Thank you. And that's a fascinating historical anchor — the Portuguese blockade of Hormuz is one of those episodes that deserves far more attention than it gets. What strikes me is the pattern you're pointing to: empires don't lose Hormuz because they're already declining. They start declining because they misunderstand what Hormuz actually is. It's never just a chokepoint. It's a thermometer. The Portuguese thought they were controlling spice routes; they were actually revealing the limits of projection without local legitimacy. Sound familiar?
This looks like it implies Iran owns the Strait… local legitimacy? It’s an international waterway that no one has historically owned. Furthermore, the part that is likely mined is in Omani waters. What of the Gulf nations that object to the closing? They have to accede to Irans piratical behavior? What of their legitimacy?
The cold truth is the only reason the Strait is closed now is the technology to cause massive destruction in a localized setting has become much cheaper and easier to acquire for any nation. Iran and Iraq possessed no such tech in the 1980s when at war with one another and the threat to close commerce was rebuffed with foreign Navy’s opening the Strait. The same could happen again today but the chances of losing multi-billion dollar naval vessels or massive supertankers laden with huge amounts of LNG to cheap, attritable systems has massively increased. There is also little stomach (and capability outside the US Navy) to force the issue. So here we are.
You're raising exactly the right distinction — and I agree with almost all of it. The Strait is an international waterway under UNCLOS, full stop. Nothing I wrote was meant to imply Iranian ownership. What I'm pointing to is something different: the gap between legal status and operational reality.
You've actually made my argument better than I did. The reason the Strait is closed isn't sovereignty — it's cost asymmetry. When a $2 million drone can threaten a $2 billion vessel, the legal framework doesn't disappear, but the willingness to enforce it does. That's the shift. In the 1980s, the Tanker War was fought because the math still favored escort. Today the math has inverted, and as you say, there's neither stomach nor capability outside the USN to force the issue.
Where I'd push back gently: "local legitimacy" in my framing isn't about legal title. It's about the political fact that any post-conflict arrangement in the Gulf has to account for Iran as a geographic reality — 1,500 kilometers of coastline doesn't relocate. The Gulf states' objections are entirely valid. But valid objections without enforceable power become diplomatic positions, not operational facts. That's the tragedy of the moment.
We're agreeing on the diagnosis. The question is what comes next — and that's where the insurance and underwriting story becomes more important than the naval one.
This is an interesting read. You may enjoy The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954 (2023) by David Painter and Gregory Brew, who make use of more newly declassified documents.
Thank you, Dr. Bowlus — I’ll add Painter and Brew to the list. The declassified material from that period keeps reshaping the picture. Ervand Abrahamian’s work on the Tudeh dimension was one of the threads I found most underexplored in mainstream accounts. Appreciate the recommendation and glad the piece resonated.
It’s impossible to talk about anything that happened in the Cold War and remove the Soviet Union from the equation. The logic of Cold War paranoia is pretty simple to make… Mosaddegh ditches his British patrons, who will fill the void? The Soviets.
To Cold Warriors, the prospect of a Soviet friendly regime stretching into Gulf waters is not one to countenance. Even if it is not entirely true, even the perception of an Iran open to Soviet patronage is enough to set off alarm bells in London and Washington. So they reacted as Cold Warriors did on both sides, they intervened and meddled.
Iran would have had a very difficult time withstanding Soviet pressure and patronage in the absence of any counterbalance in the West. Especially with such a massive shared border with the Soviet Union and closed markets in the West. As an example, the Soviets only departed Iran after WWII in 1946 following US pressure to do so. I see no reason why the Soviets would have failed to meddle in the power vacuum left following the British departure.
Finally, the narrative the Mosaddegh is some moderate democrat has always been overblown. He dissolved the Majlis, accrued emergency powers, rigged votes, nationalized industries… very Maduro-esque. We have no idea where his policies would have led due to the coup but they certainly were not indicative of some moderate democrat. If anything, they seem similar to post-colonial sham-democracies spread through Africa or Asia or America with personalized leadership. I do not doubt he was an Iranian nationalist, but nationalism coupled with the hubris that “Only I can solve these problems” has justified a lot of autocratic actions over the past 100 years. He seemed to be well on that trajectory.
“The Soviet Union is gone. The scar tissue from 1953 is not.”
“The Cold Warriors solved one problem and created a longer one.“
“The intervention didn't interrupt the autocratic trajectory. It replaced one form of it with a worse one — and added grievance as fuel.”
Ahh yes… you are correct. All your points are entirely valid and I understand what you are getting at completely. I apologize for misreading your argument and thank you for your time to explain to me these further points.
If I had to make a wager some of our problems with how the world is nowadays and how everyone sees one another is how history goes into myth making which goes into national consciousness which goes into emotions like fear and hate and envy and like and dislike. What I mean by this is 1953 could have been forgotten in the relative dustbin of history as another power struggle that one individual lost against a monarchy backed by rich foreigners. It is certainly not time first or the last time foreign powers have meddled in the internal affairs of a country.
It obviously was not forgotten both in the West and especially in the East in Iran. The myth (I don’t mean to imply it is fake or overblown, just the story one generation tells to another) that has gone on about it has obviously inspired a lot of folks to feel things and think things they might otherwise not think or feel. It is hard for people who do not live in those societies are grow up with those myths (like me) to understand those feelings or thoughts and thus we are already existing in parallel realities before we even come to interact with one another.
I hope this was not too ramble-y, but trying to put these thoughts into text is difficult.
Not ramble-y at all. You’ve actually landed on the deepest layer of the argument — the one most analysts never reach because they stay at the level of policy and strategy.
You’re describing what Ibn Khaldun called asabiyyah — the group feeling that binds a people together. And what you’ve identified is that historical events don’t stay historical. They get metabolized. They enter the bloodstream of a society and become something closer to theology than memory. 1953 in Iran isn’t a date. It’s a founding wound. And founding wounds don’t need to be accurate to be operative — they need to be felt.
This is exactly what I am writing about in my upcoming book on the Arab world.
The coups, the betrayals, the colonial carve-ups — they happened, yes. But what keeps them alive isn’t the facts. It’s the story each generation tells the next at the dinner table, in the schoolbook, in the Friday sermon. The myth becomes the lens, and once the lens is set, everything that follows is seen through it. Every American action in the Middle East, however mundane, passes through the filter of 1953 in Tehran, 1956 in Cairo, 2003 in Baghdad. Not because people are irrational. Because they are human. Memory is not a filing cabinet. It is a wound that either heals clean or gets infected. And when outside powers keep reopening it, it never scars over.
Your phrase — “parallel realities before we even come to interact with one another” — is one of the most honest things I’ve read in a comment section. That is the entire problem. Not bad faith. Not stupidity.
Parallel mythologies that make the same facts mean completely different things depending on which dinner table you grew up at.
Thank you for this exchange. This is what public discourse is supposed to be.
I enjoy the way you think and the way you describe things. I look forward to buying your book one day and being challenged to think a little better and a little deeper after digesting it.
Thank you for your patience and your lessons, it was greatly appreciated!
What you offered in this thread is what most comment sections have forgotten how to do — you let yourself be moved without surrendering your own thinking. That takes a particular kind of courage. The willingness to say I hadn't seen it that way is becoming rare, and it matters more than people realize.
The book will come in its own time. I'll make sure you know when it does. Until then, thank you — genuinely — for the company on this stretch of road. Exchanges like this are why I keep writing.
This is an excellent comment and I want to engage with it seriously because you're making three distinct arguments, each with real weight.
On the Soviet dimension — you're absolutely right that removing Moscow from the 1953 equation is ahistorical. The Tudeh Party was real, Soviet pressure on Iranian Azerbaijan in 1946 was real, and the logic of containment wasn't irrational. My essay doesn't argue the coup happened in a vacuum. What it argues is that the consequences outlasted the logic. The Soviet Union is gone. The scar tissue from 1953 is not. Policy made for containment became architecture that outlived its purpose — and that architecture produced the 1979 revolution, which produced the regime now closing the Strait. The Cold Warriors solved one problem and created a longer one. That's not hindsight moralizing. That's sequence.
On Mosaddegh the democrat — I take your point, and I'd go further than you expect. He was no Jeffersonian. The dissolution of the Majlis, the emergency powers, the referendum — all real, all troubling. But here's where I'd complicate your Maduro comparison. Mosaddegh operated inside a constitutional monarchy with a sitting Shah, a hostile court, British-funded opposition in the Majlis itself, and an imperial power actively organizing his removal. The emergency powers weren't seized in peacetime against a loyal parliament — they were seized in a knife fight with forces that were themselves extralegal. Does that excuse autocratic drift? No. But it changes the diagnosis. The question isn't whether Mosaddegh was a liberal democrat. It's whether the trajectory he represented — flawed, nationalist, confrontational with imperial concessions — would have produced something less catastrophic than what actually followed. The Shah's SAVAK, the revolution, Khomeini, forty-five years of theocracy, and now a closed Strait. That's the counterfactual that matters.
On the post-colonial sham-democracy comparison — you're pattern-matching correctly. Nasser, Sukarno, Nkrumah, Mosaddegh — they rhyme. Charismatic nationalists who centralize power and mistake themselves for the nation. But notice something about that list: the ones who were deposed by Western intervention didn't produce better outcomes than the ones who weren't. Egypt got Nasser removed by his own body, then Sadat, then a cold peace with Israel. Iran got a coup, then a revolution, then theocracy. The intervention didn't interrupt the autocratic trajectory. It replaced one form of it with a worse one — and added grievance as fuel.
That's the engine of my argument. Not that Mosaddegh was a saint. That the cure was worse than the disease, and we're still paying the bill.
Takseng — fair to raise. The argument, the reading, and the structure are mine; I do use the machine to tighten cadence and trim, the way one uses a sharp knife rather than a dull one. If a particular sentence rings false to you, point to it — I would rather know than not. Thank you for reading honestly.
Great write up. The last time Strait of Hormuz was blocked was in 1700s under Portuguese sailors. The earliest leading indicator of empire decline.
Thank you. And that's a fascinating historical anchor — the Portuguese blockade of Hormuz is one of those episodes that deserves far more attention than it gets. What strikes me is the pattern you're pointing to: empires don't lose Hormuz because they're already declining. They start declining because they misunderstand what Hormuz actually is. It's never just a chokepoint. It's a thermometer. The Portuguese thought they were controlling spice routes; they were actually revealing the limits of projection without local legitimacy. Sound familiar?
This looks like it implies Iran owns the Strait… local legitimacy? It’s an international waterway that no one has historically owned. Furthermore, the part that is likely mined is in Omani waters. What of the Gulf nations that object to the closing? They have to accede to Irans piratical behavior? What of their legitimacy?
The cold truth is the only reason the Strait is closed now is the technology to cause massive destruction in a localized setting has become much cheaper and easier to acquire for any nation. Iran and Iraq possessed no such tech in the 1980s when at war with one another and the threat to close commerce was rebuffed with foreign Navy’s opening the Strait. The same could happen again today but the chances of losing multi-billion dollar naval vessels or massive supertankers laden with huge amounts of LNG to cheap, attritable systems has massively increased. There is also little stomach (and capability outside the US Navy) to force the issue. So here we are.
You're raising exactly the right distinction — and I agree with almost all of it. The Strait is an international waterway under UNCLOS, full stop. Nothing I wrote was meant to imply Iranian ownership. What I'm pointing to is something different: the gap between legal status and operational reality.
You've actually made my argument better than I did. The reason the Strait is closed isn't sovereignty — it's cost asymmetry. When a $2 million drone can threaten a $2 billion vessel, the legal framework doesn't disappear, but the willingness to enforce it does. That's the shift. In the 1980s, the Tanker War was fought because the math still favored escort. Today the math has inverted, and as you say, there's neither stomach nor capability outside the USN to force the issue.
Where I'd push back gently: "local legitimacy" in my framing isn't about legal title. It's about the political fact that any post-conflict arrangement in the Gulf has to account for Iran as a geographic reality — 1,500 kilometers of coastline doesn't relocate. The Gulf states' objections are entirely valid. But valid objections without enforceable power become diplomatic positions, not operational facts. That's the tragedy of the moment.
We're agreeing on the diagnosis. The question is what comes next — and that's where the insurance and underwriting story becomes more important than the naval one.
An interesting insight into the roots of the current Mid-east situation. A nation's sovereignty must be respected by other nations.
Well said indeed, thank you.
This is an interesting read. You may enjoy The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954 (2023) by David Painter and Gregory Brew, who make use of more newly declassified documents.
Thank you, Dr. Bowlus — I’ll add Painter and Brew to the list. The declassified material from that period keeps reshaping the picture. Ervand Abrahamian’s work on the Tudeh dimension was one of the threads I found most underexplored in mainstream accounts. Appreciate the recommendation and glad the piece resonated.
It’s impossible to talk about anything that happened in the Cold War and remove the Soviet Union from the equation. The logic of Cold War paranoia is pretty simple to make… Mosaddegh ditches his British patrons, who will fill the void? The Soviets.
To Cold Warriors, the prospect of a Soviet friendly regime stretching into Gulf waters is not one to countenance. Even if it is not entirely true, even the perception of an Iran open to Soviet patronage is enough to set off alarm bells in London and Washington. So they reacted as Cold Warriors did on both sides, they intervened and meddled.
Iran would have had a very difficult time withstanding Soviet pressure and patronage in the absence of any counterbalance in the West. Especially with such a massive shared border with the Soviet Union and closed markets in the West. As an example, the Soviets only departed Iran after WWII in 1946 following US pressure to do so. I see no reason why the Soviets would have failed to meddle in the power vacuum left following the British departure.
Finally, the narrative the Mosaddegh is some moderate democrat has always been overblown. He dissolved the Majlis, accrued emergency powers, rigged votes, nationalized industries… very Maduro-esque. We have no idea where his policies would have led due to the coup but they certainly were not indicative of some moderate democrat. If anything, they seem similar to post-colonial sham-democracies spread through Africa or Asia or America with personalized leadership. I do not doubt he was an Iranian nationalist, but nationalism coupled with the hubris that “Only I can solve these problems” has justified a lot of autocratic actions over the past 100 years. He seemed to be well on that trajectory.
“The Soviet Union is gone. The scar tissue from 1953 is not.”
“The Cold Warriors solved one problem and created a longer one.“
“The intervention didn't interrupt the autocratic trajectory. It replaced one form of it with a worse one — and added grievance as fuel.”
Ahh yes… you are correct. All your points are entirely valid and I understand what you are getting at completely. I apologize for misreading your argument and thank you for your time to explain to me these further points.
If I had to make a wager some of our problems with how the world is nowadays and how everyone sees one another is how history goes into myth making which goes into national consciousness which goes into emotions like fear and hate and envy and like and dislike. What I mean by this is 1953 could have been forgotten in the relative dustbin of history as another power struggle that one individual lost against a monarchy backed by rich foreigners. It is certainly not time first or the last time foreign powers have meddled in the internal affairs of a country.
It obviously was not forgotten both in the West and especially in the East in Iran. The myth (I don’t mean to imply it is fake or overblown, just the story one generation tells to another) that has gone on about it has obviously inspired a lot of folks to feel things and think things they might otherwise not think or feel. It is hard for people who do not live in those societies are grow up with those myths (like me) to understand those feelings or thoughts and thus we are already existing in parallel realities before we even come to interact with one another.
I hope this was not too ramble-y, but trying to put these thoughts into text is difficult.
Not ramble-y at all. You’ve actually landed on the deepest layer of the argument — the one most analysts never reach because they stay at the level of policy and strategy.
You’re describing what Ibn Khaldun called asabiyyah — the group feeling that binds a people together. And what you’ve identified is that historical events don’t stay historical. They get metabolized. They enter the bloodstream of a society and become something closer to theology than memory. 1953 in Iran isn’t a date. It’s a founding wound. And founding wounds don’t need to be accurate to be operative — they need to be felt.
This is exactly what I am writing about in my upcoming book on the Arab world.
The coups, the betrayals, the colonial carve-ups — they happened, yes. But what keeps them alive isn’t the facts. It’s the story each generation tells the next at the dinner table, in the schoolbook, in the Friday sermon. The myth becomes the lens, and once the lens is set, everything that follows is seen through it. Every American action in the Middle East, however mundane, passes through the filter of 1953 in Tehran, 1956 in Cairo, 2003 in Baghdad. Not because people are irrational. Because they are human. Memory is not a filing cabinet. It is a wound that either heals clean or gets infected. And when outside powers keep reopening it, it never scars over.
Your phrase — “parallel realities before we even come to interact with one another” — is one of the most honest things I’ve read in a comment section. That is the entire problem. Not bad faith. Not stupidity.
Parallel mythologies that make the same facts mean completely different things depending on which dinner table you grew up at.
Thank you for this exchange. This is what public discourse is supposed to be.
I enjoy the way you think and the way you describe things. I look forward to buying your book one day and being challenged to think a little better and a little deeper after digesting it.
Thank you for your patience and your lessons, it was greatly appreciated!
What you offered in this thread is what most comment sections have forgotten how to do — you let yourself be moved without surrendering your own thinking. That takes a particular kind of courage. The willingness to say I hadn't seen it that way is becoming rare, and it matters more than people realize.
The book will come in its own time. I'll make sure you know when it does. Until then, thank you — genuinely — for the company on this stretch of road. Exchanges like this are why I keep writing.
This is an excellent comment and I want to engage with it seriously because you're making three distinct arguments, each with real weight.
On the Soviet dimension — you're absolutely right that removing Moscow from the 1953 equation is ahistorical. The Tudeh Party was real, Soviet pressure on Iranian Azerbaijan in 1946 was real, and the logic of containment wasn't irrational. My essay doesn't argue the coup happened in a vacuum. What it argues is that the consequences outlasted the logic. The Soviet Union is gone. The scar tissue from 1953 is not. Policy made for containment became architecture that outlived its purpose — and that architecture produced the 1979 revolution, which produced the regime now closing the Strait. The Cold Warriors solved one problem and created a longer one. That's not hindsight moralizing. That's sequence.
On Mosaddegh the democrat — I take your point, and I'd go further than you expect. He was no Jeffersonian. The dissolution of the Majlis, the emergency powers, the referendum — all real, all troubling. But here's where I'd complicate your Maduro comparison. Mosaddegh operated inside a constitutional monarchy with a sitting Shah, a hostile court, British-funded opposition in the Majlis itself, and an imperial power actively organizing his removal. The emergency powers weren't seized in peacetime against a loyal parliament — they were seized in a knife fight with forces that were themselves extralegal. Does that excuse autocratic drift? No. But it changes the diagnosis. The question isn't whether Mosaddegh was a liberal democrat. It's whether the trajectory he represented — flawed, nationalist, confrontational with imperial concessions — would have produced something less catastrophic than what actually followed. The Shah's SAVAK, the revolution, Khomeini, forty-five years of theocracy, and now a closed Strait. That's the counterfactual that matters.
On the post-colonial sham-democracy comparison — you're pattern-matching correctly. Nasser, Sukarno, Nkrumah, Mosaddegh — they rhyme. Charismatic nationalists who centralize power and mistake themselves for the nation. But notice something about that list: the ones who were deposed by Western intervention didn't produce better outcomes than the ones who weren't. Egypt got Nasser removed by his own body, then Sadat, then a cold peace with Israel. Iran got a coup, then a revolution, then theocracy. The intervention didn't interrupt the autocratic trajectory. It replaced one form of it with a worse one — and added grievance as fuel.
That's the engine of my argument. Not that Mosaddegh was a saint. That the cure was worse than the disease, and we're still paying the bill.
Liked reading it. But the rhythm at times feels like you used ChatGPT to polish it.
Takseng — fair to raise. The argument, the reading, and the structure are mine; I do use the machine to tighten cadence and trim, the way one uses a sharp knife rather than a dull one. If a particular sentence rings false to you, point to it — I would rather know than not. Thank you for reading honestly.