King of Kings: The Fall of the Shah, the Iranian Revolution and the Unmaking of the Modern Middle East, Scott Anderson, Hutchinson Heinemann, £25.

Iran is not the worst disaster in the history of United States foreign policy – not even close – but it gets written about a lot. One reason is that Iran remains a source of instability in the Middle East – rarely more clear than now – and, if its nuclear ambitions are to be taken seriously, a long-term threat to American security. The other reason is that the story of US failure in Iran is so incredibly colourful and so full of spectacular misjudgments that it will long serve as a case study in poor policy, badly executed.

Scott Anderson’s new book is a worthy addition to the genre. King of Kings can be read, alternatively, as a biography of the Shah or as a study of US foreign policy. The subtitle to the book’s US edition – ‘a story of hubris, delusion and catastrophic miscalculation’ – aptly sums up both the Shah’s inadequacies and the breathtaking failures of the Carter administration, which never quite knew what it wanted to do in Iran, and even when it knew what it wanted, didn’t know how to do it.

Even before he digs into Carter, Anderson charges Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger with precipitating the Iranian revolution by giving the Shah carte blanche to run his country the way he saw fit while selling him American weapons practically without restrictions. In short order, the Shah became America’s most trusted client in the Middle East as Washington increasingly deferred to ‘a ruler with dictatorial powers, a massive military and delusions of grandeur’. Those US diplomats who questioned the wisdom of such over-reliance were routinely ignored and dismissed as scaremongers.

In the meantime, the Shah bathed in petrodollars. The oil bonanza of the early 1970s brought prosperity and misery to Tehran: as usual, prosperity for the few, misery for the many. Corruption was rife. The Shah appeared unconcerned, tone-deaf, and remote. His secret police – SAVAK – operated with impunity and brutality, silencing anyone calling for change. That did not prevent dissatisfaction from bubbling through to the surface in the grumbling of disaffected youths, in workers’ strikes, and in the sermons of anti-regime clerics. Anyone with eyes and ears could see and hear that something was amiss – anyone, that is, but President Carter, who described Iran as ‘an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world’.

There were those who had their doubts. Anderson draws attention to two US diplomats who, he claims, had more insight than most about what might just happen in Iran. One was the head of the State Department’s Iran desk, Henry Precht, who, in an oral history interview, recounted how he was taking a shower one day in September 1978 when he suddenly decided that ‘the Shah was indeed finished’. The other was the Farsi-speaking US diplomat in Iran, Michael Metrinko, who was stationed outside Tehran and had a better sense of what was happening in the country. Precht was ignored, while Metrinko’s reports were regarded as unduly alarmist and quietly filed away.

In this context, Anderson has few good words to spare for Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who, with his singular focus on anti-Communism, failed to appreciate the impending dangers of an Islamic revolution. The prospect of a Communist takeover of Iran, Anderson writes, was ‘patently absurd’ and, even if it happened, ‘a Red Iran probably would have been far preferable to the Iran they [the Americans] got’.

Part of the problem, Anderson explains, was that US policymakers did not pay enough attention to what Ayatollah Khomeini was actually saying. It was not that they did not have the source material – they had a whole collection of his tapes – but no one spoke Farsi well enough to understand what the old man was on about. It did not help that Khomeini’s spokesperson, Ebrahim Yazdi, a former pharmacology instructor at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, prettified the cleric’s statements, making him sound less of a radical than he really was.

Yazdi, who later served briefly as Iran’s Foreign Minister, not only misled the others but also probably misled himself by believing that Khomeini would settle for something more moderate than what soon transpired. This raises an important question, however. If even those closest to the Imam were delusional about his aspirations, then how could anyone have expected Brzezinski or Carter to know any better?

Anderson does not write about this – he did not have access to the relevant archival documents – but even the Soviet leaders were hopeful that they could win over Khomeini. There was a lengthy and very friendly exchange of letters between the Soviet General Secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, and the Imam. What put an end to Moscow’s hopes was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which turned the Soviet Union into as much of a ‘Satan’ for Khomeini’s purposes as America had already become.

Historians are immensely privileged in that they know how the story turned out. Since the Iranian Revolution ended so badly for the United States, it’s not unreasonable to draw attention to all the terrible mistakes that were made along the way. The lesson for policy makers today must be this: do not succumb to hubris and delusions and think twice before making catastrophic miscalculations. It’s solid advice, but it’s difficult to follow. Do too much, and you will have acted rashly. Fail to do enough, and you will be seen as dithering. In short, as President Obama was fond of saying, ‘don’t do stupid s***’.

The only problem is, it’s often too hard, perhaps impossible, to say what’s stupid until it is already too late.