Jim Wright, former Congressman from Texas and Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives during the Reagan administration, opined on the subject of nationalism in a 2006 Op-ed for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, "That natural tendency: watch out for your own".

Calling nationalism a "natural characteristic of the human condition", Wright reviews America's uneasy relationship with foreign nations through the prism of subjectivity, and cites the 1953 Iran coup in particular:

"After World War II, caught up in the Cold War hysteria, we acted secretly to destabilize the Iranian government led by Mohammed Mossadegh and to install the shah, who was friendly to us. That house of cards came tumbling down in the socially regressive revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and Iran has been a problem for the past quarter-century."