Interview by Jonathan Shainin at Equator:Jonathan Shainin: I want to start with the question of Iran’s role in the American imagination. Vali Nasr: 1979 was a historic event both for the Middle East and for the US, in part because Iran had been a vital ally. Iran also endangered the American position in the Middle East in entirely new ways. It wasn’t a Soviet threat to the Persian Gulf or to global energy supplies; it was an unforeseen revolutionary instability. It was completely unprepared to deal with Islamism as an ideology, which was indigenous to the Middle East, not a Soviet import.