An Empire built on sand
REVIEW: Scott Anderson’s unsparing portrait of the Shah of Iran, Cold War America, and a doomed partnership that mistook power for permanence
Note from the road: I’m travelling this week — when this review goes live, I’ll just have crossed the Atlantic into Nova Scotia. But I didn’t want to miss the moment: King of Kings is out tomorrow, and it’s a searing, timely book that deserves a deeper look. So here’s my take.
King of Kings by Scott Anderson
Hutchinson Heinemann, August 2025
I still remember where I found it. A paperback in a bookshop at Doha International Airport, sometime in my final year of school, discovered during a long layover. The cover was loud and cinematic: a black-turbaned, white bearded Ayatollah Khomeini on one side, a stoic Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in the center, and Jimmy Carter on the far right, all framed by a title in oil-tanker font: The Oil Kings by Andrew Scott Cooper.
I picked it up on a whim. At the time, I was still planning to study aeronautical engineering (or one of the other more respectable careers that an Indian who has studied in the Science stream can take). But something about the book’s framing of diplomacy as deal-making, ego, and betrayal — geopolitics as drama — stuck with me. A month later, I’d switched tracks to international relations, and eventually, found myself working in geopolitical risk and strategy consulting.
That’s why Scott Anderson’s King of Kings felt so electric when a review copy arrived. If The Oil Kings charted the petrodollar diplomacy between Washington, Tehran, and Riyadh, King of Kings zooms into the collapse of the U.S.–Iran relationship, the crumbling of imperial illusion, and the tragedy of a monarch undone by the very alliance he so deeply prized.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, styled himself the heir to Cyrus and Darius — the Shahanshah, the King of Kings, and the Light of the Aryans. But Anderson renders him as something far more fragile: a stiff, tightly wound Europhile, raised in Swiss schools and American dependency, propped up by the CIA after the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mossadegh, and obsessed with gaining Western validation. His rule was built not on popular legitimacy, but on image, control, and a desperate desire to be seen as indispensable.
That desire paid off, for a time. In May 1972, President Nixon, fresh from a historic arms control agreement with the Soviets, stopped in Tehran for less than 24 hours. There, at the Niavaran Palace, Nixon made a private promise to the Shah: the U.S. would lift all restrictions on Iran’s purchase of American arms. The Shah could buy whatever he wanted, short of nuclear weapons, and Washington wouldn’t interfere.
What followed was a frenzy. Defence contractors flooded Tehran. Admirals and retired generals bypassed diplomatic channels and pitched military hardware directly to the royal court. Henry Precht, then Political-Military Officer at the U.S. Embassy, remembered “there was just a constant flow of [American military contractors] into Tehran and they were trying to sell the Iranians everything under the sun.”
What this shows is how structural the myopia towards Iran’s internal politics was. As Anderson explains, the Pentagon’s weapons programs often relied on foreign buyers like Iran to make large-scale production financially viable. If, say, Congress only agreed to fund 60 helicopters and that wasn’t economically feasible, an order of 40 more from Tehran could push the program through. In some cases, Iranian orders revived weapons lines the U.S. had already scrapped.
As Anderson, referring to the dependency of the American military-industrial complex on Iran, puts rather bluntly, by the mid-1970s, the Shah of Iran wasn’t leading a ‘client state’, for “that status belonged to the United States.”
By 1974, there were over 2,700 American civilian defence advisors in the country, many ex-military. The Shah spent billions as Tehran shimmered with petro-wealth. There were champagne fountains at palace parties, staircases cut from solid crystal, women wrapped in emeralds. But outside the capital, the system was beginning to crack.
After the oil price spike of December 1973, the Shah declared — with a smug smile — that his aggressive pricing was actually helping the West by forcing it to conserve energy. “We will soon be one of them,” he claimed, aligning Iran with the ranks of the world’s great industrial powers.
But Anderson lays bare the consequences: Iran’s infrastructure buckled and while warehouses overflowed with imported goods, rolling blackouts plagued cities, and a severe housing shortage meant middle-class Tehranians could spend up to 75% of their income on rent. Moreover, a program to subsidize food imports for urban dwellers accelerated the collapse of Iran’s agricultural base and by 1975, rural incomes had fallen to one-seventh of urban levels at a time when thousands migrated to slums, where they came face-to-face with addiction, unemployment, and petty crime.
Anderson is unsparing in his account of how badly the United States misunderstood what was happening. For all the intelligence infrastructure in place — including one of the largest CIA stations in the world — there wasn’t a single senior officer in Tehran who could speak Farsi. Most reporting came second-hand via SAVAK (the regime’s own secret police) and warnings from junior diplomats like Michael Metrinko, stationed in Tabriz, were brushed aside as disruptive. He had seen the protests begin, driven not by student radicals or communists, but by the rural poor, the urban jobless, and a network of local clerics whose sermons were reaching living rooms via cassette.
But the embassy wanted calm and they heard only what they wanted to hear. In some ways, the Americans and the Shah were caught in the same delusion — that money, weapons, and modernization would be enough to keep faith at bay, and that the mosques could be sidelined by malls. But Anderson reminds us that while the Shah looked West, millions of Iranians were looking somewhere else entirely: not to communism, as many in Washington feared, but to a cleric in exile whose sermons cast America as the devil himself.
By 1977, the reality had become impossible to ignore. Asadollah Alam, the Shah’s Minister of the Royal Court — and one of his closest confidants — penned a letter to the King from his deathbed, after having been diagnosed with terminal cancer:
How else can I describe the way we ourselves have stirred up the people against us by our own shortcomings? Prolonged power-cuts right across the country, occasioning slow-down in industrial output and serious financial losses; dreadful communications; shortages of every essential foodstuff save bread; a total disregard for the public’s needs; soaring inflation; the promulgation of new decrees without any preparation or warning .... It is the government itself which deserves to be regarded as the chief agent of subversion. We have squandered every cent we had only to find ourselves checkmated by a single move from Saudi Arabia.
The “move” he referred to was a Saudi-led shift within OPEC that overrode the Shah’s price ambitions and dealt a heavy blow to Iran’s oil-revenue projections — a diplomatic coup that symbolically reversed Iran’s leadership role in the region.
And yet, even in this moment of clarity, Alam couldn’t bring himself to blame the monarch. The fault, he insisted, lay with the “traitors and incompetents” around the Shah.
As Your Majesty’s loyal servant, I urge you to take stern action against the traitors and incompetents who have betrayed us.
It is a letter of extraordinary pathos, not just because it arrives too late, but because it cannot name the one person at the center of it all.
If there’s one caveat to the book, it’s that King of Kings sometimes overstays its welcome. For all its intensity — its thriller-like pacing, its intricate scenes of realpolitik and psychological decay — it could have done with a firmer edit. At over 400 pages before the endnotes, it leans long. Certain episodes and background details repeat themselves, and a hundred pages trimmed wouldn’t have dulled its force.
That said, few histories so skilfully capture the erosion of power as something internal … not only the loss of control, but the illusion that it was ever real.
Perhaps the greatest strength of King of Kings lies in its ability to capture not just the downfall of a monarch, but the anatomy of a relationship — the awkward, often unequal, pas de deux between the United States and its “indispensable” allies. It’s a dynamic that has shaped the Middle East for decades, and one that still echoes today in different theatres, with different players.
As Anderson writes midway through the book:
Given the United States’ well-earned reputation for inconsistency in its foreign relations, for oscillating between isolationism and militarist adventurism, it seemed the only sure way for any other nation to win its permanent attention was to be deemed indispensable, to be so vital to American political or military or economic interests that it could fight to maintain the relationship.
The Shah understood this early on. He wagered Iran’s future on being essential to America’s vision of the region. That gamble bought him time, prestige, and petrodollars, but not permanence. His story, as told in Anderson’s lucid and layered prose, is both a cautionary tale and a blueprint. In a world once again defined by geopolitical flux and great-power recalibration, it’s advice today’s leaders might do well to remember.
All of which makes King of Kings feel less like a history lesson and more like a warning. Because if the story of Iran’s alliance with America feels distant now, it shouldn’t. In the aftermath of the 12-day war between Israel and Iran in 2025, it’s easy to forget there was ever intimacy between Tehran and Washington. That once, this was a partnership spoken of with reverence (Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once lauded the Shah as “that rarest of leaders, an unconditional ally, and one whose understanding of the world enhanced our own.”) That Iran was America’s closest ally in the region and had access to military contracts no other country, bar the UK, had.
But as Anderson shows, that intimacy was built on something brittle: insecurity and oil. And when the illusion cracked, there was nothing holding it up.