Did West Underestimate Iran? Dr. Abbas Milani & Tom Ginsburg Explain US-Iran Tensions | 4K

Summary

Historian Abbas Milani and legal scholar Tom Ginsburg discuss Iran’s revolution, the Islamic Republic’s political outlook, and what Milani sees as repeated failures by Western governments to understand Iran.

Milani’s formative experiences

Milani recalls arriving in Berkeley from Iran as a teenager in 1964, becoming involved in a small Maoist group, and returning to Iran in 1975. He says he was imprisoned under the Shah and later taught at Iranian universities. He describes prison as a place where he observed future revolutionary leaders, while emphasizing that few people—including the Shah’s government—expected them to take power so soon.

Why the Shah fell

Milani argues that the Shah and foreign intelligence services badly misjudged the opposition. In his account, the regime saw the left as its main threat and treated the clergy as potential allies, overlooking the clerical network and its capacity to mobilize.

He also criticizes the Carter administration’s handling of Iran. Although Carter’s election coincided with an end to torture in the prison where Milani was held, Milani says US policy later became inconsistent and ultimately failed to support the Shah’s continued presence in Iran.

Assessing the Shah’s era

Milani acknowledges that the Shah’s government was authoritarian and restricted political organizing and criticism of the ruler. However, he argues that some social and cultural freedoms—particularly for women, Jews, Baha’is, and artists—were greater than under the Islamic Republic.

He says the opposition, including himself, had too narrow a view of democracy. They treated political speech as its central measure while giving insufficient weight to the freedoms and opportunities of other groups.

A challenge on modernization

Audience member Mernush Sorush disputes what she sees as an overly favorable portrayal of the Shah’s modernization, pointing to poverty and the social and cultural damage she associates with top-down development.

Milani rejects the charge of romanticizing rural life. He argues that urban migration and women’s increased public participation were important changes, even when reforms were imposed from above.

The roots of US–Iran hostility

Milani traces the current antagonism chiefly to the Islamic Republic’s founding leadership and its decision to define the United States as an enemy and the destruction of Israel as a central foreign-policy objective. He argues that Khomeini’s hostility to modernity was shaped partly by the ideas of Muslim Brotherhood thinker Sayyid Qutb.

Milani also criticizes Iran’s indirect-only approach to negotiations with Washington, describing it as inefficient and costly.

Western misreadings of Khomeini and Iran

In response to a question about the Islamic Republic’s appeal to Western audiences, Milani says Khomeini deliberately used anti-imperialist language to build a broad coalition while concealing or underplaying his theocratic intentions. Milani argues that Khomeini was a politically astute figure, not the unsophisticated cleric his opponents sometimes portrayed.

He also criticizes Western scholarship and journalism on Iran when they lack Persian-language knowledge or rely too narrowly on English-language sources.

US policy and missed opportunities

Milani says the United States has lacked a consistent long-term strategy for Iran since the Nixon era, instead shifting between contradictory positions. He believes the Obama administration failed to give adequate public support to Iran’s Green Movement.

He supported the nuclear agreement but considered it incomplete because it did not address human rights or Iran’s regional proxy forces. He also considers Trump’s withdrawal from the deal a mistake.

No military solution, but support for Iranians

Milani opposes a US or Israeli military attack, arguing that democracy must be built by Iranians themselves. He says Western governments can still help by:

• Supporting Iranians’ access to uncensored communications
• Supporting democratic activists
• Restricting the regime’s financial resources
• Making it easier for dissidents and students to study abroad

He describes Iranian women’s civil-disobedience activism as a significant movement and says many in the international left have wrongly dismissed it as foreign-inspired.

Milani’s optimism and view of modernity

Milani calls himself an optimist about Iran’s eventual democratization, while stressing that change will be difficult under repression. He rejects the idea that modernity is exclusively Western, pointing to Iranian traditions of humanism, literature, historiography, national identity, and women’s writing.

He argues that Iranians should draw on their own intellectual history rather than assume modernization requires simply copying the West.

Milani’s intellectual evolution

Asked how he moved from Maoism to his present views, Milani says he came to believe that his understanding of both Marxism and Iranian society had been deeply flawed. He cites the human and political costs of Stalinist and Maoist rule, as well as his later reassessment of changes made under the Shah.

Presenters and contributors

• Tom Ginsburg — Interviewer and moderator
• Dr. Abbas Milani — Historian and principal speaker
• Mernush Sorush — Audience questioner
• Sina — Audience questioner
• Unnamed graduate student in art history — Audience questioner
• Unnamed virtual participant — Submitted a question online