The West has a remarkable talent for manufacturing its own enemies. Mohammad Mossadegh was Iran’s democratically elected prime minister. His crime was not abolishing elections or erecting concentration camps. His crime was insisting that Iranian oil should primarily benefit Iranians rather than foreign corporations. So Britain and the United States helped overthrow him, replacing democracy with the Shah’s dictatorship. Every lecture about freedom delivered since then has had to compete with the memory of 1953.

The pattern never really changed. Democracy is applauded when it delivers governments aligned with Western interests. When voters choose the wrong people, democracy suddenly becomes optional. Coups, sanctions, dictators, invasions, then bewilderment when the puppet eventually falls and something far more hostile takes its place. Western hegemony has spent decades killing democracy abroad, only to discover that the regimes it installs are eventually overthrown as well. Few geopolitical strategies have been so spectacularly self-defeating.