The Mullahs
A hundred years of U.S.–Iran relations
The claim
The standard account, that the 1953 coup cost Iran a secular democracy, does not survive reading Mosaddegh's own words.
The paper takes on the widespread view that American involvement in Iran in the early 1950s is the origin of the present impasse. It does not dispute that the intervention happened or that it mattered; it disputes the counterfactual attached to it.
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