Why did Iran fail to retain a democratic government in this period?
Short answerThe answer stresses CIA and KGB interference and their tendency to misread Iranian politics through a rigid Cold War framework.
NotesThe answer assigns more of the disruption in Iran to the CIA and KGB than to MI6. Both services viewed the country through binaries such as communism versus capitalism and democracy versus dictatorship. That framework encouraged them to manipulate political outcomes without understanding local alignments and grievances. Iran and Suez reveal the same analytical failure: global strategy could crowd out the regional context policymakers most needed to understand.