Island of Stability (speech)

"Island of Stability" is a phrase that became the namesake for a 1977 speech by American president Jimmy Carter, while he was being hosted by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi at the Niavaran Complex in Tehran, Iran. It was a reflection of Iran's circumstances — regarded as a stable country and a bastion of the Western Bloc in what was otherwise an unstable Middle East under the influence of the Eastern Bloc — and the importance placed on the Shah's rule by the United States. Carter's speech was made one year before the onset of the Islamic Revolution, which overthrew the Pahlavi dynasty and replaced it with the Islamic Republic.