The Long History of US-Backed Efforts to Engineer Regime Change in Iran

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel initiated a widespread military campaign against Iran, resulting in the deaths of several top political and military officials.

While the administration of US President Donald Trump officially frames the military campaign around dismantling Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile infrastructure, actions and rhetoric indicate that replacing the Iranian government is a central objective. This marks the latest chapter in a long history of Western intervention in Iranian politics, drawing parallels to the 1953 coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

The latest military campaign commenced with targeted strikes against the leadership, resulting in the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei alongside a large cadre of the country's political and military leaders. The strikes were reportedly designed to degrade military capabilities and fracture the Iranian establishment.

Trump has encouraged the Iranian public to overthrow their system. "When we are finished, take over your government,"  Trump stated in a video address on the first day of the strikes. "It will be yours to take."

After the Iranian establishment selected Mojtaba Khamenei to succeed his late father, the US President publicly rejected the appointment.  Trump stated that  Khamenei was "unacceptable" and demanded direct involvement in picking a new leader who would bring harmony and peace to the country.

The US administration has offered varying rationales for the military campaign, ranging from preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon to securing global oil supplies.

"This is not a so-called regime-change war, but the regime sure did change," the US Defence Secretary submitted. However,  Trump stated in mid-February that regime change would be "the best thing that could happen."

The groundwork for this policy shift was visible in 2025. In June 2025,  Trump demanded an "unconditional surrender" from Tehran, threatening that Ayatollah Khamenei was an easy target for American forces. In subsequent remarks on the White House lawn,  Trump stated that the US would destroy nuclear sites and that he sought total victory rather than a ceasefire. Cracks had appeared within his political base regarding this approach. "You’re not going to convince me that the Iranian people are my enemy," commentator Tucker Carlson stated during a 2025 appearance on a podcast hosted by former presidential adviser Steve Bannon. "It’s Orwell, man. You’re not telling me who I have to hate."

During the same period, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a video addressing Iranians.

"The time has come for the Iranian people to unite around the flag and its historic legacy, by standing up for your freedom from the evil and oppressive regime,"  Netanyahu stated.

The Israeli military campaign in 2025 was dubbed "Operation Rising Lion," a name steeped in symbolism. The lion holding a sword was a motif of the Iranian flag under the Pahlavi dynasty. On June 17, 2025, Israel’s Persian-language social media account posted an image of a lion with a sword, piercing the modern Iranian flag.

However, Marc Owen Jones, an associate professor of media analytics at Northwestern University in Qatar, noted that the imagery was largely meant for an Israeli domestic audience, with Israel portraying itself as the lion to tie into its own identity and account of a biblical homeland. "Reverting back to Persian historical imagery is not actually going to be very effective, especially when you’re Iranians,"  Jones submitted.

For the US and its allies, intervention in Iran has historical precedents. In August 1953, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) orchestrated the overthrow of Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister.

In his book Patriot of Persia, the historian Christopher de Bellaigue writes that Mossadegh was the first liberal leader of the modern Middle East. "He was a rationalist who hated obscurantism and believed in the primacy of the law,"  de Bellaigue notes. Yet he was also a peculiar figure who ran the country wearing pyjamas and frequently fainted in public, leading British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to call him "Mussy Duck" and consider him a lunatic.

Mossadegh had moved to nationalise Iran’s oil industry, which was controlled by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

The economic disparity driving this nationalisation was stark. According to  de Bellaigue, the British government received £15 million in tax revenues from the company in 1947, while the Iranian government received only £7 million in royalties. Furthermore, the company enforced strict racial segregation in the oil city of Abadan, where Iranian workers lived in hovels without electricity or running water while British staff enjoyed colonial-style privileges.

The British government, heavily reliant on the revenues from Iranian oil, engineered a world embargo. When Mossadegh refused to compromise his demand for economic independence, the British enlisted US support by alleging that Mossadegh was a communist sympathiser. According to  de Bellaigue, the US administration under President Dwight Eisenhower allowed itself to become Britain’s accomplice, shifting American policy from benevolent neutrality to imperial manipulation.

The covert operation, known as Operation Ajax by the Americans and Operation Boot by the British, involved funding protests, planting propaganda in local newspapers, and supporting military officers loyal to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

In his magnum opus The Great War for Civilisation, the journalist Robert Fisk notes that the plot was strictly geopolitical. "Democracy, in the shape of the popular and somewhat effete Mossadeq, was the one thing Washington and London were not interested in cultivating,"  Fisk wrote. "This was to be regime change on the cheap."

Fisk points out that the British end of the operation was managed by Christopher Montague Woodhouse, who flew weapons into Iran, and the diplomat Robin Zaehner, who cultivated local saboteurs. They distributed millions of Iranian rials to fund mobs and disenchanted military officers.

The US Central Intelligence Agency relied heavily on manufactured chaos to achieve its goals.  de Bellaigue details how Donald Wilber, a CIA operative, directed a massive propaganda campaign, planting anti-government articles and hiring local thugs to pose as communist enforcers. This created a false panic that Iran was falling to the Soviet-backed Tudeh party, thereby justifying the coup.

However, Mossadegh also contributed to his own downfall.  de Bellaigue observes that the prime minister bypassed democratic institutions when faced with legislative gridlock, ultimately holding a referendum to dissolve the parliament. This tactical error provided the Shah with the legal opening required to formally dismiss him.

After the coup on August 19, 1953, Mossadegh was sentenced to solitary confinement and subsequent house arrest until his death in 1967. The Shah returned from a brief exile to consolidate his power with American backing. In 2000, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright formally acknowledged that the US played a significant role in orchestrating his overthrow, calling it a setback.

Fisk writes that the Shah became the West's policeman in the region and a guardian of oil supplies. He launched a top-down agenda called the White Revolution to expand education and infrastructure. However, his rule was maintained through the repression of the SAVAK secret police.

"Methods of interrogation included rape and cooking, the latter a self-explanatory form of suffering in which the victim was strapped to a bed of wire that was then electrified to become a red-hot toaster,"  Fisk observed.

The Shah attempted to project absolute power, most notably by hosting a lavish celebration of the Persian empire in the ancient city of Persepolis in 1971. Yet, his regime remained fundamentally unstable. When his rule ultimately collapsed, he found himself abandoned by his Western allies. "This is what happens to a man squeezed by the great nations," an observer told  Fisk. "After all the juice is gone, they throw him away."

By the late 1970s, public discontent culminated in large-scale demonstrations. The Shah fled Iran in January 1979, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile to lead the Islamic Revolution. The resulting regime executed thousands of the Shah's former officials and military personnel.  Fisk notes that the 1953 coup provided a bitter lesson to the revolutionaries, teaching them that counter-revolutionaries could not be left alive to restore Western power.

The trauma of the 1953 operation also directly precipitated the 1979 takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran. As de Bellaigue outlines, the hostage-takers viewed the American diplomats as surrogates for the CIA operatives of 1953, acting pre-emptively out of fear that Washington was planning another covert operation to restore the monarchy.

de Bellaigue concludes that the 1953 coup was the start of a long-term US policy supporting Middle Eastern strongmen, which ultimately harmed Western interests and led directly to the 1979 revolution.

Today, as the United States explicitly demands a role in selecting Iran's next leader, the historical cycle of intervention remains highly relevant. Kermit Roosevelt, the senior CIA officer who ran the 1953 operation in Tehran, left a warning regarding foreign attempts to dictate Iran's governance. "If we are ever going to try something like this again,"  Roosevelt wrote. "We must be absolutely sure that the people and army want what we want."

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