Iranian jurist, member of the Majlis, and prime minister from April 1951 to August 1953. Mosaddegh presided over the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC, later BP), passed by both houses of the Iranian parliament in 1951 on the arithmetic that AIOC paid Iran only about 16 percent of profits and that the British government received more in taxes from AIOC than Iran received in royalties. Anglo-Iranian’s own profit in 1950 alone exceeded the total royalties it had paid Iran over the previous half century. Mosaddegh’s government sought to audit AIOC’s books. The company refused. Britain rejected a 50-50 split and organized a global boycott of Iranian oil.
Mosaddegh was overthrown on 19 August 1953 in a coup jointly organized by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (cryptonym TPAJAX, popularly Operation Ajax) and the British Secret Intelligence Service (Operation Boot), led on the ground by General Fazlollah Zahedi and coordinated with CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt Jr. The Central Intelligence Agency officially acknowledged its role in August 2013 through documents released to the George Washington University National Security Archive. The coup restored the Shah, returned Iranian oil to a Western consortium in which United States companies now shared, and installed an autocracy that lasted until the 1979 revolution.
Mosaddegh belongs on this list because his defeat is the clearest twentieth-century case of retention logic being reversed by external state action rather than by persuasion. Iranian sovereign control over the country’s principal resource was materially reasonable, legally enacted, and financially defensible. It was defeated by covert intervention because it ran against the throughput order’s demand for open access to peripheral resources. The mechanism of defeat, rather than the merits of the policy, is what the S-Curve Thesis rests on.
Related pages
Sources
- Chang, H. J. (2002). Kicking Away the Ladder
Provenance
Extracted from Section 2, Cluster B of the Research Brief: The S-Curve Thesis. Coup acknowledgment documented by the National Security Archive (2013).