There’s a familiar pattern in foreign policy debates: outrage at the current regime, amnesia about how it got there. Yes, the current government of Iran is repressive. It crushes dissent, restricts freedoms, and enforces authoritarian rule. None of that needs soft-pedalling, but if we’re at all serious about understanding the world – rather than just reacting to #fashernista headlines – we also have to look at how situation came to be.
In 1953, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was removed in a coup orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency and MI6. The reason wasn’t hidden. Mosaddegh had nationalised Iran’s oil industry, which had been dominated by British interests. Oil, not democracy, was the priority.
The coup, coup d’état, dismantled a native government with a democratic mandate and reinstalled Mohammad Reza Pahlavi an authoritarian monarch, backed by the United States and the United Kingdom. His regime relied on repression, secret police, and heavy Western support to maintain control. That repression didn’t produce stability. It produced rage. In 1979, the backlash came in the form of the Iranian Revolution, which overthrew the Shah and replaced him with a theocratic system that remains in power today.
This is the churn. Western powers intervene blindly for strategic and economic gain. They undermine any democratic movements that natively conflict with this corporate and geopolitical greed. The installed regime rules repressively, public anger builds, eventually, it explodes – often empowering forces that are more hostile, more radical, and less aligned with Western interests than the government that was overthrown. Then we act surprised and circle back to the same mess.
None of this excuses the Iranian regime’s actions. But pretending history began in 1979 is dishonest. If we want fewer authoritarian states and fewer hostile stand-offs, we might start by acknowledging how “defending freedom” has meant undermining it. Policy churn without accountability simply produces the next crisis, and then the next one.
We need to compost this mess.
