Iran–United Kingdom relations
Iran–United Kingdom relations encompass the diplomatic, economic, and historical interactions between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Iran, which was called Persia by the West before 1935, has had political relations with England since the late Ilkhanate period when King Edward I of England sent Geoffrey of Langley to the Ilkhanid court to seek an alliance. Until the early nineteenth century, Iran was a remote and legendary country for Britain, so much so that the European country never seriously established a diplomatic center, such as a consulate or embassy. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Iran grew in importance as a buffer state to the United Kingdom's dominion over India. Britain fostered conflict between Iran and Afghanistan as a means of forestalling an Afghan invasion of India. In recent years, relations between Iran and the United Kingdom have been marked by hostility as the United Kingdom sanctioned Iran while Iran detained British citizens and conducted influence campaigns within the United Kingdom.
Both countries share common membership of the United Nations. Bilaterally the two countries have an Air Transport Agreement.
History of Anglo-Iranian relations
Safavid era
In 1597, as Abbas I of Safavid sought to establish an alliance against his arch rival, the Ottomans, he received Robert Shirley, Anthony Shirley, and a group of 26 English envoys in Qazvin. Soon, the Shirley brothers were appointed by the Shah to organize and modernize the royal cavalry and train the army. The effects of these modernizations proved to be highly successful, as from then on the Safavids proved to be an equal force against their arch rival, immediately crushing them in the first war to come and all other Safavid wars to come. Many more events followed, including the debut of the British East India Company into Persia, and the establishment of trade routes for silk though Jask in the Strait of Hormuz in 1616. It was from here where the likes of Sir John Malcolm later gained influence into the Qajarid throne.Qajar era
Anglo-Persian relations picked up momentum as a weakened Safavid empire, after the short-lived revival by the military genius Nader Shah, eventually gave way to the Qajarid dynasty, which was quickly absorbed into domestic turmoil and rivalry, while competing colonial powers rapidly sought a stable foothold in the region. While the Portuguese, British, and Dutch, competed for the south and southeast of Persia in the Persian Gulf, Imperial Russia was largely left unchallenged in the north as it plunged southward to establish dominance in Persia's northern territories.In the early 19th century, the British were driven by worries about Napoleon attacking India, while the Iranians were worried that the French would abandon them despite the Treaty of Finckenstein. This culminated in Iran and Britain agreeing to the "Preliminary Treaty of Friendship and Alliance" in 1809. Mirza Abolhassan Khan Ilchi was sent as the Iranian ambassador to London to wrap up the treaty.
A weakened and bankrupted royal court under Fath Ali Shah was forced to sign the Treaty of Gulistan in 1813, followed by the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828 after efforts by Abbas Mirza failed to secure Persia's northern front against Imperial Russia. The treaties were prepared by the Sir Gore Ouseley with the aid of the British Foreign Office in London. In fact, Iran's current southern and eastern boundaries were determined by none other than the British during the Anglo-Persian War. After repelling Nasereddin Shah's attack in Herat in 1857, the British government assigned Frederic John Goldsmid of the Indo-European Telegraph Department to determine the borders between Persia and British India during the 1860s.
By the end of the 19th century, Britain's dominance became so pronounced that Khuzestan, Bushehr, and a host of other cities in southern Persia were occupied by Great Britain, and the central government in Tehran was left with no power to even select its own ministers without the approval of the Anglo-Russian consulates. Morgan Shuster, for example, had to resign under tremendous British and Russian pressure on the royal court. Shuster's book The Strangling of Persia is a recount of the details of these events, a harsh criticism of Britain and Imperial Russia.
Pahlavi era
Of the public outcry against the inability of the Persian throne to maintain its political and economic independence from Great Britain and Imperial Russia in the face of events such as the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 and "the 1919 treaty", one result was the Persian Constitutional Revolution, which eventually resulted in the fall of the Qajar dynasty.The great tremor of the Persian political landscape occurred when the involvement of General Edmund Ironside eventually led to the rise of Reza Shah Pahlavi in the 1920s. The popular view that the British were involved in the 1921 coup was noted as early as March 1921 by the American embassy and relayed to the Iran desk at the Foreign Office. A British Embassy report from 1932 concedes that the British put Reza Shah "on the throne".
A novel chapter in Anglo-Iranian relations had begun when Iran canceled its capitulation agreements with foreign powers in 1928. Iran's success in revoking the capitulation treaties, and the failure of the Anglo-Iranian Agreement of 1919 earlier, led to intense diplomatic efforts by the British government to regularize relations between the two countries on a treaty basis. The most intractable challenge, however, proved to be Iran's assiduous efforts to revise the terms whereby the APOC retained near monopoly control over the oil industry in Iran as a result of the concession granted to William Knox D'Arcy in 1901 by the Qajar King of the period.
The attempt to revise the terms of the oil concession on a more favorable basis for Iran led to protracted negotiations that took place in Tehran, Lausanne, London and Paris between Teymourtash and the Chairman of APOC, Sir John Cadman, spanning the years from 1928 to 1932. Despite much progress, Rezā Shāh Pahlavi was soon to assert his authority by dramatically inserting himself into the negotiations. The Monarch attended a meeting of the Council of Ministers in November 1932, and after publicly rebuking Teymourtash for his failure to secure an agreement, dictated a letter to cabinet canceling the D'Arcy Agreement. The Iranian Government notified APOC that it would cease further negotiations and demanded cancellation of the D'Arcy concession. Rejecting the cancellation, the British government espoused the claim on behalf of APOC and brought the dispute before the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague, asserting that it regarded itself "as entitled to take all such measures as the situation may demand for the Company's protection." At this point, Hassan Taqizadeh, the new Iranian minister to have been entrusted the task of assuming responsibility for the oil dossier, was to intimate to the British that the cancellation was simply meant to expedite negotiations and that it would constitute political suicide for Iran to withdraw from negotiations.
Rezā Shāh was removed from power abruptly during the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran during World War II. The new Shah, Crown Prince Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, signed a Tripartite Treaty Alliance with Britain and the Soviet Union in January 1942, to aid in the allied war effort in a non-military way.
Contemporary era
In 1951, the Iranians nationalized the oil through a parliamentary bill on 21 March 1951. This caused a lot of tension between Iran and the UK. After the events of 1953, scores of Iranian political activists from the National and Communist parties were jailed or killed. This coup only added to the deep mistrust towards the British in Iran. It has since been very common in Iranian culture to mistrust British government.The end of World War II brought the start of American dominance in Iran's political arena, and with an anti-Soviet Cold War brewing, the United States quickly moved to convert Iran into an anti-communist bloc, thus considerably diminishing Britain's influence on Iran for years to come. Operation Ajax and the fall of Prime Minister Mosaddegh was perhaps the last of the large British involvements in Iranian politics in the Pahlavi era. The British forces began to withdraw from Persian Gulf in 1968. This was done out of economic considerations as the British simply could not continue to afford the costs of administration.. As part of this policy, in 1971, the then British government decided not to support the Shah and eventually, the patronage of the United Kingdom ended, and consequently, this role was filled by the US.
The Islamic Republic
On 30 April 1980, the Iranian Embassy in London was taken over by a six-man terrorist team holding the building for six days until the hostages were rescued by a raid by the SAS. After the Revolution of Iran in 1979, Britain suspended all diplomatic relations with Iran. Britain did not have an embassy until it was reopened in 1988. A year after the re-establishment of the British embassy in Tehran, Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering Muslims across the world to kill British author Salman Rushdie. Diplomatic ties with London were broken off only to be resumed at a chargé d'affaires level in 1990.Current relations
Post-Cold War
Relations normalized in 1997 during President Mohammad Khatami's reformist administration, with Jack Straw becoming the first high-ranking British politician to visit Tehran in 2001 since the revolution. A setback occurred in 2002 when David Reddaway was rejected by Tehran as London's ambassador, on charges of being a spy.In February 2004, following the earthquake in Bam, Prince Charles met President Mohammad Khatami in Tehran before travelling to Bam.