The 1953 UK-U.S.-backed coup that overthrew Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, remains one of the most consequential interventions of the twentieth century. By restoring the Shah and securing Western control over Iranian oil resources, the coup deprived Iranians of the full benefits of their own natural wealth for decades.
While estimates vary, the value of oil revenues extracted from Iran between 1953 and the 1979 revolution amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars in today's money. Had those resources been invested primarily for the Iranian people, Iran's economic and democratic development might have taken a very different path.
As scholars Peter Ackerman and Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi have argued, lasting peace between the United States and Iran requires acknowledging this history. Nations cannot build trust while ignoring past injustices. The coup helped fuel decades of mistrust, repression, and conflict whose consequences continue to shape the Middle East today.
History matters. Honest reckoning is not about assigning eternal blame; it is about understanding how past actions influence present realities and creating the conditions for genuine reconciliation, contrition and reparations of Iran’s stolen wealth by Britain and the United States.
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