• Analysis

Destroying the Rights of Man

As American and Israeli bombs fall on Iran, we witness the definitive proof that Energy makes Might, and Might makes itself Right — unilaterally, regardless of political principles, democratic values, or human rights.

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Destroying the Rights of Man

February 28, 2026

Today, as American and Israeli bombs fall on Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, and cities across Iran — killing Supreme Leader Khamenei and dozens of senior officials in what the Pentagon calls “Operation Epic Fury” — we are witnessing the definitive proof of a thesis that modern political history has been writing in blood for over a century:

Energy makes Might, and Might makes itself Right — unilaterally, regardless of political principles, democratic values, or human rights.

This is not merely the ancient observation that the strong do what they will while the weak suffer what they must. Modern technology has refined the equation. The nation that controls energy — oil, nuclear fuel, the infrastructure of global power — possesses the capacity to reshape entire regions by force. And that capacity, once exercised, retroactively manufactures its own legitimacy.

The bombs fall first; the justifications are assembled afterward.

The Lie That Bombs Build Democracy

Modern political history demonstrates beyond doubt that military force cannot build democracy. You do not liberate a people by destroying their cities. You do not establish self-governance by assassinating a nation’s leaders in broad daylight on a Saturday morning while millions walk to work and children sit in school.

The stated aims of today’s strikes — destroying Iran’s nuclear program, eliminating its missile capabilities, and, as both President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu have openly declared, toppling the regime — are dressed in the language of security and liberation. But the pattern is unmistakable.

The true aim of American-Israeli violence in the Middle East has always been to destabilize the region so that Israel, backed by American capital, can reshape it according to Western strategic and economic interests — not according to the self-determined aspirations of the peoples of Iran, the broader Middle East, or the emerging Asian bloc economies.

When the American empire destroys another independent nation’s sovereignty, the purpose is to sow economic insecurity among its people — to create a vacuum of power that can be exploited by the capitalist empires and allied powers that profit from that insecurity.

Chaos as Strategy

War and chaos are not failures of policy. They are the policy.

The destruction of a nation’s leadership and infrastructure creates power vacuums that place already vulnerable populations in catastrophic danger. The Iranian people have endured nearly five decades of Western economic sanctions — measures that crashed the rial, drove millions into poverty, destroyed purchasing power for food and medicine, and deliberately starved a civilization into submission.

Today’s military assault piles physical devastation on top of economic warfare, pushing the people of Iran into an even more precarious position.

Imperial power does not rise without victims along its bloody path. And the historical record is unambiguous about what follows the chaos that empires create: more dangerous figures rise to fill the void. Where there is tyranny, there are usually far worse forces waiting in the wings.

The assassination of a nation’s leadership does not produce freedom — it produces a succession crisis exploited by the most ruthless actors available, whether domestic opportunists or foreign-installed puppets.

The January 2026 protests in Iran, met with a brutal crackdown that left thousands dead, already demonstrated the regime’s fragility and the suffering of its people. What today’s strikes guarantee is not liberation but a deeper spiral of instability — precisely the conditions under which extremism and authoritarianism thrive.

The Missing Narrative: 1953

There is a profound irony — and a deliberately suppressed historical truth — at the center of this story that must be told in full.

In 1951, Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister — the first such leader anywhere in the Middle East — moved to nationalize Iran’s oil industry.The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later British Petroleum) had for decades extracted Iran’s petroleum wealth under contracts so lopsided that its net profits between 1945 and 1950 were nearly three times the royalties it paid to Iran.

Mosaddegh and the Iranian parliament said: enough. The oil belongs to the Iranian people.

The British response was not negotiation. It was economic siege and covert war. Britain imposed a global embargo on Iranian oil, deployed warships to the Persian Gulf, and launched a propaganda campaign to portray Mosaddegh — an avowed anti-communist — as a Soviet sympathizer.

When economic strangulation alone proved insufficient, Britain turned to the United States.

In August 1953, the CIA (under the codename Operation Ajax) and Britain’s MI6 (Operation Boot) orchestrated a coup d’état against Mosaddegh’s government. Led by CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt Jr. — grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt — the operation funded opposition newspapers, bribed politicians, clergy, and military officers, and manufactured street protests designed to simulate popular unrest.

After an initial failed attempt that sent Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fleeing to Rome, the CIA regrouped. On August 19, 1953, paid mobs and allied military units stormed Mosaddegh’s residence. Nearly 300 people died in the fighting.

Iran’s democracy was crushed.

Mosaddegh was arrested, tried, sentenced to three years in solitary confinement, and then confined under house arrest until his death in 1967. The Shah was restored to absolute power and ruled as an increasingly autocratic Western client for twenty-six years, his secret police — the SAVAK — trained by the CIA and Mossad to suppress all dissent.

As a condition of the coup’s success, five American petroleum companies, Royal Dutch Shell, and France’s Compagnie Française des Pétroles were granted shares of Iran’s oil — replacing the British monopoly with a Western consortium. The Shah called this a “victory for Iran.” It was, in fact, the wholesale theft of Iranian sovereignty by foreign powers.

The CIA did not formally acknowledge its role in the coup until 2013 — sixty years later.

The Arc of Consequences

The 1953 coup is not a footnote. It is the foundation upon which every subsequent crisis between Iran and the West has been built.

The Shah’s Western-backed authoritarianism produced exactly the backlash that repression always produces. The 1979 Islamic Revolution that overthrew the Shah was explicitly framed by its leaders as a repudiation of American imperial interference — the embassy seizure justified, in the revolutionaries’ eyes, by the fact that the same embassy had served as the staging ground for the 1953 coup.

The Revolution produced the Islamic Republic. The Islamic Republic produced four decades of Western sanctions. The sanctions produced mass poverty. The poverty produced popular unrest. And now, in February 2026, that unrest has been instrumentalized as the pretext for a full-scale military assault — by the same powers that destroyed Iran’s democracy seventy-three years ago.

The circle is complete.

The nations that crushed Iranian self-governance in 1953 now bomb Iran in 2026 while calling on the Iranian people to “take over your government” and claiming to deliver freedom.

President Trump’s words from his announcement — “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations” — carry a weight of historical irony so enormous it borders on cruelty.

The Iranian people had a democratic government. America and Britain destroyed it.

Energy, Empire, and the Destruction of Rights

The philosophical architecture of the modern West — the Enlightenment ideals of natural rights, democratic governance, the sovereignty of peoples — was never designed to survive contact with the realities of energy politics.

The Rights of Man, as Thomas Paine articulated them, presuppose a world in which political legitimacy flows from the consent of the governed.But when the governed sit atop resources that empires require, consent becomes an obstacle to be removed.

Iran’s great sin, in 1951 and today, is the same: asserting sovereign control over its own energy resources and strategic position. Mosaddegh nationalized oil. The Islamic Republic pursued nuclear sovereignty. Both were met with the same response — economic siege followed by the destruction of the state.

This is the lesson that the Rights of Man cannot survive: that in a world ordered by energy, the nation that controls the means of power will always claim the right to define whose rights matter.

Democracy is celebrated when it produces compliant governments. When it produces independent ones, it is overthrown.

Today’s strikes — launched just two days after Oman’s foreign minister announced that Iran had agreed to degrade its nuclear stockpiles and accept full IAEA verification, a diplomatic breakthrough deliberately obliterated by military action — make the cynicism of this arrangement impossible to ignore.

Diplomacy was working. It was destroyed because the objective was never a nuclear deal. The objective was, and has always been, control.

The bombs that fall on Iran today are not new. They are the latest chapter in a story that began when the CIA and MI6 first decided that Iranian democracy was incompatible with Western oil profits.

What changes is only the scale of the violence and the sophistication of the justifications.

The Iranian people deserve what every people deserve: the right to determine their own future, free from the interference of foreign empires. That right was stolen from them in 1953. It has been systematically denied to them through decades of sanctions, isolation, and now open military assault.

History will judge the architects of Operation Epic Fury as it has judged the architects of Operation Ajax: as destroyers of the rights they claimed to defend.

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