Fariba Amini
Informed Comment / June 9, 2026
Axis of Empire: Interview with the author by Fariba Amini.
Professor of History Afshin Matin-Asgari specializes in 20th-century Iranian political and intellectual history. He received his PhD from UCLA in 1993 under the direction of Professor Nikki Keddie and has been teaching in the University of California and California State University campuses since then. Currently, he is Distinguished Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles.
He is the author of three books and some twenty scholarly articles. His most recent book, Axis of Empire, a history of Iran/U.S. relations was published by Verso in the UK and Penguin Random House in the US in 2026.
The term Axis of Evil, first coined under the G.W. Bush administration, gave impetus to the 2003 Iraq war. Now, Axis of Resistance, an alliance led by Iran against US and Israeli domination, has become the new slogan.
In his current book, Professor Matin-Asgari covers the period from the early 1900s to the present time, even touching on the recent war against Iran.
He writes: “Nearly half a century of the most onerous U.S. sanctions had failed to change the behaviour of a regime which now stood at the threshold of going nuclear. Instead of changing, the Islamic Republic had grown more defiant in international relations and domestically repressive, blaming American sanctions for its failing economic performance and growing popular discontent.”
Here is our interview:
Fariba Amini: You wrote your first book on the Confederation of Iranian students, perhaps the largest student movement in the world. Why did you decide to write about the student movement against the Shah ?
Afshin Matin-Asgari: I was among the thousands of young Iranians active in the Confederation of Iranian Students in Europe and the US during the 1970s. By the time I joined, in the mid-1970s, it had split into several leftist factions competing and cooperating with each other around the common goal of drawing the world’s attention to dictatorship and repression in Iran. The Confederation was perhaps the world’s largest and most effective student political organization of the 1960s-1970s. Despite its shortcoming, it was the only venue where young Iranians could practice relatively pluralist politics, something that was impossible under the Iranian monarchy. After the 1979 Revolution, I decided to write a history of the Confederation as my doctoral dissertation, which later became my first book.
For your recent book, you have chosen the title Axis of Empire. Why this title ? How is your book different from other books written about Iran-U.S. relations ?
The title “Axis of Empire” was suggested by my good friend and colleague Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, to whom the book is indebted in many more ways. It refers to what makes my approach different from other studies of US-Iran relations, namely my central narrative assumption about the imperial or imperialist character of American interactions with Iran. The three or four recently published studies of US-Iran relations also note imperialist US policies toward Iran, something that is central, or axial, to my book’s narrative.
You paint a negative picture of the role of the United States in Iran. Were there also moments in history when the Americans had a positive role ?
I call America’s relations with Iran imperialist because it has imposed intertwined military, political and economic structures of domination on the Pahlavi monarchy and systematically undermined the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic. The culmination of this policy is the current US-Israeli war against Iran, which despite the Islamic Republic’s contribution to its making, is a clear case of imperialist aggression. Of course, and depending on one’s point of view, it is possible to find some positive aspects in the long history of US-Iran relation, for example, American Presbyterian missionaries’ contribution to modern education in Iran or similar contributions by the US Peace Corps during the 1960s-1970s.
In the chapter about oil and the negotiations between Mosaddegh and the U.S. administrations, unlike other scholars, you conclude that neither Truman nor Eisenhower wanted to come to a compromise over the oil issue. Yet, in his book, Envoy to the Middle World, Ambassador George McGhee mentions that the Truman administration tried very hard to appease Dr. Mosaddegh’s government, but it was the British who persuaded the Americans to hold firm. How do you come to this conclusion ?
My basic argument is that the Truman administration was not an “honest broker” and did not support Mosaddegh against British intransigence, its real objective being the breakup of Britain’s monopoly of Iranian oil to get a big share of it for American companies, exactly what happened after Mosaddegh’s overthrow. This is the scholarly consensus on British and American conflict with Iran over its oil nationalization, argued most persuasively in works by Ervand Abrahamian.
You mention in the chapter about the Coup, that on August 18, Mosaddegh’s biggest mistake was that he forbade all demonstrations for or against his government. On that day, a few hundred paid hooligans took over the city. Mosaddegh’s head of the Tehran police, general Afshartoos, had been abducted and murdered, allegedly by agents of the MI6. Tehran was in turmoil. Don’t you think that Mosaddegh did not believe in using force? He didn’t want any bloodshed. He may have survived if he had used the army to crush the rioters, but it was against his principles. So how can you criticize his actions considering who the man was ?
Though Mosaddegh’s personality looms large over the oil nationalization movement, my analysis attributes his overthrow to structural factors beyond one individual’s personality traits. Well before August 1953, Mosaddegh’s National Front coalition had fallen apart and his government could rely only on a few small parties, having lost significant popular support as well. The armed forces were deeply penetrated by the US, which means Mosaddegh could not have used them effectively even if he had tried to do so during the coup. Iran’s strongest political organization, whose presence in the streets might have stopped the coup, was the communist Tudeh Party, which Mosaddegh did not trust and whose offer of help, on August 18-19, he rejected. In the end, I explain Mosaddegh’s overthrow in terms of complex interactions among several domestic and international actors, something beyond Mosaddegh’s personal leadership qualities. Though I politically sympathize with Mosaddegh, I believe obsession with leaders, whether Mosaddegh, the Shah or ayatollah Khomeini, confuses our historical thinking.
Under the Shah, as you point out, Iran became a client state, buying vast amounts of armaments, sometimes in cash, from the United States. But at the end, Mohammad Reza Shah could not hold on to his throne. What were some of the reasons ?
The answer is not simple. Following many scholars, I argue the Shah’s relation with the US underwent changes, experiencing ups and downs. Two chapters of my book trace US-Iranian political, economic and cultural relations during the 1960s-1970s in some detail. I note, for example, that in the early 1970s, the Shah imagined himself independent of Washington. But by the second half of that decade, his relations with the US saw growing tension, in part related to the criticism of the Shah in the American news media, itself largely due to the activities of the Iranian student opposition. To simplify things, one could say Iran was drifting toward a revolutionary situation because the Shah could not manage a multi-pronged economic and political crisis, which carried over to his relations with the US. The revolutionary drift might have been averted had the Shah restored constitutional government in 1976-1977, something he accepted by the end of 1978 when it was too late.
We now come to the chapter in your book about the Iranian Revolution which you cover extensively. As an intellectual of the left, don’t you think that the Iranian left and even liberals did not know their society well? How could a cleric having been exiled for years in Najaf, quite isolated and unknown, suddenly lead one of the most significant revolutions of the 20th century ?
I don’t find the blame game concerning who was more responsible for the revolution’s misdirection useful or interesting. The Iranian left was quite diverse, and its overall understanding of society was no less complex than that of any other political tendency. From 1976 through most of 1978, Iran’s secular liberal and leftist intelligentsia asked for the restoration of constitutional government, a sensible demand the Shah refused to accept, thus paving the way for Khomeini’s rise to lead a mass revolutionary movement seeking his overthrow. Khomeini was no unknown cleric on the margins of politics, but he became the revolution’s undisputed leader only in 1978 when a hitherto secular reformist opposition acquired a revolutionary Islamic character.
Towards the end of your book, you talk about the Trump administration’s dealings with the Islamic Republic. Is he just a patsy of Netanyahu when it comes to Iran or does he have an independent policy ?
By all accounts, Israeli leaders, and particularly Netanyahu, had tried to drag the US into a war with Iran since the mid-1990s. After September 11, 2001, the Israel lobby pushed Iran to top the list of US enemies in President GW Bush’s “Axis of Evil.” However, while successive American administrations avoided direct military confrontation with Iran, they gave Israel a free hand to undertake acts of aggression that made Iranian retaliation more likely, leading to the 12-day war of June 2025. Trump joined that war to the limited extent of bombing Iran’s nuclear sites. But he embarked on a massive invasion of Iran last February, apparently being convinced by Netanyahu that the Islamic Republic would fall or surrender when faced with full-scale American Israeli attack. This proved to be a big mistake, drawing the US into a war it can neither win nor disengage from.
How has the Iranian society changed since the events of January 2026 when thousands Iranian citizens were reportedly killed ?
By late 2025-early 2026, many in the Iranian diaspora, particulary the monarchists, assumed the Islamic Republic was on the verge of collapse, needing a final push through a mass popular uprising. This proved a tragic illusion when the regime put down popular protests by massacring thousands last January. Exactly how many people were killed or the extent of direct foreign involvement in the January 2026 protests remains unknown, but the event showed the regime could not be toppled with Reza Pahlavi or Iran International TV asking people to come out and die in street protest. Nor could it be toppled by the combined firepower of Israel and the US, as the current war has shown. One may despise the Islamic Republic, but it has proven far more resilient than anyone expected.
Are we witnessing a different era in the long life of the Islamic Republic and its relationship with the West ?
What has emerged from this war so far is a different Islamic Republic that functions quite effectively under tremendous pressure and even after the elimination of its top military and political leadership. The Revolutionary Guards manage the war and seem to be running the country efficiently, though with an iron fist, with the help of surviving leaders of the old political establishment. But the regime emerging from the war is not the Islamic Republic we used to know. Already, the role of clerics and Islam is less pronounced, while a nationalistic military-technocratic elite, perhaps more competent but no less repressive than the Khamenei regime, seems to be in control. The extent and brutality of American damages inflicted on Iran, epitomized in the massacre of Minab children, indicate foreseeable US-Iranian relations, under any political regime in Tehran, can hardly improve beyond a cold armistice. Fantasies of restoring relations to something like what existed under the Shah are as absurd as Trump’s promise of turning Gaza’s genocidal grounds into a resort.
Has this war changed the fabric of the region ?
I am not a geo-strategist, and no one can predict exactly how this ongoing war will change the Middle East or the (Persian) Gulf region. Clearly, Trump’s failed misadventure vis-à-vis Iran, as well as his unleashing of Isreal’s genocidal aggression in Lebanon and Palestine, has badly damaged America’s standing in this vital and unstable region of the world. Pipe dreams such as the Abraham Accords are dashed and Saudi Arabia and Gulf states must think twice before resuming their overt military and political reliance on the US. Finally, Israel’s blood-drenched triumphalism looks like a strategic political failure, turning the Zionist state into an international pariah, which is also losing support among the American public and even segments of the political establishment who hold Israel responsible for getting the US involved in an unwinnable war and trying to prevent a resolution to this war.”
Fariba Amini is a freelance writer and journalist
