READING, Pa. – Dr. Randall Fegley spent years teaching Middle Eastern history and international law at Penn State Berks.<\/p>\n
He says to understand what’s happening now, you have to go back decades.<\/p>\n
\u201cBack in the beginning of the 1950s, Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, challenged Western oil companies over their distribution of profits, which he felt was unfair and a violation of Iran’s sovereignty, essentially. He would be eventually overthrown by a combination of British intelligence and the CIA.\u201d<\/p>\n
He says that moment still shapes how many Iranians see the United States. Then came the 1979 Iranian Revolution. American diplomats were taken hostage.<\/p>\n
\u201cCheating a country out of its resources is against international law. And also, holding diplomats hostage is against international law. And so, both sides had very deeply-seated grievances.\u201d<\/p>\n
So where does international law fit in now? Dr. Fegley says the problem is there’s no global police force.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor any system of international law to work, it requires a tremendous amount of trust. And yet, this really doesn’t exist,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He says mistrust has defined this relationship for decades, and history is cyclical.<\/p>\n
So yes, he expected this moment could come. And now?<\/p>\n
“The best-case scenario I can envision is that the Iranian people themselves will overthrow the regime, as opposed to it being overthrown from the outside,” added Fegley.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa. – Dr. Randall Fegley spent years teaching Middle Eastern history and international law at Penn State…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":129816,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[349,41079,25874,44157,28,60339,128,130,129,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-129815","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-reading","8":"tag-berks-county","9":"tag-iran","10":"tag-oil","11":"tag-penn-state-berks","12":"tag-pennsylvania","13":"tag-randall-fegley","14":"tag-reading-city","15":"tag-reading-city-headlines","16":"tag-reading-city-news","17":"tag-united-states"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129815\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}