Gareth Smyth

On Feb. 24, 1955 – 60 years ago today – Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Britain signed a defensive military agreement soon known as the Baghdad Pact, after the initial location of its secretariat. The pact was a Cold War bulwark against the Soviet Union but also partly a counter to the Arab nationalism fostered by Gamal Abdel-Nasser three years after he led a coup overthrowing Egypt’s monarchy.

It was also an alliance of what is sometimes called the “northern tier,” countries on the edge of the Middle East. Once Iraq left the pact after the 1958 revolution removed its pro-British monarchy, all the members were non-Arab.

The Baghdad Pact highlighted particularly good relations between Turkey, a secular republic, and Iran under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who in 1941 had succeeded his father Reza Shah Pahlavi as the second monarch of the Pahlavi dynasty established in 1925. Under the Sunni Ottoman Empire, religious rivalries with Iran, mainly Shiite after the 16th century, had often proved stronger than common geopolitical interests, and in later decades Sunni-Shiite rivalries were again to sharpen.

Shaul Bakhash, a professor of history at George Mason University, Virginia, argues that Iran and Turkey enjoyed closer ties from the 1920s to the 1970s than before or since. “There was a long period of excellent relations during the Pahlavi period, before the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the coming of a religiously oriented government [in Iran] strained relations with a neighbor that was militantly secular in orientation,” Bakhash recently told me.

Bakhash, who is currently researching the later 1930s in Iran, stresses the affinity between Reza Shah and Kamal Ataturk, who established the Republic of Turkey in 1923 and led it until his death in 1938. “This was a new era of modern nation states, both in the case of Ataturk and Reza Shah’s Iran, both modernizers with the modernization coming from on top,” he said. “Reza Shah was a great admirer of Ataturk and many of his sweeping reforms were near to the ones taking place in Turkey.”

The similarities are striking. “They both wanted a strong centralized state, they were Westernizers and secularists,” Bakhash said. “Reza Shah, as an army officer, copied Ataturk in staging a military coup and in some ways remained like Ataturk a soldier all his life.”

There were also differences. While Reza Shah in the early 1920s flirted with creating a republic to replace the discredited Qajar dynasty, he faced opposition from the Shiite clergy worried over secularism spreading from Turkey.

“Reza Shah did not Latinize the alphabet as Ataturk did,” Bakhash said. “On the other hand, Reza Shah formally abolished the veil and enforced this. Ataturk – even though his reforms went much further than those in Iran – never took that particularly controversial step.”

But Reza Shah and Ataturk were both committed to consolidating their country’s independence, as was seen in the 1937 Saadabad pact, a defensive agreement signed also by Afghanistan and by Iraq, at that time ruled by the left-leaning military government of Bakr Sidqi – an interesting figure of Kurdish origin assassinated in Mosul shortly afterward.

The Saadabad pact was a forerunner of the 1955 Baghdad Pact, but it did not include any Western power. “It was a way of asserting a regional policy, and was meant as an assertion of independence vis-a-vis the great powers,” Bakhash said.

Revolutionaries in Iran would later portray the Pahlavis as Western lackeys. But a desire for independence persisted even in the 1950s, Bakhash said, especially after British intervention in Iran during World War II, and continued with the 1964 establishment of the Regional Cooperation for Development, by Iran, Turkey and Pakistan, an agreement centered on fostering economic development (although its main achievement was the common issuing of several postage stamps).

By the 1950s and 1960s, the whole regional situation was transformed by the acute rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, but there was also internal upheaval in the Middle East, especially the Arab world.

“If you look at the 1952 revolution in Egypt, Iraq in 1958, coups in Syria in the 1950s, clearly the imposition of alliances with the West, particularly Britain, at a time of rising nationalism created a hostile environment in public opinion,” he said. “Countries like Iraq, Iran and Turkey not only wanted such security arrangements with the West because they feared the Soviet Union – this fear was not without foundation in Iran and Turkey – but also as a means of strengthening themselves at home.”

Both also reached out to Israel. In 1949 Turkey became the first Muslim country to recognize the Jewish state. Reza Shah offered de facto recognition the following year, and despite clerical and popular opposition, developed military ties and later supplied oil.

The overall parallels with today are hard to draw out. Tehran and Ankara have close trading ties, and are both wary of developments in the Arab world while taking opposite sides in Syria. Turkey remains secular and part of NATO, but its politics are increasingly influenced by the growth of militant Sunnism since the Arab Spring, and its relationship with Israel is strained.

Iranian diplomats are talking to the United States in a way unknown since the 1979 revolution as President Hassan Rouhani seeks an international agreement over Tehran’s nuclear program, unsettling Shiite fundamentalists at home, while Iran’s Arab allies in Damascus and Baghdad are locked in costly wars against mainly Sunni rebels or jihadis.

So, 60 years after the Baghdad Pact, the nations of the “northern tier” still seek some security in unsettling times. “Once again, we are in a period of change and turmoil,” Bakhash said. “Once again, the U.S. is involved in trying to restore some regional order and once again governments are caught between public opinion and their need for some kind of relationship with a Western power in order to deal with domestic and regional challenges.”