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among the Arab states. Ten years later, as we have seen, the Russians withdrew
their objections to the supply of missiles in the new arms agreement negotiated

in October 1976, the Persians by this time having obtained surface-to-air
missiles from Britain and the United States. The Russians do not appear to
have been at all put out by the shah’s expansionist ambitions in the Gulf. On
the contrary, because they disturbed the stability of the region they served the
Kremlin’s purposes. Thus the Russo-Iraqi treaty of April 1972 had its
immediate origins in the alarm aroused in the government of Baghdad by the
shah’s truculent behaviour over the Shatt al-Arab and Abu Musa and the
Tunbs. Six months after the signing of the treaty the shah paid a state visit to
the Soviet Union. At the end of his visit a joint communique was issued which
proclaimed the determination of both parties to ensure ‘that matters concern­
ing the Persian Gulf region should be dealt with by the countries of the region
on the basis of the United Nations charter and without any outside interven­
tion’.
There was more than a little irony in the shah’s quest for approval of his
ambitions in the Gulf from the power which had for two centuries consistently
encroached upon Persia’s sovereignty and independence, relenting only when
the pressure of events within Russia or elsewhere distracted it. But there were
historical precedents for both the shah’s soliciting of Russian approval and his
receipt of it. Throughout much of the nineteenth century Persian rulers were
wont to turn to St Petersburg rather than to London for aid and counsel in
furthering their aggressive designs upon their neighbours, and upon the
Afghans in particular. For their part, the Russians were only too happy to
encourage the Persians to aggrandize themselves at the expense of their neigh­
bours, since by doing so the Persians would be diverted from brooding over the
losses they had suffered at Russia’s hands in the form of large war indemnities
and territorial concessions in the Caucasus. What Muhammad Reza Shah
overlooked, however, or perhaps preferred to ignore as incompatible with his
dignity, was that his country’s survival as an independent state depended up to
the Second World War upon the backing of Russia’s principal rival in Asia,

Britain; and that since that time Persia has continued to enjoy an independent
existence because of the friendship and support of the United States.
The shah’s presumptuous pronouncement in Moscow in October 1972,
made with the smiling approval of his Russian hosts, was issued only five
months after President Nixon’s visit to Tehran, when he had assured the shah
of continued American support and virtually unrestricted access to American
arms. The pronouncement was directed primarily against the United States
and against her stationing of a small naval force in the Gulf, based by
agreement with the shaikh of Bahrain at the former British naval station at
Jufair. At the time of the signature of the agreement in December 1971 the
shah had protested (in the curious company of Iraq, Kuwait, Egypt and Saudi
Arabia) against the introduction of the American naval presence, on the