Here's what happened the last time the U.S. forced regime change on Iran

CBC

24-06-2025

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Hours before Iran struck an American military base in Qatar on Monday in retaliation for the bombing of three of its nuclear facilities, U.S. President Donald Trump said what some experts feared could lead to history repeating itself.
In a post on his social medial platform Truth Social on Sunday afternoon, Trump wrote, "Why wouldn't there be a regime change???"
For Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, a professor of Near and Middle Eastern civilizations at the University of Toronto, the answer is existential.
If the U.S. were to overthrow Iran's government — again — Tavakoli-Targhi said, "it's going to create a bigger chaos in the Middle East than one could ever imagine."
That scenario is now less likely following Trump's assertion in a post on Monday evening that Iran and Israel — which began bombing Iran's nuclear and military sites on June 13 — have reached a ceasefire agreement. But it wouldn't be the first time the U.S. became involved in a conflict in Iran.
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What happened in 1953?
In 1953, a coup orchestrated by the CIA forced Iran's first democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh, to spend the rest of his life under house arrest. It also led, according to experts who spoke with CBC News, to the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the repressive government that rules the country today.
But replacing that government through outside forces would plunge the region into more turmoil, they say.
"I just don't understand the game plan," said Lucan Way, a professor of democracy at the University of Toronto. "My gut is that this would make a regime that is quite unpopular more popular."
Documents declassified by the CIA in 2013 revealed the U.S. intelligence organization overthrew Mosaddegh, Iran's prime minister, in August 1953 by staging riots that were sympathetic to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran.
Mosaddegh was arrested, then tried and convicted of treason in the shah's military court. Pahlavi restored power to his monarchy, which was sympathetic to Western interests, namely British control of Iran's oil reserves.
Mosaddegh was elected on a promise to nationalize Iranian oil. At the time, the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now known as BP) shared only a small amount of its profits with the country, to growing discontent.
1950s Red Scare
While the U.S. was initially supportive of Mosaddegh's aspirations and his liberal government, it began to fear he could be pressured into communism by the Soviet Union, with which it competed for power in the global world order.
Initiatives whose goals were to give back to the people, especially in formerly colonized states, were easily seen by Western countries as steps toward communism and therefore a threat to their interests, said Wilson Chacko Jacob, a history professor at Concordia University in Montreal.
"The United States is seeing its post-World War II efforts to kind of shore up allies in defence of what they would dub 'freedom,' the freedom of capital to move around the world," he said. "And of course, most of that capital rested with the United States by the end of the Second World War."
The 1950s were also a time when decolonization "is not a complete given," Jacob said. Old colonial powers, like Great Britain, were trying to hold on to power over foreign countries. "This [was] mainly a defence of global capitalism."
Today, Israel is seen by many as maintaining U.S. interests in the region. Others, though, see President Benjamin Netanyahu as causing more turmoil because of his own expansionist actions, such as allowing settlements to grow in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and, now, attempting to take control of Gaza.
"At the heart of the conflict [between Israel and Iran] is the Iranian states' ideological and political commitment to the creation of the Palestinian state. Otherwise, Iran is far away from Israel [and] has no reason to be concerned by Israel," Tavakoli-Targhi said.
Fears of nuclear development
While the threat in the 1950s, in the eyes of the U.S. and the United Kingdom, may have been communism and the Soviet Union, Tavakoli-Targhi said the perceived threat has evolved to "Islamic fundamentalism, terrorism and nuclear weapons."
Israel sees Iran's nuclear program as an existential threat, but both he and the University of Toronto's Way note that Israel has not signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which came into force in 1970, but Iran did.
While it "makes sense" that Israel would want to go after Iranian nuclear capabilities, Way said Russia's invasion of Ukraine has created growing sympathy for states that do not have nuclear weapons.
"Unless you're a large country with a large army that can defend its border, nukes are a much cheaper option as a kind of insurance policy against foreign invasion," he said.
After Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, took back control of Iran's parliament in 1953, he struggled to gain legitimacy within his borders, and a religious movement championed by Ruhollah Khomeini began to win acceptance — eventually leading to the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.
"Part of what brought the current regime to power was this sort of anti-Americanism, which was very much grounded in 1953," Way said.
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