To better appreciate the impact of the Islamic Revolution, we need to reacquaint ourselves with late-Pahlavi Iran and the impression it created around the world. It is all too easy to forget that in the 1960s and 1970s, Iran was the emerging power, the new tiger economy to rival Japan’s economic achievements, with natural resources that Japan could only envy. The Great Game was receding into history, and while critics of the shah might accuse him of being a lackey of the West, the reality by the end of the 1960s was a good deal more complex. Iran was rich in hydrocarbon resources—the fourth-largest oil reserves and the second-largest gas reserves in the world—as well as other mineral and human resources, and the shah’s determination to reach the ‘great civilisation’ by the turn of the millennium seemed within reach
