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Multiple things can be true at once. The Iranian people are engaged in a legitimate popular struggle against an entrenched political elite that has failed to meet their material needs and has answered demands for freedom and dignity with unconscionable violence and repression. At the same time, the U.S. has no political, legal, or moral basis to intervene in Iran. The dire state of the country, as is true of Venezuela and Cuba, the two other nations targeted by the latest neo-neoconservative regime change enthusiasts blinded by imperial hubris and a fetishization of military power, is in significant part the result of Washington’s own policies.

Since 1979, the U.S. has pursued policies aimed at ensuring the failure of the Iranian Revolution. In the decades that followed, and with particular acceleration under the Trump administration, this effort crystallized into a sanctions regime designed not to promote democracy or human rights but to drive ordinary Iranians into a state of immiseration. This strategy, deployed against governments that Washington unilaterally deems problematic, occasionally for defensible reasons but far more often for refusing to subordinate themselves to U.S. imperial and corporate power, has been linked to an estimated 38 million deaths worldwide since 1971.

In Iran, as elsewhere, this policy has rested on the cynical belief that mass suffering will produce political unrest advantageous to the interests of the United States and, in this case, of Israel as well. The quiet part was said out loud by Senator John Fetterman, who mocked the government’s recent inability to quell economic discontent through modest financial inducements and celebrated this as “a testament to how our nation and Israel broke Iran.”

The disregard for international law, democratic principles, and human life that underpins this slow violence (see for example Madeleine Albright’s 1996 insistence that sanctions killing as many as half a million Iraqi children was “worth it”) is more evident today than ever. The hypocrisy of an administration that has enabled a genocide in Gaza, decapitated a government in pursuit of oil, threatens to militarily seize the territory of a sovereign country, and condemns repression in Iran while defending public execution of Renee Good by ICE is not lost on anyone.

Beyond sanctions, the template for deeper U.S. involvement in Iran appears poised to follow a familiar, troubling playbook. If Washington moves toward directing regime change under the guise of “supporting” Iranian freedom, the most likely beneficiary would be the exiled son of the former Shah, who has not lived in the country for decades. Such an intervention would amount to a second U.S.-backed ouster of an Iranian government to reinstall a member of the Pahlavi dynasty.

The Shah’s son, who has cultivated warm ties with Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, and has been rebuffed by Iranian human rights activists, does not represent a pathway toward Iran’s democratization. The pursuit of U.S. intervention today then might well produce consequences as calamitous and as unpredictable as those unleashed in 1953. This broader history must therefore remain central to any serious assessment of the current crisis in Iran.

The Oil Curse in Iran

Before Venezuela possessed the largest proven oil reserves in the world, that distinction belonged to Iran. More than a century ago, a weak, illegitimate, and cash-strapped Qajar Dynasty sold the rights to petroleum prospecting to British mining magnate William Knox D’Arcy, a speculative venture in a country with no existing oil industry and no guarantee of........

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