US interventions in Iran and beyond reveal a recurring pattern of regime changes, with high human and financial costs.
More than seven decades after the United States helped to overthrow Iran’s elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953, the two countries are again locking horns.
The ongoing war between Washington and Tehran began when the US and Israel launched strikes across Iran on February 28, claiming Tehran was on the cusp of acquiring nuclear weapons.
The war has been marked by fighting across the region, including Iranian retaliatory attacks on Gulf states. The conflict has also spilled into Lebanon, where Israel says it is targeting strongholds of the Iran-backed group Hezbollah, and Yemen, where the Iran-backed Houthis are currently targeting Saudi-linked ships in the Red Sea. The conflict has upended global energy markets, with the closure of the critical Strait of Hormuz, and progress towards a peace deal has stalled.
The US-Israel war on Iran is just the latest chapter in a US-Iran relationship that has been shaped by coups, covert operations, sanctions, military confrontations and brief, yet unsuccessful, attempts at diplomacy.
Since Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, led by former Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini, overthrew the US-backed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Washington has repeatedly sought to weaken the government in Tehran.
However, Iran is not an isolated case. From Guatemala and Cuba to Chile and Venezuela, the US has repeatedly intervened over the years against governments it considered hostile to its interests.
What have those efforts resulted in – and what lessons might they hold for Washington now?
In 1953, the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) worked with Britain to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh after he nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, something the Western powers saw as going against their interests. Mosaddegh had been in power since 1951.
The coup restored the shah, Pahlavi, to power. Iran’s last shah had first taken the reins of the country in 1941 during World War II, after his father, Reza Shah, was forced to abdicate the throne following an invasion by British and Soviet forces.
The Allies in the war were afraid of Reza Shah’s ties to Nazi Germany, which was its largest trading partner at the time, while also being interested in controlling Iran’s land and rail routes to bolster their own war efforts.
Following the coup against Mosaddegh in 1953, Washington and Tehran, under Pahlavi, were close allies for the next quarter century.
The US supported the shah, even helping Iran develop a civilian nuclear programme. In 1957, the two countries signed a nuclear cooperation agreement under US President Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” initiative. A decade later, Washington supplied Iran with a nuclear reactor and uranium.
Over time, the shah’s increasingly authoritarian rule fuelled opposition. In 1979, mass protests forced him from power, and former Supreme Leader Khomeini returned from exile to found the Islamic Republic.
The relationship between Washington and Iran soured, turning Iran from a close ally of the US into one of its principal adversaries.