How Mohammed Mossadegh’s Liberal Anti-Imperialism Collapsed
In the 1950s, Iran’s secular government nationalized its oil reserves as part of its anti-imperialist agenda. Its overthrow by the US and UK, enabled by Iranian business and religious elites, paved the way for the reactionary revolution that later replaced it.
An aristocratic constitutionalist, Iranian PM Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized oil but was fundamentally unwilling to build institutions of working-class power, leaving Iran’s new secular democracy vulnerable to the 1953 Western-orchestrated coup. (ullstein bild via Getty Images)
For the US government, violently imposing its will on the Iranian people is a generational tradition. The most consequential of those interventions took place in 1953, when US and UK intelligence overthrew Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh two years after his government nationalized oil reserves, previously under the monopoly of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC).
Mossadegh, a vector of anti-imperialist sentiment in a country long at the mercy of foreign powers, commanded broad support that encompassed both Marxist organizers and Shi’ite clerics alike. But when the pressures of a British-led embargo and Mossadegh’s plans to restructure the oil industry threatened the interests of Iran’s financial and religious establishment, the unity of the anti-imperial front soon crumbled, and Mossadegh’s refusal to empower a working-class mass movement sealed his government’s fate.
The Fracturing of a Broad Coalition
National fervor initially concealed the fragility of Mossadegh’s liberal-led coalition. He rose to power as the leader of the so-called National Front, a broad coalition of nationalist, pro-democracy, liberal, and socialist tendencies that mobilized for fair elections, freedom of the press, and the nationalization of Iran’s oil economy in the face of a British monopoly and Soviet encroachment. In the heady, patriotic years after its founding in 1949, the movement had been financed and supported by the bazaaris, Iran’s traditional merchant class, who expected nationalization to transfer the oil monopoly from the British into their own hands.
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