The spectacle of regime change in Iran may appear new, but its script is decades old. The 1953 coup against Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was its earliest and most consequential experiment. In revisiting that moment, one is reminded that today’s crises in West Asia are not aberrations but continuities shaped by a deeper interventionist logic.
President Donald Trump was emphatic, in a pre-recorded message that announced the onset of the combined America–Israel assault on Iran, that his aim was regime change. In his characteristic fact-free, insult-loaded speech, the American leader asserted that the Iranian regime had “chanted Death to America and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder” against Americans for five decades. Ayatollah Khamenei was assassinated in the first flush of airstrikes. Weeks earlier, Americans had removed and kidnapped another state leader through military action, Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela. In both instances, the brazenness of American power has been on unconcealed display. The crucial word here is “unconcealed”. Because for the longest time, America’s agent of choice for illegal regime change had been its secret agency, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In fact, the last time the CIA successfully pulled off regime change in Iran was the first time it had frontally involved itself in one anywhere. The leader it deposed was a secular, democratic nationalist: Mohammad Mossadegh.