America has been interested in Middle Eastern oil since World War II, Paul Rahe, professor of history at Hillsdale College, said.

The Hillsdale Lyceum hosted Rahe for a discussion on the Iranian War on March 26.

“Iran has the potential, if they become powerful enough, to use oil as a weapon and have tremendous leverage,” Rahe said. “We have enough oil in the United States, so why should we care?” 

Rahe explained that Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand depend on oil from the Middle East.

“You get control of that oil, and you have leverage over Europe,” Rahe said.

Rahe lived in Istanbul from 1984 to 1986 as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs.

He opened the lecture by providing context on the Iranian people.

“The Arabs are a people, and they’re united by Islam and by a language. But they have not, for any great length of time, been able to maintain a state,” Rahe said. “The Iranians are different. They are a nation, and there has always been, or nearly always been, an Iranian polity.”

Rahe said the same people group in Iran today can be traced back to the Persians, who once ruled most of the known world.

“The Iranians are a proud people with a long tradition, and they’re extremely quarrelsome,” Rahe said. “And if they weren’t so quarrelsome, they would be even more competent than they are.”

In the 19th and early 20th century, Russia dominated Iran from the north and Britain from the south. 

A nationalist military leader named Reza Shah Pahlavi overthrew the ruling dynasty Qajar and attempted to bring Iran into modernity in the early 1920s, according to Rahe. 

Pahlavi resented how little the British paid Iran for its oil, and during World War II he attempted to bring in the Germans to push out the British and Russians. He failed, and the British and Russians exiled him to Africa and put his 16-year-old son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in charge. 

“The younger Pahlavi used the Americans after World War II to push the British gently out,” Rahe said. “He reclaimed the profits from a lot of the oil flowing out of Iran. With that money, he built roads, he built schools, he built hospitals, he built clinics, and he sent over 50,000 Iranian students abroad to study.”

This push to modernity escalated tensions between the increasingly educated middle class and the devout rural communities that followed Shia Islam, according to Rahe.

Ruhollah Khomeini, an Iranian Shi’i cleric, rallied the devout rural people to his side, which opposed Pahlavi.

The tension finally broke in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution, beginning with the burning of movie theaters, according to Rahe. The Islamic Republic of Iran has continued ever since.

Rahe said America’s allies could be held hostage if Iran’s oil fell into the wrong hands. 

“The strategy that Donald Trump and the Israelis have followed is decapitation. You knock off the first level, and when that doesn’t work, you knock off the second level, and you just keep going,” Rahe said.

The administration is waiting for the next possible leader in Iran who would cooperate with the United States, Rahe said. 

“Support for the regime has waned to some degree,” Rahe said. “Very few people turn out for prayers. It’s a good sign. But the ruling order, the revolutionary guard, the people with the guns, and the people who run the army, those people are, to a very considerable degree, children of the revolution. And to get them to turn against it won’t be easy.”

Rahe explained how the Soviet Union fell after several generations, because the closer leaders are to the revolution, the more their identity is wrapped up in its success. He worried that intervention with Iran might be less successful because of the relative nearness of the regime. 

James Shotwell, a first-year classical education graduate student, said he appreciated the context of the Iranian war.

“My stepmom is Iranian Jewish, and so I have a lot of extended family in L.A. that is Persian,” Shotwell said. “I’ve heard about their experience fleeing after the revolution. And so it’s a topic near and dear to me to some extent.”

Shotwell said he has followed the war, but Rahe’s perspective on the history of Iran was new. 

“It was really useful context for the history of the regime and for understanding its strength,” Shotwell said. “I really appreciated the perspective of the cycles of regimes in general and how the revolutionary fervor can peter out after generations.”

Vice President of the Lyceum senior Audrey Powell said she loved learning about the current cultural distinctions in Iran and how those distinctions arose.

“I really appreciated getting the historical context of Iran as a country, because I hadn’t necessarily had a grasp of that before the talk,”  Powell said.