After eight years of hardline, ultraconservative and anti-Western leadership by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, drastic presidential change has occurred in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hassan Rouhani's somewhat unexpected but highly optimistic election has turned heads in the west. .
The big question now is how will he change Iran's current perception as the political bogeyman of the West? In addition, how have relations with Iran and the U.S. morphed over time and how will the installment of a new and more pragmatic president be any different than the one that preceded him. There is no way to tell of how the Supreme Leader will work with Rouhani to formulate a rational plan for foreign policy but it is fair game to analyze their attitudes in the past and take an educated guess as to how the intent on reacting to the future.
U.S. and Iranian relations go back to the early 1950s, with the U.S.'s involvement in the deposition of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq. US officials were increasingly skeptical that Mosaddeq would become dependent on the Tudeh Party, the active communist party, giving the Soviet Union growing influence in Iran. This could lead, in the eyes of the U.S. leaders, to the domino theory occurring in the Middle East. Once Dwight Eisenhower was inaugurated as president in 1953, the CIA, along with the British MI6 carried out the coup d'tat, overthrowing Mosaddeq in August 1953. In December of 1953 Mosaddeq was sentenced to three years solitary confinement in a military prison, and then kept under house arrest at his Ahmadabad residence, until his death on 5 March 1967. .
Mosaddeq's successor, Fazlollah Zahedi "who had been handpicked by the United States and Britain "declared martial law, arrested thousands, and closed down all opposition parties and newspapers. This began a period of dramatic shift in Iran's political atmosphere, which ended the flourishing of political activity that had occurred since 1941 and beginning a long period of authoritarian rule and unwarranted westernization.
