The Iranian crisis was a far more complex affair than has hitherto been realised. It brought into play the competitive and often conflicting relationship between not only the United States and the Soviet Union, but also between Britain and the two superpowers. This study is based upon newly released documents in Britain and America, Persian language newspapers and memoirs, and on Russian sources. It is firmly located within the extensive international relations.

For half a century, the United States and the Soviet Union were in conflict. But how and where did the Cold War begin? Jamil Hasanli answers these intriguing questions in At the Dawn of the Cold War. He argues that the intergenerational crisis over Iranian Azerbaijan (1945–1946) was the first event that brought the Soviet Union to a confrontation with the United States and Britain after the period of cooperation between them during World War II. Based on top-secret archive materials from Soviet and Azerbaijani archives as well as documents from American, British, and Iranian sources, the book details Iranian Azerbaijan's independence movement, which was backed by the USSR, the Soviet struggle for oil in Iran, and the American and British reactions to these events. These events were the starting point of the longer historical period of unarmed conflict between the Soviets and the West that is now known as the Cold War. This book is a major contribution to our understanding of the Cold War and international politics following WWII.

The United States, under the presidential administration of Harry Truman, began its policy of containing the Soviet Union during the Iranian Crisis of 1945-46. It was during this crisis that the US first sought to contain the USSR's attempts to expand its political influence, military presence and economic well-being at the expense of another less powerful country. President Truman and other members of the government had witnessed how poorly the policy of appeasement had worked prior to World War II. When the Soviet Union acted in an aggressive manner toward Iran following World War II, the United States did not back down, but instead took a stand to aid its ally. This was containment before containment had a name.