To understand Iran, it is necessary to delve into its ancient history and its turbulent contemporary era. Persia, during the Achaemenid Empire (550-330 BC), was perhaps the first great superpower in history. That golden age turned into decline under the Qajar dynasty, a Turkic monarchy that ruled Persia from 1789 to 1925 and had to accept the fragmentation of the country under pressure from the British and Russian empires. The Anglo-Russian Pact of 1907 and the discovery of oil in 1908 sealed this subjugation and transformed the territory into a colony. de facto Subordinated to the interests of London and Moscow, the military coup of Reza Khan Pahlavi, initiated in 1921, opened a period of transition that culminated in 1924-25 with the establishment of autocratic modernization. The most serious attempt at real sovereignty in the 20th century was the nationalization of oil by Prime Minister Mohamed Mossadegh in the 1950s, which challenged this. By crushing this democratic and reformist path in 1953 through a plot orchestrated by the CIA and MI6, the West restored the Shah's absolute power and exterminated the secular opposition. The systematic repression by SAVAK, the Shah's political police, ultimately propelled the 1979 Revolution irreversibly toward religious fundamentalism. However, it cannot be forgotten that the United States, France, and the United Kingdom played a key role in the return of Ayatollah Ali Khomeini in 1979 as a means of opposing Soviet expansion in the region.