The Iranian Revolution as American Domestic Policy: How the US Diplomatic Establishment Midwifed the Islamic Republic

2. 1. The Shah’s Modernization: What Was Destroyed

To understand what the revolution destroyed, you must understand what the Shah was building. The White Revolution, launched on January 26, 1963, was a comprehensive modernization program that transformed Iran from a semi-feudal agrarian society into a rapidly industrializing nation-state. It was, by any objective measure, one of the most ambitious development programs in the postwar Third World—and one of the most successful.

As Kyle Orton noted in the tweet Yarvin was quoting: “The Shah’s dream was to bring Iran up to a level with European States: the economic policies were in place, many social reforms done, and the political piece—an elected government with a constitutional Monarchy—was set for late 1979.”

Iran in 1977 was not a stagnant autocracy clinging to power. It was a rapidly developing nation with an economy 26% larger than Turkey’s and 65% larger than South Korea’s, on the verge of a planned transition to constitutional monarchy. Per capita GDP at its 1976 peak has never been matched by the Islamic Republic in the nearly five decades since. What replaced the Shah was not progress but civilizational regression.

The White Revolution was not without failures. The government neglected to replace the role of landlords who had previously provided farming necessities, leading to high failure rates for new farms and massive rural-to-urban migration. The disruption of waqf charitable trust holdings that funded the ulama class created powerful clerical opposition. Poverty rates still exceeded 25%. The SAVAK secret police was genuinely brutal. But the trajectory was unmistakable: Iran was converging with the developed world, and the revolution annihilated that trajectory.

3. 2. The Carter Administration’s Role

The standard narrative presents the Iranian Revolution as a spontaneous popular uprising against a hated tyrant. The documentary record tells a different story. At every critical juncture, the Carter administration made decisions that weakened the Shah and strengthened Khomeini.

The Human Rights Pressure

Carter made human rights the centerpiece of his foreign policy. Applied selectively, it became a weapon against allied governments while leaving hostile ones untouched. Carter pressed the Shah to release political prisoners, and the Shah complied—freeing the very radicals who would organize his overthrow. Not satisfied with the pace of reforms, Carter envoys began a direct dialogue with Khomeini, first at his home in Iraq and more intensely after he moved to Neauphle-le-Château, a Paris suburb.

The irony of the New Year’s Eve 1977 toast, in which Carter called Iran “an island of stability,” is not that Carter was naive. It is that the policy of destabilization was already underway beneath the diplomatic pleasantries.

Ambassador William Sullivan

Ambassador William Sullivan cabled Washington that “the Shah is doomed” and pressed for transitioning power to what he called “moderate Islamic leadership.” He praised Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar’s courage to his face while telling Washington behind his back that the man was “quixotic,” was playing for high stakes, and would not take “guidance” from the United States. Sullivan operated through a separate communication channel to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, while General Huyser reported to Secretary of Defense Harold Brown—a deliberate bifurcation that ensured no unified policy could be executed.

The Huyser Mission (January 4 – February 3, 1979)

On January 3, 1979, Carter dispatched General Robert E. Huyser, deputy NATO commander, to Tehran. His stated mission was to convince Iran’s senior military officers to remain in country and support the Bakhtiar caretaker government. His actual effect was the opposite. Huyser “essentially assumed command” of the Iranian military leadership—the “Group of Five” (four generals and an admiral)—and his primary accomplishment was preventing them from staging a coup to save the Shah or block Khomeini’s return.

Carter himself acknowledged this. The mission, in the assessment of the Army War College, “facilitated rather than prevented the revolution.” The Shah departed January 16. Khomeini returned February 1. General Abbas Gharabaghi declared the military “neutral” on February 11. The Bakhtiar government fell completely.

The Guadeloupe Conference (January 4–7, 1979)

While Huyser was neutralizing the Iranian military, Carter met with Giscard d’Estaing, Callaghan, and Schmidt in Guadeloupe. Carter’s own memoirs confirm “little support for the Shah” existed at the summit, with consensus that he “ought to leave as soon as possible.” French diplomat Alexandre de Marenches later claimed he warned the Shah directly that Carter aimed to orchestrate his overthrow. Western leaders’ knowledge of the Shah’s advanced lymphoma (diagnosed in 1974 by French physicians, with CIA awareness by 1976) reportedly influenced their abandonment strategy.

The Brzezinski-Vance Split

National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski advocated military options and saw political Islam as a force that could weaken the Soviet Union. Secretary of State Vance favored accommodation. Crucially, Brzezinski’s position, while ostensibly hawkish, shared an underlying assumption with Vance’s: that America’s role was to manage the transition of power, not to prevent it. Neither faction fought to save the Shah. The debate was only about how to handle his replacement.

4. 3. The Paris Circle: Western-Educated Revolutionaries

Yarvin’s claim that the Islamic Republic was “born as a Third World revolutionary movement with American elite support” is most directly demonstrated by the three key figures who surrounded Khomeini in Paris and served as his spokesmen to the Western world.

Ibrahim Yazdi

PhD in biochemistry from Baylor College of Medicine, Houston. Worked as a research instructor at Baylor and at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Houston until 1977. Joined Khomeini in Paris in 1978. Accompanied Khomeini on the Air France flight back to Tehran on February 1, 1979. Became deputy prime minister, then foreign minister. A Texas biochemist helped deliver the Islamic Revolution.

Sadegh Ghotbzadeh

Educated in the United States and Canada. Headed Iran’s national broadcaster after the revolution. Reportedly sent a fax thanking Western leaders for supporting the anti-Shah opposition. Executed by the regime in 1982 for plotting against Khomeini. The revolution ate its own Westernized children.

Abolhassan Banisadr

Paris-based intellectual. Became the first president of the Islamic Republic. Impeached in 1981 and fled back to exile in France, where he had come from. His presidency was the democratic fig leaf the revolution needed before consolidating theocratic rule.

These three men served a specific function: they “create[d] a democratic appearance” for Khomeini while he consolidated revolutionary Islamic authority. They were the interface between the Ayatollah and the Western diplomatic and media establishment. They spoke English and French, held Western degrees, and could reassure American officials that the revolution would produce a moderate Islamic democracy. They were, in effect, useful idiots produced by the very educational institutions that Yarvin identifies as the engine of the “cold civil war.”

5. 4. Western Intellectuals and “Political Spirituality”

The Western intellectual class did not merely fail to oppose Khomeini. It actively celebrated him.

Michel Foucault

In 1978, Foucault traveled to Iran as a special correspondent for Italian and French newspapers and published more than a dozen essays celebrating the revolution. In “What Are the Iranians Dreaming About?” (Le Nouvel Observateur, October 1978), he reported that four out of five Iranians answered his questions about their aspirations with “an Islamic government.” He called Khomeini “the old saint in exile” and praised him as “a man who stands up bare-handed and is acclaimed by a people.” He coined the concept of “political spirituality” to describe what he saw—a revolution that transcended the Marxist categories of class struggle.

Within weeks of Khomeini’s consolidation of power, Foucault stepped back from his support as the “brutally repressive reality of its semi-archaic fascism,” in the words of scholars Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson, “shook him awake.” But the damage was done. The most famous living philosopher had given the revolution his imprimatur.

Andrew Young

Carter’s UN Ambassador Andrew Young—the first African American to hold the position—described Khomeini as “some kind of saint” in February 1979 and predicted “Khomeini will eventually be hailed as a saint.” He also asserted, with breathtaking confidence, that “it would be impossible to have a fundamentalist state in Iran.”

This was not peripheral commentary. The US Ambassador to the United Nations was publicly describing the leader of a revolutionary movement as a saint while the revolution was in progress. The signal to the Iranian military, to the Bakhtiar government, and to every fence-sitter in Tehran was unmistakable: the United States was not going to intervene.

6. 5. The Cuba Parallel

Yarvin explicitly connects Iran to Cuba: “Destroying the two greatest mistakes of 20th-century diplomacy, the revolutions we sponsored in Cuba and Iran, would be a huge blow to the American left.” The parallel is not metaphorical. The mechanism was structurally identical.

The Arms Embargo (March 14, 1958)

The United States suspended delivery of nearly 2,000 Garand rifles and refused delivery of 15 training planes already purchased by the Batista government. The arms embargo created what Ambassador Earl E.T. Smith called a “devastating psychological effect” on the Cuban armed forces. The message was clear: Washington had abandoned Batista.

Herbert Matthews and the New York Times

In February 1957, NYT correspondent Herbert Matthews interviewed Castro in the Sierra Maestra. His articles portrayed Castro as a moderate, nationalist reformer with a large following—both claims were exaggerated. Matthews’s reporting “helped to create in the United States widespread sympathy for the rebellion” and directly influenced Washington’s decision to cease arms shipments. Anthony DePalma’s book The Man Who Invented Fidel chronicles how a single journalist helped manufacture consent for a communist revolution.

The “Fourth Floor”

The Latin American Affairs division of the State Department, located on the fourth floor, was where the operational decisions were made. Director of the Caribbean Division William Wieland instructed Ambassador Smith to get briefed by Herbert Matthews before his ambassadorial posting—a journalist who was effectively a Castro propagandist was being used to orient US diplomatic personnel. Assistant Secretary Roy Rubottom approved the arrangement.

Senate Testimony

On August 30, 1960, Ambassador Smith testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee:

“The United States and the various agencies of the United States directly and indirectly aided the overthrow of the Batista government and brought into power Fidel Castro.”

“Castro never won a military victory… The Castro forces themselves never won a military victory.”

Smith described how, on December 17, 1958, he spent “2 hours and 35 minutes” with Batista on State Department instructions, telling him that “certain influential people in the United States believed that he could no longer maintain effective control.” He later wrote:

“We helped to overthrow the Batista dictatorship which was pro-American only to install the Castro dictatorship which is pro-Russian.”

His predecessor, Ambassador Arthur Gardner, testified two days earlier that the State Department had “pulled the rug out” from under Batista.

The Structural Pattern

Once is an accident. Twice is a pattern. The same institutional apparatus—the State Department, the prestige press, the academic establishment—produced structurally identical outcomes twenty years apart.

7. 6. Rob Malley and the Institutional Continuity

Yarvin writes: “Iranian anti-Americanism was never Islamic or Persian in origin. The Islamic Republic was born as a Third World revolutionary movement with American elite support. It is anti-American because our elites are too. If you disagree I expect you to at least know the name ‘Rob Malley.’”

Robert Malley is the single most illustrative case of the institutional continuity between Third World revolutionary movements and the American diplomatic establishment.

The Father: Simon Malley (1923–2006)

Born in Cairo into a Syrian Jewish family. Joined the Egyptian Communist Party as a youth. Became what the Middle East Quarterly called “the best known voice” of Third World anti-colonialist movements. Conducted a 20-hour interview with Fidel Castro. Maintained extensive meetings with Yasser Arafat, who awarded him honorary Palestinian citizenship. He was “virulently anti-Israel, viewing it as an evil vestige of colonialism.” His publications were accused of inciting political assassinations. He was suspected of receiving Soviet funding. He supported the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Cuban intervention in Angola, and the Iranian hostage seizure.

Robert’s mother, Barbara Malley, worked for the UN delegation of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). Robert played with Arafat as a child.

The Son: Robert Malley

Two congressmen suggested Malley lost his clearance because he transferred classified documents to personal email and phone, which were then stolen by a hostile cyber actor. The Wall Street Journal reported Malley “clicked on a phishing link, which compromised a personal email account.” The investigation was reportedly closed in September 2025.

The Malley case demonstrates Yarvin’s thesis in miniature. The son of a Third World revolutionary propagandist who supported the Iranian hostage seizure and received honorary Palestinian citizenship was appointed America’s chief negotiator with Iran. He was forced out of one presidential campaign for Hamas contacts, then brought back into a subsequent administration in an even more sensitive role. His “entire career,” as the Middle East Forum put it, was “dedicated to Third World politics”—Palestinians, Syria, Iran—working to “reverse US positions on the Axis of Resistance.”

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a career trajectory, fully documented, unfolding across three decades in plain sight.

8. 7. The “Beta-Guy / BPD” Diplomatic Pattern

Yarvin’s most provocative claim is his analogy between US-Iran relations and a dysfunctional interpersonal relationship: “a beta-guy / BPD bitch relationship instantly developed… The beta guy is always begging and bribing for love, and generally getting the boot, with occasional moments of reward to keep him hooked.”

The analogy is crude. It is also accurate.

Reagan admitted on national television in March 1987: “What began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages.” The same regime that had held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days received 1,500 missiles because the administration believed in a “moderate faction” headed by Rafsanjani. The belief in Iranian moderates is the perpetual motion machine of American diplomacy.

The pattern spans every administration of both parties for forty-seven years. The provocation changes; the response is always accommodation, engagement, or outright bribery, followed by another provocation. Yarvin’s metaphor is vulgar, but the historical record is what it is.

9. 8. The Cold Civil War Thesis

Yarvin writes: “Foreign policy is always domestic policy by other means.” This is the deepest layer of his argument: that the Iranian Revolution was not an aberration but a symptom of a permanent internal conflict within the Anglo-American regime.

This thesis has an intellectual genealogy.

James Burnham (1905–1987)

In The Managerial Revolution (1941), Burnham argued that the West was undergoing an irreversible transformation away from both capitalism and socialism toward “managerialism”—a technocratic elite of credentialed managers exercising power through enlarged corporate and government bureaucracies. In Suicide of the West (1964), he attacked contemporary liberalism as incapable of defending Western civilization, arguing that since reaching the apex of its power in 1914, the West had been contracting “most obviously in a geographical sense”—in terms of “effective political control over acreage.”

Burnham’s insight was that this contraction was not imposed from without but generated from within: the liberal managerial elite was psychologically incapable of exercising power in its own civilization’s interest. His work on Cold War strategy (Containment or Liberation?) inspired NSC-68, which guided American national security policy for decades.

Angelo Codevilla (1943–2021)

Codevilla’s essay “America’s Ruling Class” (The American Spectator, July–August 2010) updated Burnham for the 21st century. He argued that a “ruling class”—educated at the same institutions, sharing the same assumptions, speaking the same language—had captured American governance. He coined the term “cold civil war” to describe the conflict between this ruling class and the rest of America. The essay became a phenomenon after Rush Limbaugh read from it to his 15 million+ listeners.

Codevilla, who served in senior US intelligence roles under Reagan, argued that the ruling class’s foreign policy was an extension of its domestic project: the management of populations through technocratic expertise, the replacement of sovereignty with “governance,” and the delegitimization of national self-assertion.

Samuel Huntington (1927–2008)

Huntington co-authored The Crisis of Democracy (1975) for the Trilateral Commission, diagnosing an “excess of democracy” that made governance difficult. The irony is that Huntington served as White House coordinator of security planning for the NSC under Carter—the very administration that would demonstrate the thesis by sponsoring a revolution it could not control.

The Vietnam Parallel

Yarvin writes: “Vietnam obviously was also a civil war by proxy.” President Johnson stated: “The weakest link in our armor is American public opinion.” Historians have argued that the antiwar movement “convinced the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese that they just needed to hold on until the US government was forced to withdraw.” Ho Chi Minh planned the Tet Offensive (1968) “in the hopes of achieving a decisive victory” that would exploit American domestic divisions. In each case, the “enemy” abroad was sustained by a faction at home.

Yarvin’s Extension

In his Gray Mirror newsletter, Yarvin extends this analysis to its logical conclusion: American foreign policy is a “dogfighting pit posing as a veterinary clinic.” The United States maintains contradictory commitments that generate perpetual conflict, because the conflict itself serves the institutional interests of the establishment that manages it. The Islamic Republic is not an adversary that the American establishment failed to defeat; it is a creation that the establishment needs to justify its own existence.

10. 9. The Palestinian Cause and the American Campus

Yarvin concludes: “Our aging left no longer has the vitality to create these exciting proxy forces. Without the Palestinian cause, what would they have to goon over at Columbia?”

Edward Said’s Legacy

Edward Said (1935–2003), Palestinian-American professor at Columbia University, published Orientalism (1978) and The Question of Palestine (1979). These works constructed what Said called “permission to narrate” for the Palestinian cause within Western academia. Following October 7, 2023, Said’s book sales surged elevenfold. He is the intellectual grandfather of the campus movement.

Columbia 2024

On April 17, 2024, students established the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia. A coalition of 80+ student groups formed Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), demanding immediate ceasefire, divestment from corporations profiting from Israel, and severance of academic ties with Israeli universities. On April 30, students occupied Hamilton Hall. NYPD stormed campus, arresting dozens. Columbia expelled nearly 80 students. The encampments “helped ignite a global movement.”

The Iran–Hamas–Campus Pipeline

The State Department estimates Iran provides Hezbollah $700 million annually and Palestinian groups (Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad) $100 million annually. The IRGC Quds Force operates on a “hub-and-spoke model” providing funding, weapons, training, intelligence, and strategic guidance. The chain of causation runs: Iranian oil revenue → IRGC Quds Force → Hamas → October 7 → campus protests → domestic political pressure on US policy toward Israel.

Yarvin’s point is that this chain was not an accident. The American establishment that facilitated the Islamic Republic in 1979 created the conditions for the campus movement of 2024. The revolution comes home.

11. 10. The Political Composition of the State Department

Yarvin argues that the “only other way” to break the pattern, “short of bombing Brooklyn,” is “a complete erasure of the US diplomatic establishment.” He adds: “Sorry FSO frens.”

The political composition of the State Department is not a matter of speculation. Federal Elections Commission data for 2019–2020 shows:

The State Department is not a nonpartisan institution with a slight liberal lean. It is a one-party institution embedded within a nominally two-party system. When 93% of an institution’s political contributions go to one party, the institution is that party.

Historical Precedent: The China Hands

The last time a president attempted to purge the State Department of ideological capture was the McCarthy era. The “China Hands”—Edmund Clubb, John Carter Vincent, John Davies, John Stewart Service—were purged for allegedly “losing China” to the Communists. Service was dismissed on December 13, 1951, though the Supreme Court later unanimously ruled his dismissal violated procedures. The standard historical verdict is that the purge “blinded American diplomacy on China for a generation.”

The counter-argument, rarely stated, is that the China Hands did lose China, that their policy recommendations did favor Mao over Chiang, and that the institutional incentives of the Foreign Service do systematically favor accommodation with revolutionary movements over support for allied governments. The Iran and Cuba cases suggest the pattern survived McCarthy intact.

Trump’s Second-Term Actions (2025–2026)

Over 1,350 State Department employees have been fired (1,107 civil service, 246 foreign service). Those dismissed worked on countering violent extremism, Afghan refugee assistance, educational exchanges, women’s rights, refugees, and climate change. A “fidelity” criterion has been introduced for promotions. A US District Court judge has temporarily blocked further implementation.

Whether this constitutes Yarvin’s “complete erasure” or merely a surface-level personnel shuffle remains to be seen. The institutional culture of the Foreign Service is deep, self-reproducing, and resistant to political control—which is, depending on your perspective, either its greatest strength or its fundamental problem.

12. 11. Reading List

Primary Sources and Memoirs

• Gary Sick, All Fall Down: America’s Fateful Encounter with Iran (Random House, 1985) — the definitive NSC insider account of Carter’s Iran policy
• William Sullivan, Mission to Iran (W.W. Norton, 1981) — the ambassador’s self-serving but revealing memoir
• Robert Huyser, Mission to Tehran (Harper & Row, 1987) — the general who neutralized the Iranian military
• Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (Bantam, 1982)
• Earl E.T. Smith, The Fourth Floor (Random House, 1962) — the Cuba ambassador’s account of State Department subversion

Academic and Analytical

• Javier Gil Guerrero, The Carter Administration and the Fall of Iran’s Pahlavi Dynasty (Palgrave Macmillan) — the most rigorous academic treatment
• Ray Takeyh, The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty — Council on Foreign Relations fellow’s reappraisal
• Ervand Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions (Princeton, 1982) — the standard academic history, more sympathetic to the revolution
• Ofira Seliktar, Failing the Crystal Ball Test: The Carter Administration and the Fundamentalist Revolution in Iran (Praeger, 2000)
• Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (University of Chicago, 2005) — essential on Western intellectual complicity
• Anthony DePalma, The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times — the Cuba media parallel
• Edward Said, Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978) — read the source to understand the movement

Theoretical and Ideological

• James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (1941) and Suicide of the West (1964) — the intellectual foundation for Yarvin’s worldview
• Angelo Codevilla, “America’s Ruling Class” (The American Spectator, 2010) — the “cold civil war” thesis
• Samuel Huntington, The Crisis of Democracy (Trilateral Commission, 1975) — the establishment’s own diagnosis of its problem
• Curtis Yarvin, Gray Mirror (Substack, 2020–present), especially “Gaza and the Nomos of the Earth” — the primary source for the thesis under analysis
• Curtis Yarvin, Unqualified Reservations (blog 2007–2014, published by Passage Publishing) — the original development of the “Cathedral” thesis

Congressional and Declassified

• Senate Internal Security Subcommittee testimony of Earl E.T. Smith (August 30, 1960) and Arthur Gardner (August 27, 1960) — Cuba
• National Security Archive, George Washington University — declassified Huyser cables, Brzezinski memoranda
• Office of the Historian, Department of State — FRUS volumes on Cuba 1958–60 and Iran

13. 12. Verdict

Yarvin’s thesis, stripped of its provocation, makes three claims:

1. The Carter administration facilitated the Iranian Revolution. This is well-documented. The Huyser mission prevented a military coup. Sullivan undermined Bakhtiar. The Guadeloupe Conference ratified the Shah’s removal. Western-educated figures in Khomeini’s Paris circle served as the interface between the revolution and the American establishment. The Army War College’s own assessment concludes the mission “facilitated rather than prevented the revolution.” This claim is substantially supported by the documentary record.
2. This was part of a recurring pattern. The Cuba parallel is structural, not metaphorical: arms embargo, media legitimization, State Department subversion of ambassadors, Western-educated opposition figures, and the production of an anti-American revolutionary regime. Ambassador Smith’s Senate testimony is devastating. The pattern survived the McCarthy era and repeated twenty years later with Iran. This claim is strongly supported by historical evidence, though mainstream historians would attribute it to institutional culture rather than deliberate conspiracy.
3. The resulting regimes serve the institutional interests of the establishment that created them. This is the most speculative claim but also the most interesting. The forty-seven-year pattern of provocation and accommodation, the career of Rob Malley, the 93% Democratic contribution rate at the State Department, and the pipeline from Iranian proxy funding to American campus activism all suggest a relationship that, whether or not consciously maintained, serves the institutional interests of the diplomatic establishment by providing it with a permanent portfolio of crises to manage. This claim is partially supported by circumstantial evidence and requires the reader to make an inference about institutional incentives that the evidence does not conclusively prove.

The weakest part of Yarvin’s argument is the word “client.” The Islamic Republic is not a client of the American left in the sense that Israel is a client of the American right. It is better understood as a byproduct—a creature of the American establishment’s institutional logic, sustained by a diplomatic culture that needs adversaries it can manage but never defeat. The strongest part is the documentary record of the Carter administration’s actions in 1978–79, which is damning by any standard.

“Trump is only bombing Tehran because he can’t bomb Brooklyn” is a one-liner. But the idea beneath it—that American foreign policy is a displacement of domestic conflict onto peripheral theaters—has a serious intellectual genealogy running from Burnham through Codevilla to Yarvin, and the historical evidence is stronger than the establishment would like to admit.