In the first chapter of his 1874 novel The Gilded Age, Mark Twain offered a telling observation about the connection between past and present: “History never repeats itself, but the… present often seems to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”Among the “antique legends” most helpful in understanding the likely outcome of the current U.S. intervention in Iran is the Suez Crisis of 1956, which I describe in my new book Cold War on Five Continents. After Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in July 1956, a joint British-French armada of six aircraft carriers destroyed Egypt’s air force, while Israeli troops smashed Egyptian tanks in the sands of the Sinai Peninsula. Within less than a week of war, Nasser had lost his strategic forces and Egypt seemed helpless before the overwhelming might of that massive imperial juggernaut.
But by the time Anglo-French forces came storming ashore at the north end of the Suez Canal, Nasser had executed a geopolitical masterstroke by sinking dozens of rusting ships filled with rocks at the canal’s northern entrance. In doing so, he automatically cut off Europe’s lifeline to its oil fields in the Persian Gulf. By the time British forces retreated in defeat from Suez, Britain had been sanctioned at the U.N., its currency was at the brink of collapse, its aura of imperial power had evaporated, and its global empire was heading for extinction.
Historians now refer to the phenomenon of a dying empire launching a desperate military intervention to recover its fading imperial glory as “micro-militarism.” And coming in the wake of imperial Washington’s receding influence over the broad Eurasian land mass, the recent U.S. military assault on Iran is starting to look like an American version of just such micro-militarism.
Even if history never truly repeats itself, right now it seems all too appropriate to wonder whether the current U.S. intervention in Iran might indeed be America’s version of the Suez Crisis. And should Washington’s attempt at regime change in Tehran somehow “succeed,” don’t for a second think that the result will be a successfully stable new government that will be able to serve its people well.
70 Years of Regime Change
Let’s return to the historical record to uncover the likely consequences of regime change in Iran. Over the past 70 years, Washington has made repeated attempts at regime change across the span of five continents — initially via CIA covert action during the 44 years of the Cold War and, in the decades since the end of that global conflict, through conventional military operations. Although the methods have changed, the results — plunging the affected societies into decades of searing social conflict and incessant political instability — have been sadly similar. This pattern can be seen in a few of the CIA’s most famous covert interventions during the Cold War.
In 1953, Iran’s new parliament decided to nationalize the British imperial oil concession there to fund social services for its emerging democracy. In response, a joint CIA-MI6 coup ousted the reformist prime minister and installed the son of the long-deposed former Shah in power. Unfortunately for the Iranian people, he proved to be a strikingly inept leader who transformed his country’s oil wealth into mass poverty — thereby precipitating Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.
By 1954, Guatemala was implementing an historic land reform program that was investing its mostly Mayan indigenous population with the requisites for full citizenship. Unfortunately, a CIA-sponsored invasion installed a brutal military dictatorship, plunging the country into 30 years of civil war that left 200,000 people dead in a population of only five million.
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