between the two once presumably friendly, but now hostile countries, as it does outline how US imperialism has expanded its domains around the globe, based on strategic thinking and interests in raw materials like oil.
World at their mercy
4) Ervand Abrahamian’s The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations (2013) - This book by perhaps the most eminent living Iranian historian details how in August 1953, the CIA and MI6 overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minster, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and installed the runaway monarch Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in his place.
This documented fact is now invoked as the US and Israel mull bringing back Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the ousted shah, to rule Iran in a manner friendly to their respective interests. Based on newly declassified information, Abrahamian details both the Cold War geopolitics and the oil interests that informed this treacherous coup.
5) Malcolm Byrne’s Iran-Contra: Reagan's Scandal and the Unchecked Abuse of Presidential Power (2014) - This book details the notorious case of former US President Ronald Reagan covertly selling arms to Iran in exchange for its help in freeing American hostages in Beirut in the 1980s, as war raged between Iran and Iraq.
Profits from these transactions were funnelled, in direct disregard of US Congress, to aid the reactionary Contras in Nicaragua. This well-documented episode highlights the treacherous dealings of an embattled Islamic Republic with a corrupt ruling regime in the US, and a world at the mercy of their marriage of convenience or staged hostilities.
6) Mark Bowden’s Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam (2006) - This is an excellent book for exploring the Iran hostage crisis from the American perspective at the time, which was almost entirely clueless about the internal dynamics of Iran. The book is meticulously researched, providing a good foundation for understanding how US foreign policy is informed by imperial hubris.
Equally evident in this book is the militant adventurism of a gang of pugnacious students, who used the hostage crisis to help the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini dismantle and destroy internal rivals to his reign of revolutionary terror.
7) Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (2003) - This book became an instant bestseller and classic for its precision and detailed account of the CIA-MI6 coup of 1953 from the perspective of an unrelenting investigative journalist.
The significance of this book is in detecting and documenting the height of US imperial hubris, picking up from where British imperialism left off, in an operation where the intelligence machines of both countries were actively collaborating to sabotage and dismantle the democratic aspirations of a people.
Historical depth
8) Soraya Esfandiary Bakhtiary’s Palace of Solitude (1992) - This book is the autobiography of Princess Soraya Esfandiary Bakhtiary (1932-2001), the second wife of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It details her life with the Iranian monarch, and particularly their exile, after the shah ran away from the democratic aspirations of his homeland, awaiting the CIA-MI6 military coup to bring him back to power.
It is of particular significance to have a personal account of the megalomaniacal mind of a deposed Persian monarch, providing insights into how the perturbed mind of his son works today.
9) James A Bill’s The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations (1989) - This is one of the earliest accounts of Iran-US relations, covering the period of the 1940s through the 1980s. The book is now totally outdated, but precisely for that reason, it is an excellent antidote to today’s rushed-to-social-media accounts of US-Iran relations, which lack historical depth.
The decades that Bill covers begin before and end soon after the CIA-MI6 coup against the democratic aspirations of Iranians - and as such, it is excellent background for what Abrahamian and Kinzer provide in their subsequent works.
10) W Morgan Shuster’s The Strangling of Persia (1912) - In the immediate aftermath of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution of 1905-11, an American civil servant named Shuster agreed to help the revolutionaries manage their finances against Russian and British colonial interference. He subsequently wrote this book, which offers solid evidence of how responsible and conscientious individuals anywhere in the world can help the democratic aspirations of other nations.
Countless Americans today share the democratic aspirations of Iranians, and they are severely critical of their own government’s militarism. My own distinguished Columbia colleague, world-renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs, is one such American, offering active solidarity with democratic aspirations around the globe.
Read together and back to back, these 10 books tell a story much larger than US-Iran relations. They tell the story of the rise and demise of American militant imperialism; of an empire without purpose, except to plunder the world blind through wanton cruelty and violence.
Now deeply embedded in the gridlock of its own diabolical theocracy, Iran is just one paramount example in the larger story of an empire that gave us a Trump, a Jeffrey Epstein, and a genocidal garrison state as its far-away colony. It took decades and centuries to show its true face to the world.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
posted by Satish Sharma at
13:04
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