Unintended consequences, or the West's blunder in Iran

As war rages in Iran, it’s worth pausing to imagine a different kind of leadership.

Smoke over Tehran following an Israeli attack on 13 June 2025
By Mehr News Agency, CC BY 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons

Think of it as a kind of fantasy exercise — like fantasy football — assembling the best possible team, while knowing it won’t be perfect.

So let’s imagine a leader of Iran not simply appointed by a bunch of religious figures, backed by armed groups whose main role is suppressing opposition. The leader we’re looking for owes his position to the support of the country’s secular parliament. And among the pledges to which he owes his election is putting an end to power built on brutal repression. Equally, he’s committed to working to limit the power of the clergy over wider society.

On the positive side, he’d be set on improving social benefits across Iranian society, ensuring that poorer Iranians, in towns and countryside alike, have the jobs and land they need to prosper. To fund that kind of programme, he’d use the revenue generated by Iran’s immense oil industry as well as by a progressive taxation system, in which the wealthiest contribute a greater share to government spending than the poor.

He needn’t be some kind of secular saint. What might his faults be? I suspect that in his hurry to achieve his laudable goals he might want to take emergency powers and would ask them to be granted to him by the very parliament that put him in office. That would reduce parliamentary authority. He might even go further and start to act against people who oppose him, leading to fracturing in his support.

So by no means a perfect leader. Even one who might in the long run prove the architect of his own downfall. But wouldn’t that be preferable to what both the Iranians and we, citizens of other countries, are having to deal with today?

Well, that was actually no fantasy. What I’ve been giving you is a thumbnail picture of Mohammad Mossadegh. He was Prime Minister of Iran, for a little under two and a half years, between 1951 and 1953. 

Mohammad Mossadegh

Public domain picture from Wikimedia Commons

This was the time when the British Empire was going into its terminal decline. India had already won its independence. The fifties would be when, in the phrase of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, a wind of change began to blow through Africa as colony after colony in that continent left the Empire too.

Iran was never a colony. Most of its oil, however, was controlled by the Anglo Iranian Oil Company (AIOC, which later became British Petroleum and today is known as BP). The British government had a controlling stake in the company so, in effect, Britain held undue authority over Iranian affairs.

When Mossadegh decided to nationalise the oil industry, to deliver the revenues he needed for his ambitious social programmes, the news was badly received in London. Declining power though it was, Britain still had the capacity to do damage, and it also had close ties with the power that was growing to replace it, the United States. The British put a blockade on Iranian oil and, with the Americans, persuaded Saudi Arabia to step in and increase production so the West wouldn’t suffer as a result. 

The effect was massive. Iran’s oil revenues collapsed, Mossadegh’s programme was doomed to failure, and the Iranian people condemned to poverty. As opposition grew, Mossadegh found himself becoming increasingly dictatorial in his moves to hold on to power. 

Now the American CIA, far better resourced than Britain’s spy agency MI6, began to take the lead role. Supported by Britain, US intelligence agents organised and funded a movement against Mossadegh. In August 1953, it succeeded, he was brought down, and with that, Iran returned to rule by the Shah — but now more dependent than ever on Western support.

In return, the western powers regained control of the oil.

It would prove to be a decision with long and far-reaching consequences.

A rare opportunity, to move towards a stable, secular and at least slightly democratic system in Iran, was lost. Over the next 26 years, the Shah steadily increased his power. That became particularly significant after the oil shock of 1973, when a surge in oil revenues seemed to put the Shah in a stronger position than ever. The growth in wealth gave him unprecedented power, allowing him to pursue rapid and far-reaching modernisation.

But the pace of change unsettled Iranian society. Economic disruption, social tensions, and growing opposition forced the regime to rely increasingly on repression to maintain control.

Even so, he could not hold the line. Opposition spread across the country, and in the end the army, though still intact, would not act decisively to keep him in power. In 1979, it was his turn to fall.

What replaced him?

Well, another Mossadegh regime might have been something to celebrate. But that wasn’t to be. Instead, out of the many currents that had opposed the Shah, many of them secular, it was the one led by the leading cleric, Ruhollah Khomeini, that took power. Iran was converted into a theocracy, the Islamic Republic. 

A few months later, supporters of the new regime had seized the US embassy in Tehran. Embassy staff were held hostage for 444 days, well over a year.

Within a year of the embassy seizure, Iran was at war with Iraq. It was a horribly bloody war that would last eight years. Despite Iraq’s powerful military, at the time still being armed by the US (who’d be fighting it themselves within twenty years), Iran emerged badly hurt but having lost no territory – effectively a victory from the Iranian point of view.

Khomeini died in 1989 and was succeeded by Ali Khamenei, who would rule for the next 37 years until he was killed at the outbreak of the present war. 

He headed a nation shaped and militarised by the war with Iraq and steeped in anti-American feeling, to which was added hostility towards Israel. It’s his nation which, despite the loss of its leader, is now putting up far stronger resistance to American and Israeli forces than many expected.

The war has inflicted severe damage on Iran and caused major disruption to the global economy, driving up oil prices and restricting the supply of key products such as fertiliser and helium.

Led by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, the United States and Israel appear to have entered the conflict without a clear and agreed set of objectives. So far, the gains are hard to discern.

And the tragedy is that it’s hardly the West’s first error over Iran. It flows from its much earlier mistake. The blunder made 73 years ago. 

Ousting Mossadegh in 1953 certainly benefited oil interests in Britain and the United States. But the price of those short-term gains has been a long chain of consequences — from the Shah’s increasingly repressive rule, to his overthrow, to the establishment of a far more rigid regime — leading to yet another destructive conflict today.

It’s impossible to know what would have happened if Mossadegh had been left in place. There would, I’m sure, have been serious problems. But would they have been as bad as what has actually happened?

I seriously doubt it.