The Factory Was Always the Target

Photo by Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

Yesterday’s strikes on Iranian steel plants are being covered as news. They are also history repeating. Here is the history.

When US and Israeli strikes hit Khuzestan Steel and Mobarakeh Steel yesterday, Iran had seen this before. In 1941, Allied forces invaded a neutral country, expelled its engineers, stripped its factories, and intercepted industrial machinery at sea — all to ensure Iran could not build and manufacture on its own terms. The weapons are more precise today. The agenda behind them, the historical record suggests, is not.

Yesterday’s strikes were presented to the world as part of a campaign against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear and military threat. But a look at history suggests the target is not Iran’s government. It is Iran’s industrial independence itself.

In 1938, Iran contracted the German Demag-Krupp consortium to build a steel complex at Karaj. When the Allies invaded in 1941 — expelling the Germans whose presence was the stated justification — they seized factory equipment on-site and intercepted machinery still at sea. The German threat was gone. The factory remained unbuilt.

What followed is the most revealing part of this history. In 1953, Britain and the United States overthrew Iran’s elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and reinstalled Mohammad Reza Shah — their man, brought back to power by CIA and MI6 at Western expense. If the obstruction of Iranian industry had ever truly been about security threats or hostile governments, this was the moment it should have ended. Iran now had a ruler who was, by any measure, a Western client. He posed no ideological challenge. He sought no independent foreign policy. He was, in the bluntest sense, compliant.

It made no difference. The World Bank refused to finance the Karaj steel project in 1959, and blocked a revised proposal again in 1961. There was no Soviet-backed government in Tehran to justify this, no Islamic Republic, no nuclear programme, no axis of resistance — only a Shah who owed his throne to Washington and London, asking for help building a steel mill, and being refused. The message was clear: Western support for Iran was conditional not merely on political obedience, but on economic subordination. Bending the knee was not enough. Surrendering industrial ambition was the real price of Western backing.

Britain’s own ambassador to Tehran had stated this logic openly in the early 1950s, writing in declassified files that “the need for Persia is not to run the oil industry for herself but to profit from the technical ability of the West.” When Mosaddegh nationalized oil, the United States, Britain, West Germany, Sweden and others jointly refused to supply Iran with the technicians it needed to operate its own facilities. The goal was not security. It was dependence — and that goal did not change when the Shah was restored.

Iran only escaped this trap by going outside the Western sphere entirely, finalising a deal with the Soviet Union in 1966 to build the Isfahan steel plant, which came into operation in 1971. Three decades after Karaj was sabotaged, Iran got its steel industry — but only because it found a partner the West could not veto.

The nuclear framing of today’s conflict follows this same logic. Notably, Iran had reportedly agreed — just before the February 2026 strikes began — to never stockpile enriched uranium and to full IAEA verification. Oman’s foreign minister called peace “within reach.” The attacks came anyway. The steel mills hit yesterday have no nuclear function. They are Iran’s industrial backbone.

There is a bitter irony in where Reza Pahlavi — the son of that same Shah — now stands. Pahlavi has cheered on the US-Israeli strikes, calling them “humanitarian intervention” and urging Trump and Netanyahu to keep targeting the regime. He has positioned himself as Iran’s government-in-waiting, ready to lead the country into a Western-aligned future. But the steel mills hit yesterday — Khuzestan Steel in Ahvaz, Mobarakeh Steel in Isfahan — are precisely the kind of industrial infrastructure his father spent his reign trying and failing to build, blocked at every turn by the same Western powers now doing the bombing. Reza Pahlavi is cheering on the destruction of his father’s unrealised industrial legacy, apparently in the belief that this time, Western support will be different. History offers little reason for that faith. His father was their man too.

The lesson of this history is uncomfortable but clear. Western powers have opposed Iranian industrialization under every conceivable Iranian government — under a modernizing shah allied with Germany, under a democratically elected nationalist, under a pro-Western client restored by coup, and now under an Islamic Republic. The form of Iran’s government has changed repeatedly. The Western response to Iranian industrial ambition has not. The Islamic Republic is the pretext of this era. The pattern is far older, and far more honest about what is really at stake.