Imperialism and Third World nationalism: Reflections on the coup against Mossadegh’s regime in Iran,1953

I

Several obvious answers to this question come so readily to mind that some may feel that it is not even a question worth asking. For instance, the racial affinity between the USA and Europe, the former peopled largely by migrants from the latter, has always been a factor so powerful (indeed authors like Amiya Bagchi have underscored it as an important hallmark of imperialism) that to imagine that the USA would take the side of some non-European nation in a conflict with a capitalist power of Europe appears extremely far-fetched. It is true, nonetheless that Europeans have fought among themselves two of the most devastating wars in human history in the course of the twentieth century, with the USA jumping into the fray on both occasions, so that even if the importance of race is accepted, the question about the USA choosing the side it did after the war still needs an explanation.

To be sure, even if the race factor is ignored, as the USA itself was also a colonial power, having conquered the Philippines through an exceedingly bloody invasion in the early years of the twentieth century, its making common cause with other colonial powers against the new nationalist regimes, would appear to be a normal phenomenon. But the colonial possessions of the USA were small compared to those of the West European powers; besides, the point being raised precisely is, why inter-imperialist rivalry between the USA and Europe did not triumph over the US hostility to nationalist regimes per se in ex-European colonies.

Such rivalry, to be sure, had become mute in the post-war context, as the institution of the Marshall Plan shows; nonetheless there is a difference between helping shattered European economies to rebuild themselves, and helping them in their colonial project. The latter was less compelling for the USA, even though a price was always extracted for all such help.

One obvious answer that would be offered to the question we are posing would be that for the USA, muscling in to share a part of the natural resources of the Third World which were earlier under the control of capital from the old colonial powers and which could be partially wrested from such exclusive control, was a more profitable option than supporting nationalist regimes which wanted to take over all such resources, and hence promised no gain whatsoever to the US capital. But this answer too is not very convincing.

It is certainly true that in the case of Iran, after Mossadgeh was overthrown in the CIA-sponsored coup which installed the Shah as the dictator of the country, the US oil companies became a part of the consortium that was rewarded with the right to develop Iranian oil, in the place of the old monopoly of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and thereby made handsome profits, but one cannot infer from what happened ex post the possibilities that might have existed ex ante. Iran, after all, lacked the technical expertise to develop its oil resources at that time, and a cordial relationship with the nationalist regime might have been useful for the US companies in making major gains through extending such technical help, even after the nationalisation of oil.

Besides, even if this argument is accepted for a moment in the particular case of Iran where Mossadegh appeared to be fully committed to the idea of complete national control over the oil resources, and the use of these resources for the benefit of the Iranian people, it does not necessarily hold in the case of other countries, where the nationalist regime would have been more grateful for the US assistance against the old colonial powers and hence more amenable to make concessions to the USA. Hence, the basic question still remains: Why did the USA prefer an alliance with the old colonial powers to an alliance with the new nationalist regimes?

It is not as if the idea of an alliance with nationalist regimes or movements had not crossed the minds of the US foreign policy establishment at all. On the contrary, it had surfaced from time to time in discussions of the US foreign policy options. Franklin Roosevelt, for instance, had been persuaded to raise the question of Indian independence with the UK, but was snubbed by Churchill and withdrew promptly. Even in the case of Iran, the USA was initially lukewarm to the idea of supporting British claims against Iran, and had to be reminded by Churchill that Britain had been supporting the USA in the Korean War and hence the USA was duty-bound to reciprocate by supporting Britain against Mossadegh’s Iran. And when the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt occurred in the wake of Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal, the USA, in fact, did not jump into the fray on the side of the invading colonial powers, which were forced as a result to withdraw in the face of a Soviet ultimatum.

Thus, the idea of supporting the nationalist regimes against the old colonial powers had been a sub-theme, a possible but subordinate option, in foreign policy discussions in the USA. The question therefore remains: Why did it always remain only a subordinate option?

The most common argument that is advanced for this position of the USA, from the perspective of the US interests, centres around the Cold War. The spread of communism was an overarching threat, and Third World nationalist regimes were often either allied to local communist parties as was the case in Iran with Mossadegh’s alliance with the Tudeh Party, or were supported by them as was the case in Indonesia. Even when they were distant from the local Communist Party as in Nasser’s Egypt (or unrelated to any communist party whatsoever since such a party did not even exist in the country), they had close relations with the Soviet Union, which could use them for its ‘expansionist designs’. Subverting such regimes and replacing them by ‘friendly’ regimes such as that of the Shah of Iran was therefore an essential part of the Cold War strategy.

But this argument too lacks substance. The Cold War, as is well documented by now, was manufactured by the Western powers. The Soviet Union which had lost nearly 30 million people in the Second World War had no inclination whatsoever to ‘spread communism’ as was alleged by the Western powers. In fact, it had scrupulously adhered to the understanding reached at the Yalta Conference during the War, and one obvious manifestation of this had been its lack of support for the Greek Revolution in the late forties. As Isaac Deutscher had argued at the teach-in at the University of California, Berkeley, during the Vietnam War, a ‘Soviet threat’ had never existed. It was conjured up by the Western powers to create an anti-communist hysteria, exactly as had been the case with the ‘Zinoviev letter’ in an earlier period in Britain. Ironically, the manifest Soviet unwillingness to ‘spread communism’ (to use Cold War terminology) after the Second World War was later sharply criticised not only by Mao Zedong, but even by a host of communist parties which had repudiated what were thought to be Khrushchov’s ‘capitalationist’ policies. (The CPI(M) in India became a prominent member of this group.)

While the Cold War was used as a rationalisation for the coups carried out by the USA, it was not a reason which the US establishment itself could have taken seriously. In fact, invoking the communist bogey to attack Third World nationalist regimes had the very opposite effect, of which the US establishment could not have been unaware, namely driving a host of such regimes into closer relationship with the Soviet Union: It had turned out in short to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. From Patrice Lumumba to Fidel Castro, a number of Third World leaders were pushed into seeking help from the Soviet Union because of the US opposition to what were originally just Third World nationalist projects, initiated by them, and all these leaders were sought to be eliminated by the USA for doing so.

Indeed in the case of Iran, the USA was perfectly aware, as several documents clearly show, that the Tudeh Party was contemplating no insurrection. Ironically, the CIA even launched attacks and staged demonstrations by hired thugs, pretending to be Tudeh Party members, against religious leaders in Iran, in order to bring the Tudeh into disrepute. Ayatollah Kashani’s support for the coup against Mossadegh had entirely to do with his opposition to Mossadegh’s staunch secularism and refusal to move Iran towards a theocratic State. It was this opposition that pushed Mossadegh towards the Tudeh Party. Kashani’s opposition to Mossadegh, in short, was the cause not the consequence of the latter’s shift towards the Tudeh. But the CIA did much to consolidate opposition to the Tudeh as a preparation for the coup, which again makes us return to the question: What was the cause of the US hostility to Third World nationalist regimes?

This opposition also was not just a peculiar feature of the Dulles era. It was not the mere outcome of Dulles’ rabid anti-communism which rubbed off on Third World nationalist regimes, through the argument that ‘if you are not with us then you are against us’. Even later, after Dulles had left the scene, despite the fact that the USA appeared to take a less rigid stand compared to the Dulles era, for instance, in the matter of providing ‘aid’ to Third World nationalist regimes (with the aim no doubt of undermining such nationalism from within), there has never been a case where the USA supported a Third World nationalist regime against the capital power of old colonial powers.

Two arguments which are often advanced in favour of this Cold War explanation merit a discussion in this context. One states that the US oil companies were not too keen on entering Iran and had to be persuaded by the US administration, suggesting that it was not their interests which dictated the coup. The other states that even for the US economy, access to Iranian oil was not a major consideration, since it had already sufficiently protected itself in the matter of oil supplies by its links with Saudi Arabia (through, for instance, the ARAMCO–Saudi Arabia deal).

Even if these assertions are accepted, the validity of the Cold War explanation cannot be inferred from them. In fact, as Harry Magdoff has pointed out, the CIA coup against Arbenz in Guatemala, which was launched in the wake of Arbenz’s taking over vast tracts of Guatemala’s land that had been in the possession of the United Fruit Company, was questioned by the United Fruit Company itself on the grounds that Arbenz at least had been a known entity, while the coup had unleashed all sorts of unknown players on the scene. Hence, it is not necessarily the case that a coup affected in defence of the interest of a particular multinational corporation has the connivance of that corporation itself. This is a point of some significance whose ramifications we now take up for discussion.

II

What we have argued until now is that it is neither the ‘communist threat’, nor ‘kith and kin’ considerations (Europeans being of the same race as the white Americans), nor the narrow material interests of the US companies or even of the US economy as a whole, which can adequately explain the US hostility to Third World nationalism, and in particular to the Mossadegh Regime. Indeed as the Guatemalan case suggests there is something deeper, more visceral, in the US antipathy towards Third World nationalism. Just as there is an implacable ideological opposition to communism within the USA, because of which the Soviet Union’s desire for peaceful co-existence was never genuinely reciprocated by the USA, likewise there is an implacable opposition to Third World nationalism.

This opposition obviously gets expressed in the wake of specific steps that Third World nationalist regimes take against multinational corporations, but it is not just motivated by the defence of such specific interests, as David Horowitz, in the days before his embrace of rabid anti-Leftism, had naively argued in his book From Yalta to Vietnam. Third World nationalism, in short, is simply ‘unacceptable to metropolitan capitalism, just as Communism was’.

The reason is not just that it threatens to take resources away from the control of the metropolitan capital, but also that while doing so it propagates an ideology that considers leaving such resources in the hands of the metropolitan capital to be fundamentally unacceptable to the people of the Third World. Third World nationalism too, in short, like communism, breaks down the ‘epistemic closure’ that capitalism tries to impose on all discourse.

Let me explain what I mean. One can argue quite realistically that in a slave society the happiness of the people, at large, depends upon the happiness of the slave-owner, for if he is displeased then he would flog the slaves with such brutality that it would make everyone unhappy. ‘Rational’ conduct on the part of slaves in a slave society therefore consists in making the slave-owner happy and acquiescing to their own abject state.

At the same time, however, if one looks at the matter from an ‘outside’ perspective, by standing as it were outside of the system itself, then one sees the absurdity of this system, and with it the absurdity of the proposition that the slave-owner’s happiness is synonymous with society’s happiness. This proposition, no matter how valid within the system, loses its validity once we step outside the system.

There is, in other words, an ‘internal’ perspective and an ‘external’ perspective in this matter; the first looks at the system from within, in accordance with the logic of the system itself, while the second looks at the system from the outside, on the basis of what Paul Baran in his opus The Political Economy of Growth had called ‘objective reason’. ² To prevent the application of ‘objective reason’, to prevent an ‘external’ look at the system, to ensure that the perspective on it must be hermetically sealed so as to remain locked within its confines, is what I have called the application of an ‘epistemic closure’.

Imperialism always wants such an ‘epistemic closure’ within the context in which it operates, while Third World nationalism constitutes a rupture of this ‘epistemic closure’. The affinity between communism and Third World nationalism arose in the past, not just because the Soviet Union had helped such nationalism, or because the Third World nationalism was ‘crypto-communist’ the way John Foster Dulles portrayed it. It arose because both represented in their own different ways a rupture of this ‘epistemic closure’. Each opened up a discourse that went beyond imperialism, and this was unacceptable to imperialism.

The ‘Domino theory’ which was used as the justification for the Vietnam War, was obviously empirically absurd when interpreted literally, but it was a refracted way of expressing, on the part of imperialism, this phenomenon of the rupture of the ‘epistemic closure’ that it would wish to impose on the world.

It is this desire for ‘epistemic closure’ that makes capital shun fiscal deficits and state activism in ‘demand management’, and it is also this desire for ‘epistemic closure’ that makes capital hostile to the idea of a permanently existing public sector. It is this again, which underlies the hostility to communism, rather than just the consideration that the metropolitan country can no longer trade on its own terms with a country ‘lost to’ communism, as Baran and Sweezy suggest in Monopoly Capital. ³

It could, of course, be argued, with reason, that the very process of imposing such an ‘epistemic closure’ through wars and coups, has the opposite effect of exposing the absurdity of the proposition that the Third World people’s interest lies in acquiescing with the metropolitan capital (in parallel with the slave-owner analogy); such a method of imposition persuades even the most sceptical of the Third World people about the need for a world beyond imperialism. Why, it may therefore be asked, should imperialism be so witless as to impose an ‘epistemic closure’ in a manner that increases the likelihood of its rupture?

But imperialism uses all the weapons in its armoury for achieving its ends, no matter how problematic from its own point of view, such use may be. After all, it fought one of the bloodiest wars in human history—the Vietnam War, in a country which had little mineral wealth, which posed no threats to the US security, and which was not in the least interested in ‘exporting revolution’ beyond its own immediate neighbourhood—even though that war had the effect of radicalising a whole generation of American youth, and revealing the reality of imperialism to the world in a manner that no amount of theoretical elaboration would have done.

No matter what its own post-mortems show about such wars and coups, it would repeat the same course of aggressive action if a similar situation arises yet again. Eisenhower was convinced that the coup against Mossadegh had been a resounding success and had been happy about its outcome. Obama’s comments during his presidency suggest a somewhat different view on the coup. But to infer from Obama’s post-mortem which is different from that of Eisenhower, that the USA ‘has learned its lessons’ would be a serious mistake. This is because such wars and coups against Third World nationalist regimes are immanent to metropolitan capital, for reasons we have suggested.

Of course, as of now the process of globalisation of finance has ‘spontaneously’ enforced an ‘epistemic closure’, with such outstanding success that Third World nationalism itself appears passé. But the hostility of imperialism, presently with international finance capital as its main actor, supported not by one particular super-power but by a whole array of major nation-states, including Third World ones and including our own, has not by any means lessened towards Third World nationalism. From the fact that the dog is not barking at the moment, one must not infer that it would not bark if an ‘undesirable’ intruder entered the premises.