| Summary/Abstract |
Iran enjoyed some of the earliest fruits and efforts of the Point Four programme, an initiative borne out of President Harry Truman’s 1949 inaugural address. Over the last decade, a robust literature on development theory and American foreign policy has emerged. That research reveals complex motivations and agendas. Point Four in Iran, specifically, offers a discrete, early picture of America’s broader effort to utilise technical assistance to elevate poor peoples’ standards of living and inoculate poor states from communist appeals. It is one of the landmark programmes during this genesis period. The Iranian government was amongst the first that the State Department approached to establish technical aid under this initiative, and, indeed, American aid to Iran continued into the 1970s. By mid-1953, however, larger and more direct aid absorbed this specific assistance and development effort to bolster the shah’s government, which gained secure power after an American Central Intelligence Agency and British intelligence—MI6—backed coup that same year. Scholars have argued that Truman’s foreign aid innovations reshaped United States foreign policy. The Point Four programme in Iran, however, also reveals the limits of that revolution.
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