- Sponsor
- Department of History
- Views
- 210
- Originating Calendar
- ACDIS: Arms Control & Domestic and International Security
Since the late 1990s, Iran’s nuclear program has been a source of controversy, challenge and – often – confusion. Successive US administrations, in concert with close allies in the Middle East and elsewhere, have vowed to do everything possible to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. However, away from the media hype and the political machinations, there has not always been a clear understanding of Iran’s nuclear intentions and strategies. This lecture examines Iran’s controversial nuclear program from the critical perspective of history – from its origins under the Shah’s regime in the 1950s, to the close US-Iranian nuclear cooperation of the 1960s and 1970s, to the changing dynamic that followed the Iranian revolution in the 1980s and 1990s. What this history reveals is that the Iranian nuclear ‘crisis’ of the past two decades is largely the result of the dysfunctional political relationship between the United States and Iran — and could have been easily avoided.
About the Speaker:
Dr. John Ghazvinian is an author, historian and former journalist specializing in the history of US-Iran relations. His most recent book, America and Iran: A History from 1720 to the Present (Knopf, 2021) was named by the New York Times as one of "100 Notable Books of 2021". He has written for publications including Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, the Sunday Times and the Huffington Post, and has taught modern Middle East history at several colleges and universities in the Philadelphia area. He earned his doctorate in history at Oxford University and was the recipient of a "Public Scholar" fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.