Rahmin Sarabi 🌱🗽

For centuries, monarchs ruled Persia. Then in 1921, a military officer named Reza Khan seized power with British cash. By 1925, he crowned himself King: Reza Shah Pahlavi. The Pahlavis ruled the country. But the British ruled Iranian oil. By 1950, Iran was pumping 660,000 barrels a day (7% of global supply). Almost all the revenue went to London. Iran got pennies. Enter "Mossy." After the Shah abdicated during WW2 (UK and Soviets took over), a democratic window opened. In 1951, the Iranian parliament elected Mohammad ("Mossy") Mosaddegh. Mossy was a character. He ran the state from his bedroom, wearing pajamas. He was so fascinating that Time Magazine named him "Man of the Year" in 1951 (beating Churchill and Eisenhower). But then he committed an unforgivable sin: He nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) to take back control of Iranian oil revenue from the British. He became a Western pariah overnight. The CIA was on a post-WW2 roll installing new governments here and there. To help out the British, in 1953 the CIA launched Operation Ajax, led by Kermit Roosevelt (Teddy's grandson), to overthrow Mossy. Toppling the new Iranian democracy turned out to be surprisingly easy. The CIA reinstated the Shah. The oil company AIOC whose main revenue was Iranian oil was rebranded as British Petroleum (BP). For the next 25 years, a consortium (40% BP, 40% US oil majors - a little kicker for the CIA Shah reinstallation) once again drained Iranian oil revenues. The Shah was a puppet. He used his secret police (SAVAK) to keep the strings attached. Iranians wanted change. Unfortunately Mossy was long gone. So a 1979 revolution ousted the Shah, only for an even more extremist ayatollah to fill the Shah-shaped power vacuum. Today, in 2026, Iranians know that the ayatollah is just the Shah with a different hat. They know that this time Iran doesn't need another Shah. It needs another Mossy.

There is a surface-level politics and a structural-level politics. The issues in surface-level politics are cooked up by major political and media figures — the hot-button “issues” of the day. The structural-level issues are the actual tectonic forces affecting our lives.