US President George W. Bush likes to compare himself to President Harry Truman.
His recent West Point commencement address invoked the 33rd president 17 times. Nor is he alone.
Soon after arriving at her new office in Foggy Bottom, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hung a portrait of her predecessor under Truman, Dean Acheson.
The fixation is understandable. Bold and plainspoken, the folksy Truman and his urbane secretary of state were the first of the post-Second World War "deciders," present at the creation of a dangerous new world. And so the Bushies see themselves.
Then, it was the Cold War against communism; today, it's militant Islam and the war on terror.
Truman faced a vast and monolithic Soviet enemy, largely confined to the battleground of Europe.
For Bush, the threat is more amorphous and its geographic epicentre infinitely more alien: the Middle East. But with regard to Iran, especially, the echoes from past to present are deafening and not very encouraging.
Truman's crisis came in 1952, when a newly elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a precursor of the modern British Petroleum.
In Tehran, the move touched off an ecstasy of nationalistic fervour; overnight, Mossadegh became a hero not only in his own country but across the developing world.
In London, Winston Churchill first considered an out right invasion, then settled on organising a coup to depose Mossadegh and reclaim the oil fields that were the brightest jewel in Britain's post-colonial crown. He immediately asked Washington for help.
Truman and Acheson were appalled. Both were viscerally sympathetic to the nationalist movements of the era, as Stephen Kinzer notes in his admirable book, All the Shah's Men.
Neither did they much respect Britain's high-handed, imperial ways in the world. They urged "engagement" and negotiation of what Acheson, in particular, called the essential "fairness" of Iran's claims.
Best under Mossadegh
Besides, under Mossadegh, Iran was a democracy, enjoying a flourishing free press, independent courts and corruption-free government for perhaps the only time in the region's modern history.
Indeed, Iran was proving to be the very model of the nation that Acheson and Truman hoped would emerge from the chaos of Second World War.
Then came a new administration in Washington: Dwight Eisenhower and his twin ideologues, John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, apostles of Cold War confrontation, full of visionary schemes for "rolling back" communism worldwide.
They were convinced that Iran would somehow be the next domino to fall. They not only threw their support behind Britain but organised the CIA coup that, in 1953, successfully overthrew Mossadegh and restored an autocratic Shah to his thrown.
We have paid for that folly ever since, from the 1979 revolution and seizure of the US embassy to Iran's sponsorship of anti-American terrorism from Lebanon to Iraq.
History speaks once again amidst the current crisis over Tehran's nuclear ambitions. Just as Mossadegh once insisted on Iran's "right" to its own natural resources, provided Britain was compensated, so today do its rulers assert their nation's right to enrich uranium.
Just as Mossadegh enjoyed his countrymen's overwhelming support, even under the duress of crippling sanctions, so now does Iran's government, at least on this issue.
From the American side come ultimatums: Iran has weeks to accede to the latest US and European package of incentives to drop its nuclear programme, Rice declares, or else it will face UN sanctions. Tehran fires back with the same defiance it showed Britain in similar circumstances five decades ago.
Is it back to the future, this time with America playing the British? Or, after seven years in office and with the tempering of Iraq under its belt, has the Bush administration indeed learned the considered pragmatism of Truman and Acheson?
If the latter, they may emerge from the Iran crisis as the far-sighted statesmen they present themselves to be.
Michael Meyer is Europe/Middle East Editor for Newsweek International and he is a member of Benador Associates.
