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United States was already overstretched by commitments in Europe and the
Far East, a situation that led to Nixon’s “Guam Doctrine” of July 1969 declar-
ing Washington’s increased partnership with regional powers in Asia. The
shah seized the opportunity to win US backing for an effort to establish Iran
as the dominant military power, “the policeman,” of the Gulf.
The shah was an ambitious top-down modernizer in the mold of Japan’s
Meiji emperor, Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, or (later) China’s Deng
Xiaoping.^50 Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the shah used Iran’s rapidly ris-
ing oil revenues and his royal authority to attempt to turn Iran into an indus-
trialized, educated, urbanized, gender-equal, and, even more fatally than the
last item, secular country. The shah envisioned Iran as the naturally domi-
nant country in the Gulf region. Economic and social development were to
be the foundations of this rise in national stature. So too was military devel-
opment. During the 1970s, Iran’s military was transformed into a large and
powerful force. The diplomatic cornerstone of the shah’s push for national
grandeur was alliance with the United States, an alliance that went back to
American efforts to secure Soviet evacuation of northern Iran in 1945 and
was premised in the 1970s on Iranian fear of Soviet power on Iran’s northern
borders. Iran under the shah was a close and important US ally in containing
the Soviet Union. Iranian partnership with the PRC was a natural extension
of the shah’s alliance with the United States.
From Beijing’s perspective, partnership with Iran was positive for a
number of reasons. Iran’s alliance with the United States fit with Beijing’s
emerging strategy of using US power to check and counter expanding Soviet
power. More importantly, Iran was a country of considerable and rapidly de-
veloping capabilities—a major regional power, whose friendship China might
find useful. Iran was a close friend of Pakistan, China’s close friend. Since
Iran was not a First World superpower, filling the power vacuum of the Gulf
with Iranian domination would help exclude superpower domination of that
energy-rich region of the world. And Iran was a country with thousands of
years of friendly contact and cooperation, but never conflict, with China.
Unlike other major Asian powers—Japan, India, Russia—Iran had never ex-
perienced military or geopolitical conflict with China. From Beijing’s per-
spective, Iranian preeminence in the Gulf looked benign.
Foreign Minister Ji Pengfei in June 1973 was the first high-level Chinese
official to visit Iran. This was twenty-five months after the first visit by an
imperial princess to Beijing, a delay that may have been partially due to the
shah’s insistence on maintaining balance in Iran’s ties with China and the
Soviet Union. His major objective in opening relations with China was to use
that link as leverage to secure a degree of Soviet support for Iran’s new role
as policeman of the Gulf. From the shah’s perspective, the Soviet Union, on
Iran’s northern border, was far more important than China. The shah under-
stood that his China card should not be overplayed. Thus, while Hoveyda was