Opinion: From Mossadegh to Khamenei, America keeps relearning the true cost of regime change in Iran
In Iranian politics, history is not past; it is precedent. The 1953 coup that toppled Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh under a covert U.S.-British operation did more than restore a monarch. It set the template for how Iranians interpret foreign power—and how easily short-term victories can harden into generational backlash. Seven decades on, Washington is again defining success by removal. The lesson from 1953 suggests the reckoning will arrive later, costlier, and on Iranian terms.
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That earlier drama began with a royal decree inked under intense pressure. In August 1953, a reluctant Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi signed a firman dismissing his own prime minister. The signature was the linchpin of a plot orchestrated by a man calling himself James Lockridge—Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA’s Tehran station chief and grandson of an American president. Roosevelt had spent months choreographing the illusion of a popular uprising, with CIA money flooding newsrooms to seed fabricated stories casting Mossadegh as a communist fellow traveler and British stooge. Clerics were paid to thunder denunciations from the pulpit. Army officers were bribed. Royalist mobs, portraits of the Shah held aloft, surged through Tehran’s bazaars not as spontaneous fury but as a production.
The operation did not create discontent from nothing. Mossadegh was admired by millions, but he had sidelined the Shah, alienated conservative clerics who once backed him, and governed amid a British-led oil boycott that strangled the economy after he nationalized Iran’s oil industry. The CIA identified real fractures and paid to widen them. Still, most historians agree: without U.S. and British intervention, Mossadegh would not have fallen when he did, or in the way he did. The coup was not merely Iranian politics playing out—it was an imposition upon them.
What followed was 26 years of autocratic rule. Propped up by American money and weapons, the Shah built a modernizing state with a brutal core: SAVAK, a CIA- and Mossad-advised secret police whose repression became notorious. Suspicions of U.S. and British fingerprints on 1953 were voiced by Mossadegh at his own trial and never faded. Instead, they sank into the bedrock of Iranian political consciousness, passed through families and embedded in national memory. When revolution came in 1979, it was in part a verdict on 1953’s audacity. The students who stormed the U.S. Embassy did not choose that building at random. They believed—on the evidence of lived history—that it could be used again for the same purpose.
The Islamic Republic that emerged was not the pluralistic vision many Iranians imagined. It built its own machinery of repression, its own prisons and red lines. A revolution made in the name of the people was, in many ways, made against them. But one inheritance from 1953 endured: a deep suspicion of American intent that outlived the Shah and shapes Iranian decision-making to this day. As the CIA’s own historian would later write, Operation Ajax “transformed a turbulent constitutional monarchy into an absolutist kingship and induced a succession of unintended consequences.”
That history sharpens the contrast with today’s playbook. In 1953, regime change was a covert craft—false names, forged headlines, hired crowds. The cover mattered. Kermit Roosevelt did not use his real name. Seven decades later, there is no pretense. The U.S. strikes that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were announced in a video posted to Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform. The objective—regime decapitation—was briefed openly to journalists. Asked who should lead Iran next, President Trump did not demur. “I have to be involved in the appointment,” he told Axios. He has already disparaged the frontrunner, Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, as “a lightweight,” and followed by demanding “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” from Iran.
Israel, meanwhile, bombed the building in Qom where Iran’s Assembly of Experts was in the middle of voting for a new supreme leader. The choreography is overt, kinetic and unapologetic—an inversion of Roosevelt’s velvet-gloved manipulation. The operating theory, voiced by Trump and echoed by some of his allies, is simple: with precision weapons and the world’s strongest military, removing hostile leaders is not that hard. Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro was captured in January. Iran’s supreme leader was killed in February, along with much of the senior military cadre. If it can be done, why hasn’t it always been done?
The answer is Iraq. It is Afghanistan. And, above all, it is Iran itself. The 1953 coup looked, at first, like an unqualified success. Washington got its man. Oil concessions flowed. The communist “threat”—never particularly real in Tehran—was snuffed out. The bill arrived 26 years later. It is still being paid, with interest, in the form of a political identity forged in resistance to foreign diktat.
This is the core misunderstanding that 1953 exposes. Iran is not simply a hostile regime to be managed or replaced. It is a country whose modern political identity was shaped—decisively—by what the United States did to it. The revolutionary chant that still appears on Tehran’s streets, “Death to America,” did not emerge from a void. It traces to a CIA villa, to a man called “Lockridge,” to a firman a monarch signed under duress. You can remove a leader. You cannot airlift in legitimacy. And when change is perceived as foreign imposition, identity congeals against it, often empowering the very forces most hostile to American aims.
None of this absolves Iran’s rulers of their own responsibility for repression or regional adventurism. Nor does it romanticize Mossadegh, who made fateful political miscalculations, or the Shah, whose modernization also brought social gains. It does insist on a sober accounting of causality and consequence. Interventions do not end with the last airstrike or the celebratory post. They begin there. The hardest work comes afterward, in the churn of state-building, legitimacy and consent—the very arenas where foreign fingerprints are least tolerated and most resented.
What comes next in Iran will likely be decided less by who sits atop the state than by how millions of Iranians interpret what has been done to them, again, by outside powers. If recent days have impressed anything on the region, it is that force can kill a man but rarely kills a movement. The open, triumphal register of this moment—the video announcements, the capitalized ultimatums—may feel like clarity. To Iranian ears trained by history, it sounds like confirmation.
Washington can try to appoint. It cannot confer trust. If the United States wishes to shape a more stable Middle East, it must grapple with the fact that Iran’s political grammar was written in 1953, revised in 1979, and annotated every time outsiders mistake decapitation for destiny. The U.S. can, in theory, install whoever it likes in Tehran. The more consequential question—the one history keeps asking, the one American power has not convincingly answered—is what happens after the mob disperses, the smoke clears and a nation, long suspicious and newly wounded, decides what to become next.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
