How the West Lost Iran: Oil, Coups, and the Road to Revolution - Part 1

The David McWilliams Podcast

David McWilliams

News & Politics

4.5 • 692 Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2026

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Iran didn’t suddenly become the geopolitical flashpoint it is today, the roots go back decades. In this first part of a two-part series, we trace the economic and political history that reshaped Iran from the 1940s to the 1979 revolution. From Britain’s oil empire and the CIA-backed coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh to the rise of the Shah as America’s key ally in the Cold War, we explore how oil, empire, and superpower rivalry transformed Iran into a strategic battleground. Along the way we look at the choke points of global energy, the Suez crisis, the birth of the CIA’s regime-change playbook, and the corruption and inequality that ultimately ignited revolution.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Today's podcast is all about Iran, but we are giving you the economic history of Iran from the 1940s
0:06.1	all the way up to the 1980s. This is part one of a two-parter, which will hopefully give you a little
0:12.9	bit more perspective, a little bit more depth, and allow you or aid you in understanding what
0:19.8	is going on in the Middle East right now.
0:22.7	That's all coming up in a couple of minutes.
0:25.5	To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature.
0:31.7	This podcast is powered by ACAST.
0:48.7	Thank you. is powered by ACAST. Welcome to the podcast.
0:51.3	Those of you of a certain vintage
0:53.0	will recognise that guitar riff as a pretty iconic riff by the police message in a bottle.
0:59.4	You will ask yourself, oh, what the hell are they listening to the police at the top of a podcast,
1:03.7	which is all going to be a two-part podcast about Iran, the Middle East, America, Trump, politics, geography, economics, finance.
1:13.2	And Wesley Disko.
1:14.4	Exactly. We will answer that in the course of the podcast because the police loom large in this story.
1:21.8	This is going to be the first of two parts about American intervention in Iran specifically, in the Middle East in general,
1:30.7	but in Iran specifically. What we're going to do is try and give a little bit of context,
1:36.2	a little bit of history, a little bit of economic history as to what has been over the past 70 years on and off intervention.
1:49.0	And when I say intervention, intervention, it's not just here's a few quid and do the right thing.
1:54.6	We're talking about absolute decapitation of leaders.
1:58.5	So the idea that what we're seeing in the last couple of days in Iran
2:03.0	is a new thing is not the case. This has been part and parcel of Western policy towards Iran
2:09.5	for quite some time. And when I say Western, I don't just mean European capitalists. We're all
	...

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