Ali

and Western influence.

Totally new country writing new founding documents.

And one of the biggest debates was how this new Iran would interact with the rest of the world and with the United States.

So she puts on her headscarf and goes to the archives to read old newspapers and magazine articles, contemporaneous accounts of the revolution in 1979 and the years immediately after.

And there's one thing in these big books that she finds really instructive.

She sees in these newspaper pages and transcripts that there was one event that had a huge impact on their decision making.

the hostage situation.

In November 1979, militant Iranian students took over the US embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage.

And down the road, Iran's new government representatives are trying to keep up in real time.

And then there's one more key piece of news in the archives.

The U.S.

responds to the hostage situation by putting its first sanction on Iran, freezing assets held in the U.S.

until they released the hostages.

And all this, the students, the American pressure.

That's one of the big things Iwilela found in all those big books, that the hostage situation and the sanctions that followed, the clear desire to keep foreign influence out of Iran, helped calcify Iran's oppositional stance.

Their whole economic identity was created in opposition to the U.S.

and the West.

Iran in this period wanted to have its own economy.

The idea being we can do it all ourselves.

This is researcher Asfand Yar Batmagellich, or Yar.