How way leads to way

What happened, happened. We should neither sanitise the past nor live in it.

Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, during his visit to the United States in 1951,

The United States and Iran have been at odds for decades. Sometimes the relationship has thawed somewhat, but never for long. And now, in the most serious escalation yet, the US has bombed Iranian nuclear sites into rubble.

The Iranian regime is a bad actor. It funds terror operations from Lebanon to Yemen. It threatens to wipe Israel off the map. It has pursued nuclear weapons, or at least the clear ability to produce them. Neither the U.S. nor Israel will ever allow a regime like the Islamic Republic to acquire the bomb.

Nor should they.

But there is a certain logic to why Iran wants nukes. Nobody threatens North Korea like they threaten Iran. And one reason that Iran behaves like a cornered animal is because, in its own eyes, it has been treated like one for decades.

Kierkegaard said that life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. Let’s keep that in mind while we work our way backwards from today to the end of the British Empire at the close of the Second World War.

From the Revolution to Today

Washington DC is not paranoid. Iran has truly earned the enmity of the United States. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the regime has:

• Seized the U.S. embassy and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days;

• Funded groups responsible for bombing U.S. Marines and diplomats;

• Backed militias that killed American soldiers in Iraq;

• Carried out assassinations and kidnappings abroad; and

• Armed proxies who threaten Western allies.

This is not the résumé of a misunderstood or mischaracterised government. It is a regime that has defined itself in opposition to the West, and particularly to the United States, for more than forty years. The hostility is not imagined.

How the United States Created Its Own Adversary

How did this happen? Because the United States backed the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a ruler whose regime combined aggressive modernisation with ruthless suppression. He was a strongman who fit neatly into Cold War American strategy: secular, anti-communist and eager to align with the West. But that support came at a price.

The Shah did bring progress. He invested in education, expanded rights for women, built roads and hospitals and pushed for industrialisation. He tried to modernise Iranian society from the top down, envisioning a strong, Westernised Iran that could stand as a regional power. Many in the urban middle class welcomed these reforms. Tehran gleamed under his rule.

But for millions of others, the cost was heavy. The Shah tolerated no opposition. His secret police, SAVAK, were infamous for surveillance, torture and disappearances. Political parties were neutered. Religious leaders were sidelined or harassed. The rural poor, left behind by the modernisation drive, saw little benefit and plenty of condescension. Corruption festered at every level of government, and the royal family became a symbol of decadence and foreign dependence.

The more the United States embraced the Shah, the more it became associated with the worst aspects of his rule. In the eyes of many Iranians, America wasn’t just a distant superpower. It was the protector of a homegrown autocrat.

Then, in typical fashion, the United States abandoned him when he became a liability. And when the revolution came, it exploded not just against the monarchy, but against the American hand behind it.

Why the United States Backed the Shah

After World War II, Iran had a shot at something different. Iran was ruled by a Shah, but he was not an absolute ruler. Mohammad Mossadegh, a secular nationalist, was appointed prime minister. His government was determined to assert Iran’s sovereignty, starting with control over its oil.

The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (BP today) had since 1908 enjoyed an oil drilling concession in the country. For the privilege, it was to pay 16% of all net profits to the Iranian state. And that’s not unreasonable, given the cost of exploration, development and infrastructure, which fell on the company.

But here’s the catch: the books were kept in London. Iran had no way of verifying what the company claimed as profit. It simply had to take the company’s word for it. And because of Hollywood accounting, it was pretty easy to hide profit.

As the British economy recovered from the war on the back of Iranian oil, Iranians themselves lived in poverty. Roads were unpaved. Villages had no electricity.

Mossadegh (not unreasonably) asked to have the books audited. The AIOC (less unreasonably) refused to engage. So the prime minister moved to nationalise the oil industry in 1951.

With British urging, and fearful that instability could open the door to Soviet influence, Washington agreed to help remove Mossadegh. The result was a joint CIA-MI6 operation—carried out with the assistance of royalist officers and street mobs—that toppled the elected government and expanded the Shah’s power.

It was dressed up as a domestic uprising, and while there had been discontent, Mossadegh would likely have remained in power without US and British influence.

So Where Does That Leave Us Now?

It leaves us here. In the Year of Our Lord, Two-Thousand and Twenty-Five, where the Iranian people—heirs to a great civilisational heritage—are ruled by a violent theocracy that had nuclear weapons within reach. It wasn’t inevitable. But for paths untaken, it could have been avoided.

Does all that matter? Not really. Not much.

The road here was crooked, yes. The Western alliance made mistakes both strategic and moral. But none of that changes the fact that Iran today is run by extremists who bankroll terror across the region and who were bent on acquiring nuclear weapons in open defiance of the civilised world.

The idea that historical grievances entitle Tehran to the bomb is nonsense. They don’t get to trade on 1953 while plotting worse in 2025. We can’t prevent past mistakes—we can only avoid making new ones.

The choice before the West now isn’t philosophical. It’s practical: do we allow a regime like this to possess the most destructive weapons ever devised?

This is no longer about Mossadegh or the Shah. The past is a foreign country. Today is where we live.