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Iran-US tensions: 5 ways Americans and Iranians are actually similar

Despite escalating US-Iran tensions, remarkable similarities between their peoples have prompted some to suggest that the US and Iran could one day be powerful ‘natural’ allies.

4. Individualism

  • By Scott Peterson Staff writer

Iranians and Americans share another trait, historian Reza Alavi once told the Monitor in Tehran.

"As in the American mind, [there is] the same cultural value of success [and] an extreme individualism," said Mr. Alavi, who was educated at Harvard and Oxford. "That's why you find so many Iranians adjust so well to America. When they go there, they are like a fish in water."

And that is not all. Both sides frequently vilify an “enemy” in public discourse. In recent decades alone, the US has demonized Panama’s Manuel Noriega, Somalia’s Gen. Mohammad Farah Aidid, Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic, Al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden, Libya’s Col. Muammar Qaddafi, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and – a perennial target – Iran’s revolutionary leaders.

A similar tradition reigns in Iran, where for two centuries Persians railed against British and Russian scheming. After 1979, a policy of “neither East nor West” took Iran out of the cold war dynamic, so the West, Soviet Union, and Israel were all vilified.

Special fury was reserved for the US, however, as one ayatollah raged: “Let America be angry with us, and die of this anger.”

This list is adapted from Scott Peterson's book, "Let the Swords Encircle Me: Iran – A Journey Behind the Headlines." Follow Scott on Twitter.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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