Rusi Analysis Podcasts

Recorded on 10 July 2019 at 18:15 In 2001, Jack Straw became the first senior British government minister to visit Iran since the 1979 revolution and has developed a growing interest in the country ever since. His latest book examines Britain’s extraordinary and tangled relationship with Iran, and why so many Iranians are obsessed with Britain’s role. Rather as we in the United Kingdom continue to define ourselves by what happened nearly eighty years ago at the start of the Second World War, modern Iranians define themselves by their bloody experience of the Iran–Iraq war of 1980–88, where the country had stood alone against Iraq. The conflict was an act of unprovoked aggression by Saddam Hussein, leader of Iraq. The rest of the world – France, the Soviet Union, later the US and the UK – all piled in to support Iraq, with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States bankrolling Saddam. It was this experience that has helped define Iran’s view of the world, and its attitudes to both its local rivals for power and those