How Western leaders shattered Iran — and why the 2026 war cannot be understood without 1953 and 1979
An investigative essay – by Andreas Manousos
German Version
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2 March 2026 – 13:30
This report draws a strict line between documented facts, contemporary interpretations, and investigative conclusions. Claims from the ongoing propaganda war that could not be reliably verified as of the cut-off date are not treated as fact. That is the point: the report is not meant to serve the next camp, but to peel back the layers of a historical crime — and of a new war that cannot be understood without its prehistory.
The first air strike of this war was launched in 1953. Anyone who looks at Iran only through the rubble of Tehran, the rocket sirens of Haifa, the jittery tanker alerts from the Persian Gulf, and the frantic emergency sessions in New York is watching only the top floor of a building burn — a building whose foundations were undermined decades ago.
That does not make the present either harmless or excusable. Today’s Iran is no innocent victim. The Islamic Republic is a system of security apparatus, Revolutionary Guards, revolutionary courts, torture, executions, and a political theology that understands the state not as service to the citizen but as an instrument of rule. Anyone who downplays that lies to the dead of Evin, Khavaran, and the public gallows. But anyone who pretends this regime sprang from a historical void — or that the West had nothing to do with the problem’s birth — lies as well.
The truth is harsher, and messier. Modern Iran was not merely a distant oriental backdrop where fanatical clerics suddenly appeared out of nowhere. It was a country with an early constitutional tradition, parliamentary experience, legal thinking, an urban public sphere, secular elites, and a strong impulse to link modernity with national sovereignty. It was no perfect democracy, no idyllic showcase, and no liberal Switzerland on the Caspian. But by the standards of its region it was a serious political project — and at times one of the Middle East’s few genuine constitutional hopes.
Then the strategists arrived: first London and Washington, unwilling to accept a democratically legitimized nationalization of oil resources. Then Western rearmament of a monarchy that modernized, even as it suffocated the country’s political oxygen. Then the pivotal moment of 1978–79, when leading Western statesmen — out of weakness, calculation, illusion, and foreign-policy fatigue — realized the Shah might fall, yet had no serious answer to the question of who would take his place. The one large, organized force left standing was the clergy. The vacuum was not filled by democracy. It filled with turbans, revolutionary courts, and ropes.
The 2026 war has not ended this history; it has ripped it open. Since 28 February the United States and Israel have been conducting major strikes on Iran; Ali Khamenei is dead; Washington spoke of a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” and, internally, of a “high-risk, high-reward” scenario; and yet the Pentagon had to concede to Congress that it had no intelligence indicating Iran had planned to strike U.S. forces first. At the same time the nuclear question is more real, more dangerous, and more serious than yesterday’s Western apologists and today’s propagandists on either side want to admit: Iran has amassed alarming stockpiles of highly enriched uranium; the IAEA has warned for years; but reports and Western intelligence assessments do not show the same certainty that political war speeches suggest.
The result is a double fog. One fog rises from Tehran, which uses the myth of the besieged “resistance state” to cover its own mass graves. The other comes from Western capitals that sell the war as necessary self-defense, while preferring not to discuss how deeply Western responsibility has cut into this country’s history. Between these two fogs stands the Iranian citizen — first robbed of a national development, then oppressed by a religious power-state, now once again the object of a geopolitical operation whose outcome is unknown.
This report therefore tells the story in two movements. First, the essential narrative: Iran as an early constitutional nation; the 1953 coup; the Shah between modernization and repression; the abandonment of the old regime in 1979; the bloody character of the Islamic Republic; and the 2026 war. Then the deeper background analysis: the specific political responsibilities; the weaknesses of the Western case for war; the role of China, Russia, and BRICS; the strategic importance of the Strait of Hormuz; and the situation of third states — from Cyprus to Pakistan.
Those looking for a single culprit will be disappointed: there are several. Those looking for a single camp will be disappointed as well. Iran’s historical truth is not a slogan. It is an indictment in multiple counts.
PART I – THE ESSENTIAL REPORT
1. Iran, before it broke
The starting point of this story is almost always set wrongly in Western debates. It usually begins with the Shah as a pro-Western monarch — or with Khomeini as a dark man of God. Both are too late. The deeper beginning lies in Iran’s constitutional experience. The Constitutional Revolution of 1905 to 1911 forced a parliament and a constitutional monarchy on Persia. Iran thus became one of Asia’s earliest constitutional states. Ministers were to be accountable to the Majles; the Majles was to be able to bring down ministers; the monarchy was no longer to be mere personal rule, but translated into law.
That sounds sober today, but for the region it was revolutionary. A country that Western hindsight too often treats as a passive object of foreign powers developed early its own political vocabulary of law, constitution, responsibility, press, and sovereignty. That memory matters, because it punctures the later myth that political Iran could choose only between monarchy and mullahs. No: there was a third line. It was called the constitutional nation-state.
That line gained historical force once again under Mohammad Mossadegh. Mossadegh was no Islamist demagogue, no Soviet proxy, and no anti-Western irrationalist. He was a nationalist in the literal sense: someone who wanted the country’s wealth to serve the country. He stood for constitutional democracy with a limited monarchy, and for the nationalization of oil after the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company refused Iran a fair share. The project was political, economic, and symbolic at once. It was not only about revenue. It was about dignity.
Here the word “pearl” takes on its real meaning. Iran in the early 1950s was no romantic fairy tale, but it possessed something many neighbors did not: a serious blend of political pluralism, national self-assertion, and social modernity. It had urban milieus, universities, political debate, a constitutional tradition — and, perhaps most important, the historical idea that the state need not be identical with naked arbitrariness.
Even the later Pahlavi period did not, at first, wholly extinguish this modernizing side. Economic programs, infrastructure projects, literacy and health corps, industrialization, and the greater inclusion of women in education and parts of working life were real developments. Anyone who denies that becomes a propagandist too. Pre-1979 Iran was by no means a purely backward space politicized only by the Islamic Republic. The opposite is closer to the truth: the country had long been arguing over what modern sovereignty should look like — aligned with the West or nationally controlled, monarchically led or parliamentarily constrained, religiously traditional or secular. That very uncertainty made it alive. And vulnerable.
Because where a country is politically alive, it can also be politically destroyed. The West’s tragedy in Iran is not that London and Washington stumbled upon an already finished theocracy. It is that they helped smash the strongest secular, constitutional alternative — and later watched as clerical absolutism took its place. Iran was not, by nature, destined to be ruled by turbans. It was pushed in that direction: first by intervention, then by misjudgment, finally by war.
2. 1953: The Original Sin – Operation Ajax and the Political Perpetrators
The overthrow of Mossadegh is no side episode, no Cold War footnote, and no detail for university seminars. It is the original sin of modern Western Iran policy. Anyone who relativizes this episode understands neither the depth of Iranian distrust nor the moral vulnerability of the Western position in the Middle East.
The facts are no longer seriously in dispute. Declassified U.S. documents, the publications of the National Security Archive, and the official Foreign Relations documentation of the United States show: Operation TPAJAX was planned in Washington and carried out with British involvement. The CIA played a central operational role. Britain had been pressing for Mossadegh’s removal for some time. The British side wanted to reverse the nationalization of the oil industry, or at least neutralize it through a change of power. The United States joined in under Dwight D. Eisenhower; under Harry Truman, Washington had not yet signed on to Britain’s coup course.
Names must be named. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Republican, President of the United States. John Foster Dulles, Republican, Secretary of State. Allen Dulles, also a Republican and, as CIA Director, one of the operation’s key figures. On the British side, Winston Churchill of the Conservative Party, along with the foreign-policy and intelligence establishment that treated Mossadegh not as a legitimate negotiating partner but as an obstacle. It was not faceless apparatus alone. It was specific men in specific offices.
Their political responsibility differs in degree, not in kind. Eisenhower gave the course presidential cover. John Foster Dulles supplied the foreign-policy hardness that turned a dispute over sovereignty and resources into a strategic threat. Allen Dulles embodied the intelligence-service hubris of the era: if an elected prime minister stands in the way of Western interests, he is removed covertly. Churchill, in turn, personified the British imperial sentiment that saw the nationalization of Iranian oil as an outrage—not as the exercise of national sovereignty.
Was it all about oil? No. Was it also about oil? Absolutely. British interests in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company were central. At the same time the Cold War was used as an argumentative accelerator. Mossadegh was not overthrown because he was a communist proxy; the sources provide no serious basis for that. He was overthrown because a successful Iranian nationalization, and an independent, constitutionally legitimized policy, would have been a dangerous example—for Iran and beyond. Oil, the power of example, geopolitical control, and anti-communist rhetoric converged here.
One more point is decisive: the coup was not merely a change of government. It was a pedagogical catastrophe. Millions of Iranians learned that parliament, government, and national self-assertion are tolerated only as long as they do not truly touch the structure of Western interests. The belief that constitutional politics could hold in a crisis was destroyed. From then on, every later anti-Western demagogy possessed a hard historical core it could invoke.
That is also where the party-political finding lies. In Washington the Republican administration acted with strong backing from the anti-communist establishment. No significant intra-party revolt against Mossadegh’s overthrow is visible. The broader U.S. political class of the time was indeed trapped in Cold War thinking across parties; but the decisive step into active coup politics was taken under Republican leadership. Anyone who wants to name the genealogical guilt cannot bypass Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers.
The outcome was, in the short term, a success for power politics and, in the long term, a disaster. The Shah returned strengthened. Mossadegh was neutralized. But in place of a difficult, democratically legitimized nationalist came no stable order—only a monarchy that drew its legitimacy increasingly from repression, secret police, and foreign backing. The coup did not solve the “Iran problem”. It created it, in its modern form.
3. The Shah: Modernization outwardly, suffocation inwardly
Anyone who tells Iran’s story only as Western victimhood misses the second half of the truth. After 1953 it was no longer only Washington or London that deformed the country. The Shah and his order did their share as well—substantially so.
Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi presided over a country that did, in fact, modernize. That is not a side issue. The “White Revolution” stood for land reform, infrastructure, literacy, health programs, and an ambitious expansion of industry and administration. Iran was not pushed back into pre-modernity; in many respects it was accelerated. Roads, dams, airports, industrial plants, universities, a growing urban middle class—all of this was real. Women’s position in public life, education, and parts of the professional world likewise set Iran apart from many neighboring states.
That is precisely why the later destruction is so tragic. Modernization is not the same as freedom—and the Shah increasingly confused the two. The political order narrowed; spaces for opposition were cleared away; criticism was not integrated but surveilled. SAVAK—the notorious secret police—became synonymous with a system that mistook stability for intimidation. Autocracy, corruption, unequal distribution of oil wealth, forced Westernization without adequate political opening, and the brutal suppression of dissent ate away at the project’s legitimacy from within.
There lay the Shah’s fatal contradiction. His regime generated the social, technical, and cultural modernity of a new Iran, but denied that new Iran political representation. It created an educated society and treated it as a security problem. It built up a state and withered the political nation. Rule like that does not produce calm; it produces pent-up eruption.
That failure does not absolve the West; it does explain why Pahlavi rule became so fragile in the end. Without the 1953 coup the Shah would hardly have been secured in this form. Without the regime’s own mistakes, the revolution might still not have come with such force. Both belong together. A system buttressed from outside yet dried out politically on the inside often falls not to the most reasonable force, but to the best organized.
In hindsight, Jimmy Carter’s famous toast of 31 December 1977 in Tehran is especially bitter. Carter praised Iran as an “island of stability” in a turbulent region. The sentence is historically embarrassing not because it was only slightly off, but because it condenses the underlying problem: the West saw the Shah primarily in terms of function, order, alliance reliability, and strategic dependability. What was fermenting beneath the surface was understood too late, and too poorly.
To this day the Shah sits between two distorted memories. In one, he was merely a Western satrap and tyrant; in the other, an almost lost golden monarch under whom everything was fine. Neither is adequate. Truer is this: he stood at the head of a major—and in parts impressive—modernization project, and he destroyed part of his own chances because he did not take political opening, institutional self-restraint, and social balance seriously enough. He made Iran more modern, but not freer. And so his regime became vulnerable at the very moment Western backing began to waver.
4. 1978/79: When the West abandoned the Shah — and underestimated the clergy
A great deal of nonsense is told about 1979. One side claims the West deliberately installed Khomeini. The other claims the West had almost nothing to do with his rise. Neither withstands sober scrutiny.
The archival reality is more complicated—and precisely for that reason more accusatory. By late 1978 it was already clear in the Western power center that the Shah was wobbling politically. Washington oscillated between propping him up and orchestrating a handover, between toughness and exit, between fear of chaos and underestimating the clergy. The Carter administration was far from unified. Zbigniew Brzezinski leaned toward harder options; others looked for a form of transition. But the decisive point is not whether everyone in the White House saw everything the same way. It is that the United States and its key partners developed no viable non-clerical succession strategy.
The Guadeloupe conference in early January 1979 is therefore neither a mere myth nor a mysterious act of omnipotence. President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat; Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of the SPD; President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing of the UDF/center-right; Prime Minister James Callaghan of Labour—all met and spoke about Iran. By the available reconstructions, Iran was not the only topic, but the judgment was bleak: within the small circle of Western leaders, the Shah was seen as largely finished. Carter later noted himself that he found little support for the Shah among the other three; later reconstructions from his notes indicate that the others were, in essence, of the view that the Shah should go as soon as possible.
In Germany Helmut Schmidt is still often celebrated as the archetypal statesman: cool, sober, crisis-proof—the great helmsman of the Federal Republic. That is precisely why a second look is warranted here. For the posthumously gilded Schmidt belonged to the innermost Western circle that wrote the Shah off politically without possessing any realistic safeguard against a clerical takeover. That does not mean Schmidt “installed the mullahs”. But it does mean this: his later aura as a sovereign crisis manager collides with the hard fact that, in 1979, he was among the Western leaders who accepted the old regime’s fall without truly thinking through the strategic consequence. Anyone who celebrates him only as a great realist pushes Guadeloupe out of view.
Jimmy Carter, too, cannot be released from this balance sheet. His Iran legacy is a double burden. First he still carried the old alliance, spoke of stability, and held to the strategic relationship with the Shah. When the regime then tipped, his administration swung into a policy of uncertainty. Contacts with the Khomeini camp and efforts to avoid collapse or a military coup are documented; the interpretation of those contacts is disputed, but the direction is clear: Washington tried to manage the transition, not to crush the clergy politically. That was understandable as crisis diplomacy, but historically fatal.
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, in turn, allowed Khomeini to operate from French soil as a global revolutionary transmitter. The decision had its own logic; Paris did not necessarily want to make him ruler. Yet, objectively, France gave the exile the stage from which he could beam cassettes, messages, and the aura of an alternative center back into Iran. Here, too, the rule applies: perhaps not malicious, but consequential.
The party-political backing in 1979 was more diffuse than in 1953, but no less consequential for that. Carter did not act against a rebellious Democratic Party; rather, his course reflected a broader foreign-policy milieu that saw the Shah as spent and did not recognize Khomeinism as an immediate existential threat. Schmidt, meanwhile, acted as chancellor of an SPD–FDP coalition without any documented internal party counter-front becoming visible. This is not an accusation about formal party congress resolutions; it is a political one: leading Western elites wrote an old regime off without grasping the character of the order that was coming.
Here lies the core of the guilt—not in a simple fairy tale that the West deliberately ordered an execution regime as if from a catalog, but in the fact that specific politicians treated a collapsing system with strategic fatigue, misperception, and short-term crisis calculation, without taking seriously the only force that could ultimately fill the power vacuum. The result was not the hoped-for opening, but the Islamic Republic.
And from the very first moment that republic stamped its signature: not as a transitional government, not as a misguided movement of piety, but as an apparatus of rule that fused revolutionary legitimacy with a willingness to kill.
5. The Republic of the Gallows
There is a Western reflex that opens every new chapter of the Iran crisis with the question of how one should “deal” with Tehran. That reflex often obscures the plainest, most brutal fact: the Islamic Republic is, above all, a regime founded, consolidated, and defended against its own people.
In the first years after 1979, a wave of executions, revolutionary courts, and purges set in, decimating the country’s political landscape. Amnesty documented early on that, since the proclamation of the Islamic Republic, many thousands of prisoners have been executed; between July 1988 and January 1989 alone, the organization recorded more than 2,500 executions. A UN Special Rapporteur later characterized the crimes of 1981/82 and 1988 as “atrocity crimes”—crimes of a category far beyond ordinary repression. Thousands of political opponents disappeared in a state whose institutional DNA was built from impunity, ideological persecution, and the negation of the rule of law.
Anyone who fails to see the long shadows of this history will not understand the present either. Today’s Islamic Republic is not merely authoritarian. It is the continuation of a power model that draws its stability from systematic violence. In 2025, according to Amnesty, more than 1,000 people were executed—the highest annual figure Amnesty has recorded in at least 15 years. Human Rights Watch and the United Nations warned of an unbroken execution wave. AP, citing a UN report, wrote that at least 975 people were executed in 2024; Iran carried out death sentences by hanging, four of them in public.
The symbolism of public hanging, in particular, shows what this system thinks of politics. Reuters documented as early as 2023 how the bodies of executed protesters were displayed on cranes. The case of Majid Reza Rahnavard—hanged publicly from a crane in Mashhad—stands for a message the regime inscribes into the urban landscape: the state does not only want to kill. It wants to be seen killing.
One must be equally rigorous about the latest protest wave. Donald Trump spoke of 32,000 protesters killed within a few months. Reuters explicitly noted that this figure could not be verified. That is precisely why precision matters here. In a comprehensive report on the first fifty days of nationwide protests since late December 2025, HRANA documented 7,007 confirmed deaths; a further 11,744 cases were still under review. Among the confirmed dead, HRANA counted 6,488 protesters killed, 236 children killed, 76 civilians killed outside the protest spectrum, and 207 deaths on the military/government side. Even these confirmed numbers are horrifying enough. They need no propaganda inflation to make the crime visible.
One must be just as precise about the death penalty in recent weeks. What is solidly documented is this: on 20 February 2026, Amnesty reported that at least eight people had already been sentenced to death after the January protests, and that at least 22 others were in immediate danger of death sentences—at least 30 people in total, including minors or young adults, in expedited and grossly unfair proceedings. Reuters reported in late February on the first death sentence directly linked to the January unrest. The regime is thus moving once again toward its familiar logic: fast-track trials, confessions extracted under torture, death sentences as a political weapon.
At this point a comfortable illusion breaks—an illusion popular both in the West and in anti-Western camps. One illusion says the regime is, at its core, merely a reaction to Western hostility. False. It has long been an autonomous producer of terror against its own population. The other illusion says that if the West simply projects enough strength, the regime will almost automatically collapse. Also false. Systems built over decades on violence, patronage, the Revolutionary Guards, and religiously grounded state loyalty do not fall simply because of an air strike on a command bunker.
Iran in 2026 is therefore a double battlefield: militarily on the outside, existentially on the inside. The crane from which an opponent hangs and the missile heading for a base belong to the same story—but not to the same responsibility. The Islamic leadership cannot hide behind 1953 when, in 2026, it throws teenagers into show trials. And the West cannot hide behind 2026 when it conceals its historical co-responsibility for destroying the secular alternative.
6. 2026: The War — Justifications, Contradictions, Naked Interests
On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel opened the heaviest direct blow against Iran in decades with massive strikes. Reuters, AP, The Washington Post, and Al Jazeera reported the start of the operation; according to Reuters, the Pentagon referred to “Operation Epic Fury”. In the first days of the war, Ali Khamenei was killed. Reuters also reported that the operation was brought forward in time so that it hit a meeting of Khamenei with his inner circle. The target was not merely infrastructure. The target was—so far as the sources allow—also leadership.
The official American justification rested on several pillars: Iran must not have a nuclear weapon; its missile program must be contained; threats against the United States and its allies must be neutralized; Iranian violence against demonstrators must be punished; and, at the end, a regime-change motive shimmered through, openly or half-openly. Trump himself called on Iranians to take over their government. Reuters also reported from inside the decision-making that Trump was briefed in advance on a “high-risk, high-reward” scenario described as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” for change in the region.
Precisely for that reason, the report must read against the current of both camps at this point. First: the nuclear problem is real. In 2025 and 2026 the IAEA reported alarming stockpiles of uranium enriched up to 60%. At the end of February 2026 the agency estimated the stockpile—before the attacks of the previous year—at 440.9 kilograms, enough, if further enriched, for ten nuclear weapons by the IAEA’s yardstick. The IAEA and Western governments have long emphasized that there is no credible civilian justification for enrichment at that level. Anyone who claims the West simply invented the nuclear concern is arguing past the facts.
Second: a real concern does not automatically make every case for war true. Reuters reported on 2 March that Pentagon officials had conceded in confidential briefings to Congress that they had seen no intelligence indicating Iran planned to strike U.S. forces first. That undercuts the dramatic public rhetoric of an imminent, pre-emptive strike against America. Reuters also reported that Trump had presented no evidence that Iran would soon possess missiles capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. That discrepancy is not trivial. It is the difference between a demonstrable threat and political dramatization.
Third: diplomacy was not dead. As late as 24 and 26 February, Reuters reported on talks in Geneva and on serious—if inconclusive—signs of progress. Oman spoke of progress; Iran said an agreement was within reach if diplomacy were given priority. There was no breakthrough. But the claim that war was the only door left open cannot be sustained on that basis.
Fourth: war rhetoric often blends everything—nuclear issues, missiles, proxies, protest repression, regime change—into a single moral package. That is politically effective, but analytically dishonest. A regime can be murderous at home and still not be demonstrably planning an immediate first strike on U.S. forces. It can be nuclear-problematic and still not meet the precise scenario political speeches claim. It can be strategically dangerous and still not be fought by filling justificatory gaps with pathos.
The result of this conflation is a war read in the West as a security operation, in Tehran as a neo-colonial decapitation strike, in Moscow and Beijing as an escalation in breach of international law, in parts of Europe as a morally ambivalent moment, and in much of the Global South as yet another proof of Western double standards. Nothing about it is clean. But one thing is clear: the 2026 war is not only military action. It is also a battle over the narrative.
That is precisely why one should not lose sight of the legitimacy problem. A state that overthrew a democratically legitimized Iranian government in 1953, underestimated the weight of clerical power in 1979, later condemned the Shah’s regime morally without seriously working through its own role, and in 2026 once again sells war on arguments that are, in places, thinner than the speeches suggest—such a state never speaks only about Iran. It always speaks about itself as well. And it often polishes the story in the process.
PART II – BACKGROUND ANALYSIS
7. The political decision-makers: names, parties, support
Anyone who seriously investigates the story of Iran’s collapse cannot work with abstract formulas. “The West” is too convenient. Responsibility is carried by governments, decided by individual politicians, covered by parties, executed by bureaucracies, and morally framed by leading media. The Iranian case is a textbook example.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, bears ultimate political responsibility as U.S. president for the 1953 coup. Without his assent, Operation Ajax would not have happened. The Republican administration thereby adopted precisely the policy Harry S. Truman had previously resisted. The shift was not marginal; it was fundamental: a dispute over national sovereignty and oil revenue was recast, under Eisenhower, as a case of global containment. Eisenhower was not acting against his party, but in line with the anti-communist consensus of his era. Support within his government was strong, and support within the national-security establishment stronger still. The fact that Mossadegh was not a Soviet proxy but an Iranian nationalist with parliamentary legitimacy was pushed aside politically. The lie was useful, so it became raison d’état.
John Foster Dulles, a Republican and Secretary of State, was not merely an executor but an ideological hard-liner. He translated economic interests and British pressure into the language of the Cold War. His brother Allen Dulles, CIA Director, turned that political intent into an operational program: disinformation, bribery, street mobilization, influence over the military and the court. This was not foreign policy with dirty edges. It was the state-organized destruction of a constitutional-national alternative. The Dulles brothers were not operating in a party-political no-man’s land. They embodied a Republican fusion of anti-communism, strategic instinct, and willingness to sacrifice democratic procedures on the periphery when resources, prestige, and alliance systems were at stake.
On the British side, Winston Churchill—a Conservative—belongs in the same dock of history. London had escalated the conflict over the nationalization of Iranian oil and systematically sought support in Washington for Mossadegh’s removal. In German-language debates the British role is often told too small, even though the archival record is clear: the impulse came not only from Washington but also from London. Churchill acted with the backing of a conservative establishment unwilling to accept the loss of old imperial privileges. Iranian voter intent counted for almost nothing next to the question of who controlled oil and access rights.
Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, stands on a different level of responsibility. The 1953 coup cannot be laid at his door; the political blindness of 1978/79 can. In 1977 Carter publicly praised Iran as an “island of stability”. When the Shah’s regime began to sway, Washington slipped into a mode of simultaneous hesitation and letting go. Carter and his circle sought distance from the Shah without securing a viable non-clerical alternative. Carter’s historical guilt is not that he deliberately “installed” Khomeini; the reliable record does not provide clean proof of that. His guilt lies in a strategic underestimation of the clergy, a misreading of the balance of forces, and a willingness to drop a long-supported ally without grasping the force of the emerging power vacuum. Carter did not have support everywhere for this course, but he did have it in large parts of his administration and within a Western alliance circle that, by January 1979, had effectively written the Shah off.
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the French president of the center-right UDF, belongs to this circle as well. That Khomeini could operate from French soil was politically consequential. Paris saw itself as a stage, a diplomatic transit point—not as the midwife of a theocracy. But that very misrecognition is part of the responsibility. Politics is accountable not only for what it intends, but also for what it enables through gross negligence. When a revolutionary cleric topples a regime from European exile soil and the host power draws no strategic consequences, that is not merely a historical footnote; it is a form of political facilitation.
Helmut Schmidt, a Social Democrat, must be examined more sharply than German memory culture usually allows. Posthumously, many Germans regard him as the epitome of the sober statesman. Yet in the Iran chapter, his name also stands among the Western leadership that inwardly bid farewell to the Shah at Guadeloupe. The fair, defensible formulation is not that Schmidt consciously planned mullah rule. But it is that Schmidt was among the leading Western politicians who treated the old regime’s fall as largely decided without securing a viable liberal successor option; and he shared a realism that put stability management above political depth. Party-political backing for this was high—not in the sense of an explicit SPD resolution to “mullah-ize” Iran, but in the sense of a broad West German elite consensus that viewed the Shah as a problem case and fundamentally underestimated the revolutionary dynamics.
This point matters especially for German readers. Anyone who remembers Schmidt only as crisis chancellor, NATO strategist, and Hanseatic voice of reason is remembering too little. The Iran chapter does not destroy everything in his biography. But it does scratch the lacquer of the impeccable statesman, plainly. Truth-seeking means reading icons against the sources—not against the cult.
The parties, in turn, contributed each in their own way. The Republicans of the Eisenhower years created the structural original sin: overthrowing a legitimate, constitution-bound leadership in the name of geopolitical usefulness. The Democrats of the Carter years share responsibility for misreading the revolutionary moment and for the consequential underestimation of the clergy. West Germany’s SPD shares responsibility because, at the decisive moment, it was part of a Western steering circle that no longer read Iran as a society with competing visions of the future, but as a problem of damage limitation. The balance sheet is therefore this: different parties, different motives, one common result—the path was first smashed, then cleared, then handed to the wrong force.
8. What Washington says today — and what Washington would rather not remember
The current war is justified in Washington as a response to nuclear danger, missile threats, regional destabilization, and the regime’s human-rights crimes. Some of that rests on real problems. Iran has accumulated highly enriched uranium on a scale for which there is no convincing civilian explanation. The regime has massacred, tortured, executed, and terrorized its own population. Anyone who denies that is not arguing investigatively but propagandistically. And yet this is precisely where the decisive question must be asked: why do American speeches of justification so rarely include America’s own historical co-responsibility?
The reason lies less in day-to-day party politics than in an institutional need of the United States to preserve the face of the presidency. U.S. foreign policy can get away with many things domestically—military gambles, rhetorical escalations, regime change abroad—but it can hardly afford to tell its great historical lines openly as a series of fateful misjudgments. To say publicly that a Republican president toppled a democracy in 1953 and a Democratic president misread the depth of the coming theocracy in 1979 is not only to attack individual predecessors. It is to attack the moral narrative of American power.
This is where Donald Trump becomes interesting. Trump accuses Joe Biden at every opportunity on domestic politics, Ukraine, and almost every field of the day. That is exactly what makes his silence about Eisenhower, Carter, or the long arc of American Iran policy so revealing. It does not automatically prove a secret deal. But it does suggest that there is a presidential “protected zone” of history: if you want to preserve the office, you do not dismantle the office’s legend too thoroughly. Trump can attack Biden without damaging the institution. If he were to name openly the line from 1953 through 1979 to 2026 as American co-responsibility, he would be striking the foundations of the United States’ foreign-policy self-description.
For the present, Reuters supplied a revealing—almost self-exposing—tension. On the one hand, the operation was presented as a necessary strike against danger and escalation. On the other, Reuters reported on 2 March 2026 from congressional briefings that the Pentagon had seen no indications Iran was planning an immediate first strike on U.S. forces. That makes a central element of classic pre-emption rhetoric collapse. The logic shifts: away from acute self-defense and toward strategic forward defense, opportunity politics, demonstrations of deterrence, and an attempt to rewrite the regional balance of power. That shift may be militarily debatable. But it is something other than the morally clear self-defense the public is so often sold.
There is also the timing. Reuters reported that the Geneva talks and Oman’s mediation efforts were not completely dead a few days before the attack. That does not mean diplomacy would certainly have worked. But it does mean the decision for war fell into a window in which negotiation channels still existed. The closer one zooms into that fact, the clearer it becomes: the operation was not merely a reaction to the last minute. It was also a deliberate decision to close a negotiating window in favor of military shock.
The real taboo, therefore, is not “was Iran dangerous?”, but “what story do the United States tell themselves in order to cut their own role out of the story?” Washington readily names Iran’s nuclear program, but rarely the 1953 coup. Washington denounces Iran’s violence against demonstrators, but rarely the long Western practice of supporting authoritarian partners as long as they are useful. Washington speaks of stability, but is reluctant to discuss how often Western policy in the Middle East created the preconditions of later instability.
None of this absolves Tehran by a millimeter. The Islamic Republic is not merely the victim of Western intrigue; it is the author of its own crimes. It needs no Western order for its torture basements, no foreign command for its cranes, and no CIA for its death sentences. But investigative duty is to make both levels visible at once: the regime’s crime and the historical chain that helped create the space in which that regime could arise.
In today’s political communication, this double perspective is systematically split. Pointing to Western co-responsibility quickly brands one as an apologist for the regime; taking the mullahs at their word, in the other camp, instantly brands one as a megaphone for Western war rhetoric. That way of thinking is intellectually barren and journalistically useless. The truth is harder: Iran was damaged by Western power politics, and it has been destroyed for decades by its own clerical power. The 2026 war will be intelligible only if both can stand in a single sentence.
The Guadeloupe File — a decision without an alternative
To understand why the years 1978/79 must be read not only as an Iranian revolution from within, but also as a Western failure, there is no way around Guadeloupe. In early January 1979, Jimmy Carter, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, James Callaghan, and Helmut Schmidt met on the Caribbean island. The meeting itself has often been myth-loaded—as if, in a secret cabal, a mullah regime were designed there to a blueprint. It is not that simple. But the counter-lie—that Guadeloupe was merely a meaningless summit ritual—also does not survive a closer look.
Guadeloupe concentrates a form of political responsibility that official memory likes to blur: responsibility not for what was consciously intended, but for consequential omission. Archival indications and later reconstructions suggest that the Western leaders largely regarded the Shah as no longer sustainable. Carter later wrote that he had seen very little support for the Shah among the other participants. According to reconstructions by the Middle East Institute, the others were, in essence, agreed that the Shah had to leave the country. This is not a small thing. It is the moment when long-standing support turns into a strategic write-off.
Helmut Schmidt plays a particularly uncomfortable role in this scene for German memory. Germany likes to tell Schmidt as a sober realist, a man of clear sight, a chancellor who did not romanticize crises but worked through them. In the Iran case, however, “realism” meant something deeply ambiguous. It did not mean that Schmidt recognized the clerical danger with special sharpness and took precautions against it. Rather, it meant that in Bonn, too, the overriding question became how to manage an apparently dying regime in an orderly way—not how a liberal alternative could be secured. The error was not sentimental weakness, but cold truncation. Iran was read as a management problem of a failing order, not as a struggle over the social future of a highly politicized country.
Carter, for his part, acted under double pressure. The human-rights rhetoric of his presidency had already changed the relationship with the Shah; at the same time, fear grew in Washington of chaos, civil war, a military coup, or a gain for Moscow. But that complexity does not exonerate; it creates a different form of responsibility. Anyone who works closely with a regime for decades does not bear responsibility for its collapse only when he actively engineers its fall. He bears it already when, in the moment of dissolution, he no longer has a clear, robust strategy and oscillates between distance, pressure, hesitation, and improvisation.
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and James Callaghan fit the same picture. France provided the place from which Khomeini could operate; Britain came from a long history of imperial entanglement and saw Iran, too, through the lens of stability, energy, and bloc logic. None of the four officially wanted a theocratic dictatorship. But none developed a serious protective architecture for those forces that represented neither the collapsing court state nor clerical totalism. The secular center—liberal nationalists, constitutionalist forces, parts of the technocracy, and other non-clerical milieus—were not treated in that phase with the weight their historical significance warranted.
This is where the sentence must be formulated—journalistically clean and politically sharp at once: Guadeloupe was not the birth hour of mullah rule, but a node of Western responsibility for the vacuum into which that rule could move. It is the difference between active installation and negligent clearance. That difference matters—legally, historically, intellectually. But it does not absolve those involved. For anyone who writes off an existing order without understanding the forces that will dominate the space being freed is not acting neutrally. He is acting blindly toward consequences.
That this consequence-blindness was later softened belongs to the second layer of the problem. The political write-off of the Shah was later recast in Western narratives as a kind of necessity: one could not have known better; the revolution was unstoppable; Khomeini’s real intentions were visible to no one. Such sentences contain grains of truth, but they often function as moral whitewash. For the West did know that the situation was highly explosive, that the court was collapsing, that the clergy had mobilizing power, and that an uncontrolled transition carried enormous risks. What was missing was not all information. What was missing was the willingness to make a non-clerical future a strategic goal at all.
For Helmut Schmidt and the SPD this is particularly sensitive, because German debates have traditionally underestimated Germany’s own role in Iran. In many retrospectives, the Federal Republic appears only as a spectator to American or British decisions. That is too short. Bonn was part of the Western leadership circle. Schmidt was not an extra; he was a participant in the round in which political reality was not only discussed but framed. That is precisely why one must say: Social Democracy does not bear the original guilt of 1953, but it does share responsibility for the lack of strategic clarity in 1979—not as a secret “mullah party”, but as part of a Western establishment that accepted the end of the monarchy without seriously organizing the freedom that was supposed to follow.
Guadeloupe therefore remains a touchstone of political judgment—not because every lever can be seen in the open, but because an attitude becomes visible there: fatigue with the old ally, uncertainty about the revolution, little imagination for the liberal middle, and a fatal tendency to understand what is coming only once it has already collapsed over one’s categories. Anyone who glosses over this point understands the Iranian tragedy only halfway.
The Nuclear File — real danger, an unsound case for war
Hardly any point is distorted as crudely in the current dispute as the nuclear question. One camp treats it as a mere pretext for Western war policy. The other uses it as a universal license by which almost any military escalation can be justified. Both are analytically weak. The documented situation is serious—and precisely for that reason it must be read with precision.
The IAEA reports of recent years paint a picture of growing concern. In late May 2025, Reuters reported—citing an IAEA report—that Iran had conducted clandestine activities involving undeclared nuclear material. At the end of February 2026, Reuters then reported, based on another IAEA report, that Iran had stored 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched up to 60% in a deeply fortified facility before the previous year’s attacks. By the IAEA’s yardstick, such a stockpile, if further enriched, is enough for ten nuclear weapons. And there is more: by the IAEA’s and Western governments’ own consistent argument, there is no credible civilian justification for enrichment to 60%. Anyone who simply talks these facts away is replacing reporting with attitude.
And yet the same source record provides reasons for skepticism toward the totality of the war justification. Reuters reported as early as summer 2025 that U.S. intelligence had seen no evidence, before earlier strikes, that Tehran had actually taken the steps to build a bomb. Even in the present crisis, not every alarming finding automatically amounts to an immediately imminent deployable weapon. High enrichment is dangerous; it is not identical with a finished nuclear arsenal. Between stockpile, possible further enrichment, weapon design, integration work, and a deployable system lie relevant stages.
That distinction is not a pedantic quibble; it is the core of sober judgment. Precisely because the Iranian regime has repeatedly deceived, concealed, and destroyed international trust, one must draw the threshold between severe proliferation risk and an immediately imminent bomb all the more exactly. Otherwise ignorance turns into a blank check. And that danger is precisely what shows up in the political communication surrounding the 2026 war.
For alongside the alarming nuclear findings, diplomatic channels still existed until shortly before the war began. On 24 February 2026, Reuters reported that Iran was ready to take “any necessary steps” to reach a deal with the United States. Two days later, Reuters reported the resumption of talks in Geneva, mediated by Oman. One need not idealize this diplomacy. Tehran has often used negotiations tactically in the past—buying time and producing ambiguity. But it remains a hard fact that the negotiating window was not yet fully closed. The war did not fall into a moment of total diplomatic emptiness, but into a moment of open—if fragile—channels.
Taken together with Reuters’ reporting on congressional briefings, this yields a revealing double finding. On the one hand, Washington could argue from a real concern over the nuclear dossier. On the other, Reuters reported that proof was lacking of an immediately planned Iranian first strike against U.S. forces. This combination changes the moral architecture of the war. One can still say: the strike was preventive, strategically necessary, or, from the planners’ perspective, long-term rational. What becomes harder to say is: it was the only conceivable response to a danger already about to strike.
This is exactly where investigative duty begins. It does not consist in playing down the nuclear question merely because Western governments use it. It consists in exposing the political use of a real danger. A serious proliferation situation can, in the language of politics, be condensed into a story that erases all gray zones: the difference between capability and decision, between stockpile and weapon, between chronic danger and acute threshold, between negotiating possibility and definitive failure. The more these gray zones disappear, the easier it becomes to turn a strategic attack into a moral compulsion.
At the same time, the nuclear dossier is both a result and an accelerator of the long history of rupture between Iran and the West. After 1953, Iranian state thinking internalized that Western assurances are purpose-bound and reversible. After 1979—and especially after the sanctions years—the regime learned to translate vulnerability into strategic ambiguity. The result is a vicious circle: the West distrusts Iran because of its deception; Iran distrusts the West because of its history of intervention; and both sides thereby generate ever new justifications for precisely the behavior the other side fears most.
In the end, the sober, uncomfortable formula remains: Iran’s nuclear program is dangerous enough that no one can responsibly give an all-clear—but the documented source record is not sufficient to anoint every war claim as self-evident self-defense. Anyone who holds this tension cleanly is arguing neither for the regime nor for the bombing. He is arguing for reality. And that reality is unpleasant: the problem was real. The decision for war was still a political choice.
9. Moscow, Beijing, BRICS: an umbrella, a lifeline — but no guardian angel
Since Iran joined the expanded BRICS, many observers have treated Tehran as firmly embedded in an anti-Western counter-bloc. That view contains a kernel of truth—and yet it underestimates the hardness of geopolitical interests. Iran matters to Russia and China, but it is not sacred. It is partner, bridgehead, energy source, sanctions laboratory, corridor, and a symbol of a post-Western moment. But it is neither an ally with an automatic military-assistance guarantee nor a state for which Moscow or Beijing would risk a Third World War.
China’s role is structurally the most important. Reuters reported in January 2026 that China took more than 80% of Iran’s oil shipments from the previous year—around 1.38 million barrels per day. That is not a footnote. It is the financial lung of the Iranian state. As long as Chinese refineries, intermediaries, and re-routing networks absorb Iranian oil, Western sanct
