“Contacts with the opposition”: American foreign relations, the Iranian student movement, and the global sixties

Iranian students amassed one of the most impressive movements of the 1960s. Through diligent and efficient transnational organizing in the United States and Western Europe, oppositionist students wedded their rejection of the US-supported regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with a broader, more inclusive internationalism that thrived in the late 1960s. This essay situates the Iranian student movement abroad -- both its challenges to the Washington-Tehran alliance and its internationalism -- within the context of US international history. Rather than establish and maintain systematic contacts with the opposition abroad to formulate a more dynamic and less myopic foreign policy, the Johnson and Nixon administrations interpreted Iranian student protest as an impediment to forging a stronger alliance with the Shah of Iran.