America and Iran traces the tangled history of relations between the two nations back to the eighteenth-century Persian Empire-an object of genuine admiration for Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams-and to an America that many Iranians once regarded as a model worth emulating.

Drawing on years of archival work in both the United States and Iran, including rare access to Iranian government records seldom opened to, leads readers through the four seasons of the relationship: the spring of mutual fascination, the summer of early engagement, the autumn of close strategic partnership, and the long, bitter winter of mutual enmity. Ghazvinian shows precisely where, how, and when the path diverged. The book explains why two countries that once felt real admiration for each other became such determined adversaries-and why that outcome was never inevitable.