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The Price of Not Knowing: Iran, Corporate Interests, and America's Cycle of Violence
Why did the United States help topple a democratic government in Iran some 70 years ago—and how did that decision create the conditions we’re seeing today?
Mar 11, 2026
Every war of choice depends on public complicity.
Fifty-nine percent of Americans disapprove, but what can we do to stop this war? The justifications coming from the Trump administration are, by any honest accounting, muddled, contradictory, and changing by the day. There are so many unanswered questions, but a good place to start would be by asking how did Iran become our enemy in the first place? Why did the United States help topple a democratic government in Iran some 70 years ago—and how did that decision create the conditions we’re seeing today?
When Iran Was a Democracy
To understand how Iran became an adversary, we can start by returning to the decision made by the United States and Britain to overthrow Iran’s Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh.
Mosaddegh was the sort of leader the US should have loved. He was anti-communist, at a time when containing the Soviet Union was the paramount US foreign policy aim. He pursued reforms that expanded the rights of women, and the political and economic conditions of the poor. He was widely respected internationally, and was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1951.
Few Americans know this history. In Iran, though, it is remembered as the moment when the United States claimed the country’s petroleum wealth for itself and crushed a democratic government that sought to make life better for ordinary people.
His fatal crime in the eyes of Western powers, was nationalizing Iran’s oil production, which had been controlled by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
“With the oil revenues, we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease, and backwardness among our people,” Mosaddegh said in a 1951 speech to the United Nations. “By the elimination of the power of the British company, we would also eliminate corruption and intrigue.”
For British and US leaders, a sovereign nation asserting control over its own resources, rather than bowing to a foreign corporation, was intolerable. Likewise, battling the corrupting influences of a foreign company.
The intelligence agencies of the two nations launched a campaign to destabilize the Mosaddegh government, with media disinformation, targeted bribery, harrassment, lies to religious and political leaders, and orchestrated riots.
Finally, on August 19, 1953, Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup backed by the CIA and Britain’s MI6.
The Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was restored to power, and he appointed the CIA’s choice, General Fazlollah Zahedi, as prime minister.
The government outlawed Mosaddegh's National Front and arrested most of its leaders. The SAVAK secret police force, with funding and training from the US, conducted widespread repression. Over 130,000 were arrested, and thousands were tortured and executed. The Shah’s policies furthered the wealth and landownings of his own family and friends, while many farmers couldn't get access to land and were forced to migrate to cities and live in shanty towns.
Yet the US built warm relations with the new regime as US corporations gained control of 40% of the country’s oil fields along with access to much of the remaining output.
Blowback
By the late 1970s, resentment toward the Shah’s authoritarian rule exploded into revolution. In 1979, the Shah was overthrown and the Islamic Republic was born. The new government defined itself partly in opposition to the United States—an enemy that many Iranians believed had stolen their democracy a generation earlier.
From that moment on, relations between Washington and Tehran were marked by mistrust, hostility, and periodic confrontation.
Few Americans know this history. In Iran, though, it is remembered as the moment when the United States claimed the country’s petroleum wealth for itself and crushed a democratic government that sought to make life better for ordinary people.
A Pattern of Military Interference
The overthrow of Mosaddegh was not an isolated episode. The United States has a long history of undermining governments that put their own citizens ahead of US economic interests.
In 1954, the CIA helped engineer the overthrow of Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Árbenz. His crime? Land reforms that would have given poor farmers opportunities for a livelihood while taking, and paying for, land unused by the United Fruit Company.
The result of the coup was a series of dictatorships. Political opponents, labor unions leaders, farmers, and human rights activists were imprisoned, “disappeared,” and executed. Wave after wave of genocidal massacres targeted Indigenous villagers. Land reform was reversed and poverty deepened.
We set up the next war when we fail to reckon with choices made in previous conflicts that created instability, oppression, abuses, poverty, and resentment.
Many Americans enjoy visiting this beautiful Central American country, but few know the role the US government played in impoverishing this small nation. Likewise, those calling for the deporting of Guatemalans rarely acknowledge the reasons these refugees are fleeing their communities.
Two decades later, the United States helped destabilize the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile, culminating in the US-supported military coup in 1973 led by Augusto Pinochet. The resulting dictatorship lasted for 17 years, leading to the exile of an estimated 200,000, the torture of tens of thousands, and the death of some 3,000 Chileans. The regime’s extreme economic policies brought about cuts in the safety net, a massive buildup in military spending, and high unemployment.
US copper mining companies benefited from the coup, receiving compensation for the nationalizations that had taken place under the Allende government. More importantly, international mining companies were permitted to extract enormous profits from subsequent mining operations.
In addition to enriching these foreign corporations, the coup prevented Allende from leading a successful socialist government that might have inspired others across the Americas to mobilize for more egalitarian governments.
Each case had its own circumstances. But the pattern is unmistakable: When governments around the world pursue policies perceived as threatening US corporate interests, Washington all too often resorts to clandestine interference or military attacks. And all too often, the justifications and patriotic propaganda is all that Americans learn about what took place.
There have been important exceptions to the widespread ignorance. US Marine Smedley Butler, who at the time of his death was the most decorated Marine in US history, saw firsthand who benefited from US wars. He wrote this in a 1935 magazine article:
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903.
For many Americans, these episodes remain obscure chapters of history. Yet, in much of the world, these events set the stage for decades of poverty and political repression.
The Choice to Support War
Wars are often described as tragic inevitabilities—conflicts that somehow spiral beyond anyone’s understanding. In reality, we set up the next war when we fail to reckon with choices made in previous conflicts that created instability, oppression, abuses, poverty, and resentment.
- Well-connected corporations who insist on military support for their control of resources abroad, even when this means undermining another country’s sovereignty, economy, and political stability.
- Political leaders who put Americans in uniform in harms way and spend trillions in taxpayer dollars to support corporate interests abroad, instead of looking out for the well-being of ordinary people.
- Apologists for violence abroad, who generate anti-communist, anti-Islamic, or other propaganda instead of honest analysis.
- Media outlets that repeat official narratives without scrutiny, and downplay the harms caused by US foreign policy choices, especially when those impacted are of different races or religions.
- Defense contractors who profit from excessive military spending. (US defense stocks have been on the upswing as a $50 billion supplemental defense spending package looms, according to Bloomberg.)
- And US citizens who buy the war propaganda, look away from the suffering, and disregard the reasons refugees may be fleeing the chaos and violence.
Each group occupies its own circle of complicity, and each gains in a different way. Some may claim ignorance and others may argue that they were powerless to intervene. But history suggests that silence and complacency can be powerful enablers of atrocities.
What We Pay for Not Knowing
After disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there are signs that this time might be different. A majority of Americans disapprove of the US bombing of Iran, according to a CNN poll taken immediately following the launch of the war. American service members have begun paying with their lives. The Center for American Progress estimates the war’s price tag already exceeds $5 billion—with safety-net programs in free fall and gas prices rising.
But it will take more than passive disapproval to stop yet another war of choice.
Reckoning with the abuses of the powerful and naming those profiting from the willful blindness in the face of atrocities are first steps toward ending the cycles of violence. All of us pay for these wars, whether through lives lost, democracies imperiled, excessive public spending on a bloated military-industrial complex, or through the neglect of needed investments at home.
An informed public—asking questions and refusing complicity—is the first step to stopping this and future wars of choice.
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Laura Dogu: The American Coup Expert Appointed by Trump as Top US Envoy in Venezuela
Dogu’s appointment ultimately signals not innovation but continuity: a recalibration of tactics in pursuit of the same objective that has defined US policy toward the Bolivarian Revolution for decades—regime change.
Feb 13, 2026
Laura Dogu, newly appointed US envoy to Venezuela, is described by the Los Angeles Times as an appropriate choice because she “navigated crises” in Nicaragua and Honduras during periods of “social and political volatility.” What the LA Times fails to add is that it was precisely Dogu’s job to create crisis and volatility in both countries.
In Latin America she is widely regarded, for good reason, as the “US ambassador of interventions and coups.”
The LA Times appears entirely relaxed about a US diplomat’s job being to meddle in the internal politics of a country whose president the US has just kidnapped in an operation resulting in the murder over 100 people and involving the bombing of key public buildings and health facilities.
Dogu enters the fray “leveraging her experience with authoritarian regimes” and her “deep Latin American expertise.” The LA Times implies that her job is likely to be proactive, looking for ways to ease out the Chavista government and replace it with one more to Washington’s liking, even if that takes a while.
Nicaragua
Signaling that this is the case, the LA Times reporter asked right-wing opposition figures from Nicaragua for their opinions of Dogu, presumably on the basis that she is charged with working with similar quislings in her new role. Predictably, they praised her, admitting to having had clandestine meetings with her when she was based in the country and noting her public support for opposition groups.
Dogu was US ambassador in Managua from 2015 until October 2018, a period coinciding with the preparations and then the coup attempt that began in April 2018 and was defeated in July. At the start of her term, she had relatively cordial relations with the government. That changed after President Daniel Ortega was reelected in 2016 with an increased popular mandate. It became clear to Washington that electoral means to oust the Sandinistas lacked sufficient public support.
Instead, as the State Department admitted, the US concentrated their efforts on “civil society” groups led by opposition figures, “limiting their contact” with the elected government. It later emerged that, in the run-up to the April 2018 insurrection, millions of dollars were spent promoting such groups.
When the coup attempt fizzled, President Ortega explicitly identified Laura Dogu, as Washington’s representative, of being “the leader and financier of this conspiracy, the destruction, the fires, the torture, the disrespect for human dignity, the desecration of corpses, and other acts carried out with cruelty against all Nicaraguans marked by the great sin of being Sandinistas.” Within three months, Washington replaced her.
Honduras
In Honduras, Xiomara Castro of the progressive Libre Party became president in January 2022. Laura Dogu arrived in Tegucigalpa as US ambassador just three months later.
The Center for Political and Economic Research (CEPR) catalogued some of her egregious interferences including with energy and tax reforms, creation of a Constitutional Tribunal, replacement of the attorney general, and the building of a prison.
By 2023, Dogu was already drawing criticism from the Honduran foreign minister, who asked her to “stop commenting on internal Honduran matters.” He criticized her again for similar reasons, in December 2024, after she held a series of meetings with NGOs critical of the government.
In August 2024, President Castro complained about Dogu, after the US diplomat criticized Honduran officials for meeting with their counterparts in Caracas. The ambassador characterized this meeting as “sitting next to a drug trafficker."
Then after a conflict with Dogu over Honduras’s extradition treaty with the US in September 2024 and a spate of rumors about the president’s family, Castro warned that a coup attempt was underway. Dogu concluded her term in Honduras before the presidential elections at the end of 2025, where the US did, in fact, decisively interfere.
Venezuela
The LA Times ingenuously commented that Dogu was “an unusual pick signaling a strategic shift in US policy.” It was neither. US policy remains regime change, but the tactics have shifted in response to the successful and unified resistance of the Bolivarian Revolution.
Venezuelan analyst Francisco Rodriguez noted: “Laura Dogu presented credentials as diplomatic representative of the US to the government of [acting President] Delcy Rodríguez today, that would count as an act of formal recognition.”
As for Dogu being “an unusual pick,” her record, as shown above, suggests a continuation of business as usual. CEPR put it bluntly: “Dogu’s appointment suggests that the administration sought someone with experience in aggressively interfering in a host country’s domestic affairs.”
There is nothing unusual about that. Between 1898 and 1994, the US perpetrated coups and government changes in Latin America at least 41 times. Dogu now presides over just another such attempt. The only reasons Washington itself hasn’t suffered a coup, Latin Americans quip, is because there is no US embassy there.
Far from breaking with the past, Dogu actually invokes it: “We never left the Cold War in Latin America,” she said.
Dogu recently tweeted: “Today I met with Delcy Rodríguez and Jorge Rodríguez to reiterate the three phases that @SecRubio has outlined regarding Venezuela: stabilization, economic recovery and reconciliation, and transition.”
The comment drew an immediate repudiation from the aforementioned Jorge Rodríguez, president of Venezuela’s National Assembly. The failure by Dogu to refer to him and acting President Delcy Rodríguez by their formal titles is a disrespectful snub. He characterized her remarks as “diplomatic blackmail” and a “colonial roadmap.” The Venezuelan leadership may have a gun held to their heads, but they continue to respond militantly.
For now, Dogu is concentrating on the “stabilization and economic recovery” phases of the Rubio dictate. The more contentious third phase will be “transition.”
In a telling pivot from its previous myth-making that the “opposition [is] more unified than ever,” the LA Times now admits that Dogu is just the right official to be foisted on Venezuela because of her experience navigating “fragmented opposition movements.” The opposition to the Chavista government has long been fractious despite hundreds of millions of dollars pumped into “democracy promotion” by the US.
Contrary to the myths in the corporate press, María Corina Machado and her hand-picked surrogate Edmundo González Urrutia may not be the people’s choice in Venezuela. No lesser authority than Donald Trump himself commented that Machado “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country.”
If the claims that the opposition won the July 2024 presidential by a 70% landslide were credible, why didn’t González present his evidence when summoned by Venezuela’s supreme court? Failing to do so left no constitutional basis for him to be declared the winner.
But that was the whole point of the Washington’s interference in backing an astroturf opposition with more traction inside the Beltway than in Caracas. The US objective was not to win the contest but to delegitimize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The deadly sanctions—illegal unilateral coercive measures—were explicitly designed as collective punishment to erode Maduro’s authority with his compatriots.
And when that failed and the Bolivarian Revolution prevailed, Washington escalated further, culminating in the January 3 kidnapping of a constitutional head of state. That military action formed part of its hybrid war, accompanied by sustained demonization of Maduro before the US public.
Conclusion
Laura Dogu’s appointment ultimately signals not innovation but continuity: a recalibration of tactics in pursuit of the same objective that has defined US policy toward the Bolivarian Revolution for decades—regime change through pressure, attrition, and delegitimization. Whether branded as “stabilization,” “economic recovery,” or “transition,” the underlying premise remains that Venezuela’s political future should be shaped in Washington, not Caracas.
Yet the record in Nicaragua, Honduras, and Venezuela itself suggests that external coercion has limits. Dogu’s mission will test not only Venezuela’s resilience but also the durability of the unremitting US strategy of Latin American interventions.
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The US Is Acting Like a Rogue State in Venezuela
The chaos, suffering, and violence about to unfold will be a reminder of why coups are so destructive. Whoever celebrates this should own whatever is coming.
Jan 07, 2026
After a series of strikes in the last few days, and more than two decades of attempted coups (in 2002, 2019, and 2020), warfare, sanctions, and a “Maximum Pressure Campaign,” the United States has just toppled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Maduro and his wife are standing trial for “narco-terrorism” charges, a cover to extend the War on Terror without congressional authorization, in New York, with members of his security team, along with several civilians, dead.
Far-right hardliner María Corina Machado, the leader of the opposition who has longstanding ties to the White House and even went on Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast to justify a coup based on oil wealth, was expected to be put in power. She promised to implement a vision of deep privatization under “Popular Capitalism,” modeled on Augusto Pinochet, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan. However, President Donald Trump has said she “doesn’t have the support or the respect within the country,” with Vice President Delcy Rodriguez assuming the presidency, governing alongside the cabinet members remaining alive. With a CIA-imposed power vacuum and so many lingering questions, it is unclear who will govern in the near future.
In a sweeping slash, the coup took the air out of the revolutionary fervor that had carried the spirit of the Venezuelan free people since Simón Bolívar’s stunning victory against the Spanish in New Granada in 1811.
The US is now a mafia state, where oligarchs and extremists run foreign policy.
This coup is also a nod to the Kirkpatrick Doctrine, named after Reagan’s United Nations Ambassador and close foreign policy adviser, Jeane Kirkpatrick, who decreed that the US should support right-wing authoritarian or fascist regimes over democratically elected left-wing governments so long as they remain pro-capitalist and geopolitically aligned with Washington.
Meanwhile, Machado’s family were oligarchs, she helped briefly put an oligarch into power through a coup against Chávez in 2002, and she is still expected to govern following the edicts of the American oligarchical class.
The 48-hour 2002 coup, it is worth mentioning, produced the Carmona Decree, which dissolved the National Assembly, suspended the Constitution, purged democratic institutions, and appointed an oligarch-dictator, Pedro Carmona, openly revealing the anti-democratic nature of Venezuela’s far-right opposition when backed by Washington. It was never a fight for democracy and freedom, then or now.
The Trump administration just committed one of the greatest crimes in its history, in violation of democracy, sovereignty, and international laws, including Articles 1 and 2 of the Charter of the United Nations (which, by the way, was written primarily by the United States). This is a regime, not a democracy, led by a war president.
This is not about drugs; the US has created many of the very drug cartels it is fighting, while the president embraces and pardons drug traffickers like former President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in a US court of helping traffic more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States, killing more Americans than on 9/11.
This coup, and the preceding drone strikes, were likely directed by the same CIA that, during the Cold War, worked directly with drug traffickers to advance US geopolitical goals, most infamously facilitating the flow of narcotics through Los Angeles, devastating Black communities with heroin and crack, while the proceeds were used to arm the Contras in Nicaragua, who committed atrocious war crimes.
It was also the same CIA that helped prop up the brutal far-right paramilitaries in Colombia, borne out of a war against left-wing guerrillas, paramilitaries which are now among the largest cocaine traffickers on Earth and committed various crimes against humanity including the False Positives Scandal.
There is no evidence for any of the claims the administration has been making on its drug strikes, and all evidence points to the dead being fishermen, blown up in international waters, another war crime. Even if they were traffickers, Trump has cajoled traffickers who kiss the ring and add to his family's billions.
It would have taken the small motorboats at least 10 refuelings to get to US shores; they were never going to the US. And should pharmaceutical company CEOs, or street-drug peddlers, get killed by missiles in Manhattan? This is ridiculous on its face.
This coup is also the death blow to the liberal order the US helped create with the Allies after the Second World War.
The administration is claiming that everyone is celebrating this coup, but support for this war is nil, both among Americans and Venezuelans. Western media coverage has overwhelmingly elevated Venezuelans who support the US-backed coup not because they are representative, but because they are disproportionately wealthy, urban, English-speaking, and geographically accessible to foreign journalists—often living in elite neighborhoods or abroad—while Chavismo’s base is concentrated in marginalized urban peripheries, rural zones, factories, and barrios that Western reporters rarely enter or even attempt to understand. Highlighting their support also helps manufacture support for the coup in the name of “balance,” while serving the corporate interests that fund most of Western media.
Moreover, following Covid-19, Venezuela'a economy, thanks to the relaxation of sanctions, had been faring better, while most of the population, though, yes, governed by a brutal dictatorship, were given public healthcare, education, literacy, roads, transportation, medicine, and food baskets, thanks to left-wing reforms (called Misiones).
The US is about to put in another brutal dictatorship, but one that cuts all these programs, selling the country away to American capitalists while obnoxiously screaming about freedom and democracy. When US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was arguing that countries in “our hemisphere” can’t be governed by "hostile regimes" or trade with US adversaries (a line that has been repeated by others in the administration), he was revealing that this isn’t actually about self-government or democracy.
Washington is refusing to acknowledge that it helped produce Venezuela’s highly authoritarian “Apertura” (Opening) era, following Venezuela’s discoveries of vast oil reserves, where the overwhelming majority of the resulting wealth was given to the very rich and Western energy companies. Those protesting were brutally repressed, jailed, tortured, or killed. It is against the backdrop of this inequality and repression that Hugo Chávez was elected. Chávez was a reaction, and the US, through this coup, is ensuring a repeat of those very conditions.
Toppling Maduro is about natural resources, of which Venezuela has trillions of dollars worth, and geopolitical dominance, in a region where US “adversaries” are increasingly popular. There is a strong indication that Cuba might be next, something that Marco Rubio has wanted for a very long time. Trump has already threatened Colombia, Mexico, Panama, and others.
This kind of arm-flexing destroys any kind of rules or credibility around sovereignty and democracy. Now, when the Western democracies claim to oppose Israel, Russia, or China’s wars of civilizational rejuvenation, whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or Taiwan, their moral and legal complaints will be utterly and completely indefensible.
I'm sure the military-industrial complex is elated at its added power and wealth, which will, just like in Iraq, win out on trillions of dollars of contracts and stock valuation. The chaos, suffering, and violence about to unfold will be a reminder of why coups are so destructive. Whoever celebrates this should own whatever is coming.
The US is now a mafia state, where oligarchs and extremists run foreign policy, much like Russia and Iran. Companies and billionaires, not the people, determine US foreign policy interests.
This coup is also the death blow to the liberal order the US helped create with the Allies after the Second World War. The US is handing a victory over to the very forces it claims to topple; it is just too short-sighted to know it yet.
There are hundreds of thousands of dissenting troops, guerrillas, cartels, colectivos, and Chavistas, whose wealth and power depended on this government. Expect blowback soon, and then inhumane repression by occupying forces.
Also expect goalpost-moving; make them own it, and never let them move it. The media, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, New York Post, and all the right-wing imperial propaganda mills parading as journalists, have attempted to manufacture consent for this war. They have repeated the Trump regime’s propaganda, unchallenged, conflating neutrality for objectivity.
CNN’s Erin Burnett, whose husband’s Citigroup stock is up almost 5% since the coup, said that Venezuela’s 30 million people were now “owned by the United States.” That’s the quality of supposedly critical media in the United States at the moment.
Meanwhile, CBS News’ Maggie Brennan even pressed Marco Rubio on whether the socialist regime was really gone, given that they only took out Maduro (making Rubio seem like the dove, in that scenario). On far-right media, including Fox News, pundits have casually floated more US interventions for natural resources, claimed that Latin America “belongs to the United States,” argued for the US to have “subordinate vassals,” and mentioned using Venezuela as a prison and labor colony.
These outlets ran multiple stories running cover for the Trump administration's crimes, or platformed "experts" backed by oil and defense companies, and elevated “dissidents”—many of whom come from the old oligarchical families, the same whose wealth was redistributed to the poor under Chavismo, indistinguishable from the Cuban dissidents from the Batista era who helped launder support for the Bay of Pigs invasion—repeatedly supporting crimes against humanity.
The same can be said of supposedly nonpartisan think tanks that, backed by money from energy companies and defense contractors, have run favorable “analyses” of US coups in Latin America and platformed corrupt Latin American leaders whitewashing US crimes. They are, now and forever, stenographers of power.
They will attempt to spin the motives, intentions, and consequences of this horrific coup and conveniently throw them onto scapegoats. We should not let them. Whenever anyone tries to spin this war, remember this context.
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