This paper forms part of the pre-organised panel: 'The Bazargan Era in Iran: A Critical Reappraisal'. Its primary purpose is to re-appraise the United States relationship with the Bazargan government. To do so it draws on a wealth of recently declassified documents and the author's interviews with participants. In one important sense, the analysis presented in this paper stands as an important corrective to the narrative of American motives in Iran presented by the current Iranian leadership. Indeed, the confrontation between the United States and Iran may appear so ideologically entrenched and domestically vitriolic that it is easy to lose sight of the importance the United States placed on reaching an accommodation with the nascent Islamic Republic in 1979. US diplomats tried persistently, and in good faith, to build bridges with the new regime. This was not an obvious decision. The revolutionary movement led by Ayatollah Khomeini had just swept aside a loyal US ally and many of its early activities appeared to run contrary to US interests. This paper explores the assessments, pathologies and interactions that guided US attempts to engage Iran. This includes assessments of the PGOI's foreign policy orientation, contacts prior to the revolution, assessments of Khomeini's relationship with the PGOI, assessments of the internal and external communist threat in Iran, prevailing attitudes towards political Islam, and the wider domestic and cold war context. The paper shows how US strategy retained core-elements of the relationship that had existed during the Shah’s regime. US officials emphasised a mutual interest in containing direct Soviet aggression, deterring Soviet proxies such as Iraq, and undermining Iranian leftist groups. My paper will then look at the actual execution of engagement – particularly contacts between embassy staff and Iranian groups. Although well-meaning, the paper argues that many of the assumptions that guided Washington’s ‘new’ policy were inappropriate for dealing with the new reality. Washington’s continued presentation of Iran as a critical theatre for super-power rivalry reinforced a paradigm for US-Iranian relations that the more radical elements of Iran’s post-revolutionary polity were dedicated to dismantling. It undermined Washington’s claim that it had accepted the revolution and projected American concerns and orthodox understanding of geopolitics onto a transitional regime operating in a febrile political environment. More broadly, the US defined its ‘mutual interest’ with Iran in terms that smacked of protecting the status quo; rarely a welcome notion to revisionist revolutionary movements.