Reflections on war, energy, human nature, and the civilisations that keep forgetting what they already knew

The Door Churchill closed in 1953 is still open
By José Parejo, Founding Partner, Jose Parejo & Associates

To understand Winston Churchill, you must first acknowledge what he was: the statesman who held Britain together during its darkest hours, and whose resolve was instrumental in drawing the United States into the Second World War. History owes him that.

But in 1953, that same Churchill chose British imperial interests — and Iranian oil — over democracy in Tehran. What followed — the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the proxy networks, the nuclear programme, the ongoing war — was not an accident. It was the bill for that decision, paid by others.

Tehran in the 1950s: A city that believed it could have It all

Tehran in the early 1950s was a city stretching toward modernity without fully releasing its ancient gardens. On Lalezar Avenue, Egyptian and French films premiered nightly; middle-class women were beginning to walk unveiled in certain neighbourhoods; hotel minibars served whisky to foreign engineers while, a few streets away, the bazaars still smelled of spice and worked copper.

Trams and Chevrolets shared the road with mule-drawn carts. Students at the University of Tehran debated Sartre and oil nationalisation simultaneously. In the courtyards of Golestan and Ferdows — Persian royal gardens dating to the Qajar dynasty — water still ran beneath the trees, a refuge for an elite that believed it could combine monarchy, modernity, and national pride without having to choose between them.

When the sanctions, the plots, and the coup arrived, for many Iranians the sound of tanks on the asphalt was, above all, the sound of a door closing on a city that had been left half-open for far too long.

Damascus: Two cities superimposed

In Damascus, a civil servant trained during the years of the French Mandate (1920–1946) learned to navigate two superimposed cities: one of straight boulevards, administrative buildings with iron balconies, and schools where French was the language of prestige; the other of jasmine courtyards, hammams, and alleyways where Arabic filled with whispered politics.

After Syrian independence in 1946, flags and official portraits changed — but not the hierarchies, not immediately. The same notable families continued receiving the same diplomats in slightly redecorated salons, while in the cafés along the Barada River, new words began to be heard — Baath, Arab socialism, unity — promising a different country to those who had never been invited into those salons.

From behind a wooden desk in the ministry, that civil servant watched files open, laws drafted, and seals changed. But the feeling on the street was that Damascus remained a city governed from above, with fresh layers of discourse layered over a very ancient structure.

Beirut: The Paris of the Middle East — Before the fractures showed

A musician in Beirut in the 1960s lived in a city that presented itself to the world as "the Paris of the Middle East" — and for once, the label did not seem exaggerated. Cafés in Hamra that closed at dawn; hotel bars facing the Mediterranean; recording studios where singers from Cairo and Paris passed through; literary magazines printed in three languages in the same week.

On Rue Bliss, at the same table you could find students from the American University of Beirut, diplomats, second-generation Palestinian refugees, and European tourists who had come to gamble at the casino — all convinced they had found a stable oasis in a turbulent neighbourhood.

The musicians played believing that hybrid normality — Christians and Muslims in the same rooms, Arabic and French in the same song — would last forever. They did not see, or did not want to see, the fault lines advancing beneath the surface: the same fault lines that, a few years later, would turn those streets into barricades and those facades into walls marked by bullet impacts during Lebanon's fifteen-year civil war (1975–1990).

Tehran today: The exhausted city

Walking through Tehran today, you recognise only half the city those earlier inhabitants described. The avenues have widened, the cars have multiplied, shopping centres have replaced several cinemas, and the metro line cuts through neighbourhoods that were once orchards on the margins of the city.

But beneath that layer of tired modernity — even before the current war — something had already broken. Prices changed week to week. Bazaar merchants closed their shops in coordinated protest. University graduates competed for jobs that did not require their qualifications. In café conversations, the word sanctions appeared as often as the word future.

In winter nights, when protests ignited and videos circulated on phones, the city became once again a stage for conspiracies — but no longer about oil nationalisation. The questions had shifted: Will the currency hold? Is it worth staying? Can these protests change anything more than the price of bread?

The Bazaar Revolt: When the regime's own pillars turned against it

The defining feature of the 2025–26 Iran protest cycles is not merely that protests occurred — it is who started them. This is the detail that most Western analysts have underweighted.

The largest economic mobilisations did not begin in peripheral neighbourhoods. They began with coordinated shop closures in Tehran's Grand Bazaar and other commercial hubs across the country, when merchants watched the Iranian rial lose more than 50% of its value in a single year, making it impossible to restock inventory or set stable prices.

Those bazaaris — integrated into the system since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, long considered beneficiaries and essential pillars of the Islamic Republic — shifted from crisis absorbers to visible protest actors, extending strikes to other cities and drawing in students, salaried urban workers, and middle-class professionals.

The 2025–26 cycles carry a predominantly urban social base, with strong participation from commercial and middle classes, while regime support among both urban and rural poor has eroded after:

• Sustained inflation above 30–40% annually

• Iranian rial at historic lows against the US dollar

• International sanctions making food, medicine, and fuel unaffordable for millions

This was not an organised uprising in the vein of the 2009 Green Movement. It was something structurally more significant: proof that even the economic networks most tightly bound to the State were prepared to challenge it when the old social contract between bazaar, clergy, and political power became economically untenable.

Churchill, Suez, and Operation Ajax: The decision that reshaped the region

Winston Churchill returned to power in October 1951 and immediately refused to accept Egypt's denunciation of the Suez Canal treaty — an agreement originally conceived in the context of the Nazi threat and no longer strategically justified. He chose instead to reinforce British military presence in the Canal Zone, straining relations with the Egyptian street to breaking point.

Egypt, January–July 1952: British troops killed approximately 50 Egyptian police officers in Ismailia on 25 January 1952. The following day, Cairo burned. More than 700 buildings were looted or set on fire in what became known as the Cairo Fire or "Black Saturday." King Farouk's monarchy was fatally discredited; the Free Officers' coup — led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and Mohammed Naguib — followed in July 1952.

Iran, August 1953: Declassified British and American sources confirm that Churchill's government promoted the oil embargo against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and pressured the Eisenhower administration to approve a joint covert operation. The Truman administration had previously refused. Eisenhower, after taking office in January 1953, ultimately agreed. Operation Ajax (UK codename: Operation Boot) was executed on 19 August 1953, overthrowing Mossadegh.

Mossadegh's only "crime" had been to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) through a law passed by a sovereign Iranian parliament — reclaiming a greater share of the wealth extracted from Iranian soil by a British corporation that had paid Iran a fraction of its profits for decades.

The historian Ervand Abrahamian (The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations, 2013) describes 1953 as the moment "the path of democratic nationalism" in Iran was definitively closed. CIA declassified records confirm how Operation Ajax restored the Shah to absolute power — but left a wound of institutional resentment that has never healed.

Why Mossadegh still matters in 2026

The literature on the 1953 Iranian coup insists that, from London and Washington, the operation was experienced as a brilliant intelligence success. From Tehran, it was the moment it became clear that whenever Iran attempted to be master of its own destiny, an external power reserved the right to veto the experiment.

The analyst Suzanne Maloney (Brookings Institution, 2015) articulated this with precision: Mossadegh "still matters" because every time sanctions or regime change are discussed, 1953 returns as proof that the West prefers its order to any form of Iranian sovereignty it cannot control.

The most recent protests in Iran — fuelled by currency collapse, youth unemployment, and systematic repression, compounded by international sanctions — are built on that collective memory. The young people demonstrating in Tehran today walk the same streets where their grandparents watched the Anglo-American tanks of the 1953 coup.

Churchill did not intentionally create these forces. But his defence of British imperial positions contributed to closing the few windows of controlled reform that existed in both Egypt and Iran — and the long-term consequences were borne by others.

The IRGC: not a victim — An actor with full agency

Nothing in the above exempts the Islamic Republic of Iran — and in particular the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — from direct and independent responsibility.

The IRGC is not a passive consequence of Western imperialism. It is a fully agentive actor that has built, maintained, and expanded:

• A system of internal repression targeting protesters, journalists, women's rights activists, and civil society

• Regional proxy networks: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Shia militias in Iraq and Syria

• State capture by a clerical-military elite whose financial and political interests have nothing to do with the welfare of ordinary Iranians

• A nuclear programme used as strategic deterrent and negotiating leverage against the international community

The regime has instrumentalised the legacy of Cyrus the Great — the Achaemenid king who in the sixth century BC issued what is considered the world's first known decree of human rights and religious freedom — selectively and cynically. Cyrus is invoked when historical grandeur is needed for legitimacy; he is ignored when the regime acts. There is a profound and revealing paradox in the fact that the heir of the empire that opened the Strait of Hormuz to world commerce is today the actor threatening to close it.

A radicalised Iran under IRGC control has recruited fighters from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Lebanon for approximately $600 per month — driven by a dual fear: that internal revolts might reignite, and that the Basij paramilitary forces and Iranian police might hesitate to carry out the lethal repression expected of them against their own compatriots.

The straight line from 1953 to 2026

The thread connecting Churchill's defence of Abadan and Suez to the economic and military confrontation over Iran today is more direct than most Western capitals choose to acknowledge.

Then — the 1953 playbook: oil embargo → international isolation → delegitimisation of a nationalist government → covert coup.

Now — the 2026 sequence: sanctions on oil exports and financial systems → pressure to dismantle the nuclear programme → UN Security Council debates → explicit discussions in several capitals about engineering internal regime collapse.

In both scenarios, external decision-makers consistently:

1. Underestimate the human cost in Tehran, Damascus, and Beirut

2. Overestimate their capacity to control the forces they unleash

3. Eliminate the moderate actors with genuine internal legitimacy — the only ones historically capable of managing transition from within

In 1953, the "victory" over Mossadegh helped manufacture an Islamist nationalism far more resistant, anti-Western, and structurally durable than anything that preceded it. Today, a clumsy management of the Iran crisis risks consolidating — rather than weakening — the hardest factions within the Iranian system.

Samir Kassir and the predicament that repeats

The Lebanese writer and intellectual Samir Kassir described in 2004 what he called "the Arab predicament" (Being Arab, Actes Sud, 2004): a mixture of internal authoritarianism and external humiliation that had trapped Arab societies in a paralysis they struggled to name or escape.

He was assassinated in Beirut in June 2005, presumably by the very forces his work described.

His diagnosis applies almost word for word to the Egypt–Iran axis that Churchill shaped in the early 1950s, and to the Iran–Levant axis we are navigating today.

Conclusion: The same streets always pay

The lesson is not that the West is responsible for everything that happens in the Middle East. That reading is both lazy and inaccurate.

The lesson is more precise — and more uncomfortable: when external powers eliminate the few moderate actors with genuine internal legitimacy, they do not create the vacuum they expected. They open the door to forces more radical, more impervious to dialogue, and ultimately more dangerous to everyone — including the populations they claim to protect.

In 1953, the IRGC walked through that door. Today, mismanaging the Iran crisis can reinforce it still further.

And it is always the same streets — those of Tehran, Damascus, Beirut, Cairo — that pay the price in lives, exiles, and broken cities

— José Parejo

Founding Partner, Jose Parejo & Associates (JPA)

Sunday CEO Strategic Insights | May 1, 2026

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