Appeasement vs Aggression: Why Most Leaders Fail When Pressure Hits; Where Should The Iran Story Begin?

Part 1.

Before 1953.

The part nobody tells you.

Now, to understand 1953, you have to go back further because the overthrow didn't come out of nowhere.

They were focused building for decades that made it maybe not unavoidable, but deeply predictable to anyone paying attention.

Let me walk you through it.

We're first going to focus on the catalyst, where it all began.

And that starts with the famous word, oil, where it all started.

In 1901, a British businessman named William Knox D'Arcy cut a deal with Iran's government to be the only company allowed to drill for and sell Iran's oil.

The deal was completely one-sided.

Iran got a tiny piece of the money while a British company ran everything.

By the 1940s, the Anglo-Iranian oil company, the company we know now as BP, had become the most profitable British business in the world.

Think about that for a second.

Iran was sitting on one of the biggest oil supplies on the planet and its own people were living in poverty while that money was went mostly to London.

That created a deep, real anger among everyday Iranians.

This wasn't fake outrage.

It was a real injustice.

People were watching their country's greatest resource making someone else rich.

That anger built up for decades.

But, and this matters, The British had also built everything that made the oil business work.

The refineries, the pipelines, the shipping network.

That was British money and British engineering.

So when Iran's leader took over the oil industry, the British had a real complaint too.

Not one that justifies what happened next, but a real one.

Both sides had a case.