John Cavanagh has been Director, Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, DC, since 1998. This article was first published in the IDSA Journal, 11(4), April–June 1979.
The recent events in Iran have raised a number of questions: one interesting question concerns the real character of the US interests in that country. There are obvious strategic US interests like monitoring and early warning stations, oil interests, military interests, including sales of huge quantities of modern weaponry, and so on.
