Analysis | This US-Iran crisis was decades in the making
- From the Shah to the Gulf War and Isis and beyond, America has often seemed unsure whether it is friend or foe to Iran
- It’s a tangled relationship that is littered with strategic blunders
Yet it was not so long ago that the two countries were allies – democratic ones at that. Indeed, one strand of thought has it that it is America’s strategic mistakes in the history of the Middle East that have created the very problem it now faces.
In the early 1950s, Iran was ruled by a democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh.
However, the US and Britain, perceiving him to be aligned with what was then the Soviet Union, overthrew him in 1953 and installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the Shah of Iran. (This action was itself something of a U-turn as his father, Reza Shah Pahlavi had been ruling Iran since a coup in 1925 but was forced by the British to abdicate in 1941.)
But suspicions of Soviet leanings were not the only motivation for the CIA’s plot – Operation Ajaz – to overthrow Mosaddegh. Another one was oil. Western firms had for decades controlled the region’s oil wealth and were angered when Mossadegh nationalised the domestic oil industry.
