Mosaddeqs Nationalization of Oil in Iran Essay -- Foreign Policy Poli

Mosaddeq's Nationalization of Oil in Iran The world of foreign policy is like a multi-sided game of chess. Moves are made with varying degrees of calculation and skill, and nothing happens in a vacuum. Everything that happens affects the other players' sets of options and levels of risk. In analyzing historical events in international relations, it is incumbent upon the analyst to take into consideration the historical and regional context to what happened. At the time of the coup that overthrew Premier Mosaddeq, several world events had just happened: key were the 1949 Chinese Revolution and Iran's 1951 nationalization of its oil industry. The Korean War was ending, and the Viet Minh guerrillas were harassing the French colonial regime in Vietnam. Five days before the coup in Iran, the Soviet Union tested its first hydrogen bomb (Encyclopaedia Britannica). According to Daniel Ellsberg in his book Papers on the War (1972), after 1949, no U.S. president could politically afford to be in power while another major country "went Communist" (dictating that they take actions to f...