Near the starkly imposing tomb of Cyrus the Great, who founded the Persian Empire in 550 BC, I met an Iranian who summarized his country’s history in a single sentence. “All of our troubles,” he told me, “started with that Greek Alexander.”
Sixteen centuries have passed since Alexander the Great conquered Persia and ordered the destruction of its ceremonial capital, Persepolis. That set a pattern that has haunted Iran’s history. No country on earth has been subject to so many foreign interventions over such a long period of time. During the modern era, the pace of these interventions has been relentless. China famously suffered through a “century of humiliation” at the hands of foreign powers. So did Iran — but its century lasted 200 years.
President Trump is now considering joining the long parade of outsiders who have crashed into Iran. He has deployed what he called an “armada” in surrounding waters. Its centerpiece is the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, which carries up to 90 fighter planes and is accompanied by three destroyers armed with guided missiles.
History serves a stark warning against violent intervention in Iran. Most previous interventions have ended badly, both for Iran and for the intervening power. This is an exceedingly difficult country to reshape from outside. Outrage at the bloody repression of recent weeks should not tempt Americans into what might well be a self-defeating attack on Iran.
For nearly all of the 19th century, when Iran was ruled by a weak and corrupt dynasty, rapacious foreign powers picked it apart. Britain sliced off Iran’s entire northeast and incorporated it into Afghanistan, which it controlled. Russia took the Caucasus. Iranians were also forced to accept humiliating “capitulations” that exempted foreigners from Iranian law.
Foreigners came to control much of Iranian life. British consortiums bought the exclusive right to establish banks, prospect for minerals, and run ferry service. Russia took the exclusive right to Iran’s caviar fisheries. In 1901 the regime sold a London-based financier the “special and exclusive privilege to obtain, exploit, develop, render suitable for trade, carry away and sell natural gas [and] petroleum … for a term of 60 years.” Then Britain and Russia signed an accord dividing Iran into three pieces. Russia controlled the north, Britain the south, and Iranians were left with a “neutral zone” in between.
In 1906, influenced by ideas of democracy emerging in Europe, Iranians exploded in revolution. A constitution was proclaimed, a Parliament was elected, and a new social and political order began taking shape. It ended abruptly when a Russian force bombed the Parliament building and executed leaders of the constitutionalist movement.
Iran was on the verge of disappearing as a nation when the archetypal man on horseback, a fiery tyrant who proclaimed himself Reza Shah, seized power in 1925. He launched a program of radical reform — even forbidding women to veil themselves. But he was never able to escape from the power of the British, who after tolerating him for 16 years finally deposed him.
Democracy reemerged after World War II. The elected government confronted the great injustice of Iran’s national life: Britain thrived on Iranian oil while most Iranians lived in misery. Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized Iran’s oil reserves, but in 1953 the American and British secret services organized a coup in which he was overthrown. This fateful intervention ended the only period of democracy Iran has ever known.
Until that moment, many Iranians idealized Americans as anticolonialists who had thrown off British rule, as they themselves wished to do. The coup destroyed that image. Half a century later, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright issued a semi-apology. “In 1953 the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran’s popular Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh,” she said. “It is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs. Moreover, during the next quarter-century, the United States and the West gave sustained backing to the Shah’s regime.”
The shah the Americans imposed after the 1953 coup, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was the son of the shah the British had deposed a decade earlier. During his increasingly repressive 25-year reign, the United States supported him lavishly. In 1979 he was overthrown in a popular uprising aimed in part at pulling Iran out of America’s orbit. Soon afterward, Iranian militants, fearing that the CIA would repeat its 1953 intervention and stage a coup to bring the shah back, took American diplomats hostage in what became a searing 444-day crisis. To this day, it shapes America’s perception of Iran as a barbaric enemy that deserves punishment.
Over the last 45 years, Iran has become one of the most sanctioned countries in history. Its economy has been devastated and its middle class has all but disappeared. American efforts to undermine the Islamic Republic, in partnership with Israel, have taken many forms. They partly explain the recent explosion of protest. “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets,” former CIA director Mike Pompeo tweeted. “Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them.”
The Islamic Republic is deeply rooted and could probably not be deposed even if decapitated in a Venezuela-style commando raid. Leaders of nearby countries fear that an American attack could send Iran into a civil war like those that have consumed Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
“Iran is ready to negotiate, but you need to find a way to negotiate in the right way,” Turkey’s foreign minister and former spy chief Hakan Fidan said recently. “If they feel cornered, they will prepare for the worst-case scenario.”
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
