INTRUSIVE SYSTEM: THE CASE OF AMERICAN POST-WAR INVOLVEMENT IN IRAN

Intrusive system is a theoretical concept developed by Louis J. Cantori and Steven L. Spiegel in the late 1960s to identify and explain external participation in the international politics of regions. The concept, defined as those aspects of foreign involvement which produce participation in the process of power distribution at the regional level, provides an effective tool of research within which data related to either historical or current events could be readily organized, carefully examined, and well understood. This dissertation is an attempt to demonstrate how the intrusive system approach could be applied to a case of foreign participation in the Middle East. American post-war involvement in Iran has been selected as the case study for two reasons. First, the official records of the U.S. government suggest that well before the final stage of World War II, American policymakers expected frictions among Allied Powers and planned accordingly to win the peace, not just the war. In this regard, Iran became a testing ground for the U.S. foreign policy to develop a pattern to be used for American relations with all less-favored associate nations. Second, the case is a success story of American intrusion into a country where Great Britain and the Soviet Union traditionally shared primacy in influence and involvement. The theoretical orientation is laid down in Part One through application of the intrusive system concept to the contemporary politics of the Middle East within the context of regional system theory. The conclusion is that the United States is the most intrusively involved power in the Middle East, and its participation fits into a pattern of superpowers' restrained mutual involvement. Part Two reviews the case of American post-war involvement in Iran and demonstrates that restrained mutual involvement was the pattern of Soviet and American participation from the beginning. It concludes that the U.S. intrusion enhanced the internal and external position of Iran enabling its Imperial leadership to overcome the peril of disintegration posed by the Soviet intrusion. The American intrusive involvement turned Iran into the first U.S.-Soviet contesting ground; influenced socio-political, economic, and ideological directions of Iranian post-war politics; and thus affected the course of events in the Middle East.