Iran and a History of Unintended Consequences from Foreign Intervention

TL;DR

• The current crisis with Iran is not an isolated event. It is the latest chapter of a seventy-year story in which American covert and military interventions, each made by people who believed they knew better, produced consequences far worse than the problems they were meant to solve.
• From Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s to Central America in the 1980s to Iraq in 2003, every bypass of constitutional war powers has added instability, debt, and displacement that Americans are still paying for.
• The Founders set a high bar for war not because they were naive, but because they understood what happens when executives wage war without the deliberate consent of the governed. That bar exists for us.

The missiles that struck Iranian targets in 2025 and the fragile ceasefire that followed in early 2026 did not emerge from nowhere. They are the most recent consequence of a causal chain stretching back to August 1953, and of a habit of American statecraft that, decade after decade, has produced results the opposite of those intended.

This is not an argument for doing nothing. It is not an argument that American interests abroad are illegitimate, or that no foreign threat is worth confronting. It is an argument that the Founders were right: decisions of war are too consequential, too irreversible, and too expensive (in blood, in treasure, and in the stability of the regions they touch) to be made by anyone other than the representatives of the people who must bear those costs. When that bar is cleared, as it was in 1941, the nation tends to finish what it starts with broad support. When it is bypassed, the work is never finished, and the bill keeps compounding.

The Iran we are dealing with today was substantially shaped by American choices made without a declaration of war, without public debate, and without democratic accountability. So was the Central American migration crisis. So was the rise of ISIS. Understanding that history is not an exercise in self-flagellation. It is essential to making better decisions now, and for the next time someone in an office somewhere is sure they know better.

The Seed: 1953 and the End of Iranian Democracy

To understand Iran’s relationship with the United States, you have to begin in the summer of 1953. Mohammad Mosaddegh was Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, a nationalist who had led his country to nationalize its oil industry, which had been controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a British firm that retained the majority of profits from Iranian petroleum while Iranians received a fraction of the royalties. Mosaddegh was enormously popular. Time magazine named him Person of the Year in 1951. He was not a communist; he was explicitly anti-communist. He was simply an Iranian who thought Iranian oil should benefit Iranians.

Britain, furious at the nationalization, imposed an economic blockade and lobbied Washington to remove him. The Eisenhower administration, framing Mosaddegh as a potential Soviet foothold in the region, authorized the CIA and Britain’s MI6 to execute what became known as Operation Ajax. In August 1953, the operation successfully ousted Mosaddegh through a combination of bribed politicians, paid street agitators, and military pressure on the Shah to dismiss him. Approximately 200 to 300 people died in the ensuing violence. The CIA formally acknowledged its role only in 2013, when it declassified documents detailing the planning and execution of the coup. (Central Intelligence Agency, CREST Database, declassified 2013.)

The Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, then ruled Iran as an autocrat for the next twenty-six years, backed by American aid and arms. His secret police, SAVAK (trained in part by the CIA), became notorious for torture and repression of dissent. When the Iranian Revolution came in 1979, it came in large part as a direct reaction to those twenty-six years. The revolutionary government that replaced the Shah was theocratic, deeply anti-American, and capable of mobilizing genuine popular anger: anger that had been accumulating since 1953, when the United States had helped end the last democratic government Iran had ever known.

The 1953 coup is not ancient history in Iran. It is living political memory, the founding wound of modern Iranian anti-Americanism. Every Iranian leader since 1979 has been able to point to it as evidence that American declarations about democracy and sovereignty are contingent on whether the results are convenient for Washington. The hostage crisis of 1979 to 1981, the nuclear program, the revolutionary government’s entire posture toward the West: all of it has roots that trace directly to a covert operation that was never authorized by Congress, never debated in public, and never submitted to the American people for judgment.

Doubling Down: Arming Both Sides

If 1953 planted the seed, the 1980s watered it. After the Islamic Revolution, the United States found itself facing the government its own actions had helped bring to power. When Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, the Reagan administration saw an opportunity: keep Iran weak by ensuring Iraq did not lose.

Over the following eight years, the United States restored diplomatic relations with Iraq, removed it from the list of state sponsors of terrorism to facilitate aid, and provided billions of dollars in economic assistance and dual-use technology. American officials shared battlefield intelligence (including satellite imagery of Iranian troop movements) with Iraqi commanders. This intelligence sharing continued even when U.S. officials knew, according to reporting by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, that Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iranian forces and against its own Kurdish population in what was later recognized internationally as genocide. (National Security Archive, GWU, The Dirty War: CIA Files on U.S. Policy During the Iran-Iraq War, 2003.)

The Iran-Iraq War killed between 500,000 and one million people over eight years. It ended without a decisive victor, leaving both countries bled dry. Iraq, which had borrowed heavily to finance the war, emerged with enormous debt and an economy in shambles. Saddam Hussein, now emboldened and desperate for revenue, invaded Kuwait in 1990. The United States then had to lead a multinational coalition to reverse the very situation its support for Saddam had helped create.

This pattern deserves to sit with you for a moment. The United States helped overthrow a democratic Iranian government in 1953. That created the conditions for the 1979 revolution. To counter the 1979 revolution, the United States armed Saddam Hussein through the 1980s. That empowered Saddam enough to invade Kuwait in 1990. To reverse the 1990 invasion, the United States deployed hundreds of thousands of troops to Saudi Arabia, a presence that became one of Osama bin Laden’s stated justifications for the September 11 attacks. Each intervention was, at the time of its execution, presented as solving a problem. Each one created a larger problem downstream.

The Hemisphere Next Door: Central America’s Forgotten Lessons

The Middle East is not the only place where this pattern played out. Beginning in the 1950s, the United States ran a parallel series of interventions in Central America with consequences that are still reshaping American domestic politics, including the immigration debates that dominate every election cycle.

In 1954, the Eisenhower administration authorized the CIA to overthrow Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, Guatemala’s democratically elected president, in an operation called PBSuccess. Árbenz’s offense was land reform: his Decree 900 redistributed uncultivated land to landless peasants, which threatened the holdings of the United Fruit Company, a U.S.-based corporation with extensive influence in the region and with the Eisenhower administration itself. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles had both previously represented the company’s legal interests. The CIA organized a small exile army, deployed propaganda, and engineered the military pressure that caused Árbenz to resign.

What followed was a U.S.-backed military dictatorship that lasted in various forms until the peace accords of 1996. The Guatemalan Civil War, which ran from 1960 to 1996, killed more than 200,000 people, the majority of them indigenous Maya civilians. A UN-sponsored truth commission concluded in 1999 that the Guatemalan state had committed acts of genocide against the Maya population during the conflict. (Guatemala: Memory of Silence, Report of the Commission for Historical Clarification, 1999.) The United States, which trained Guatemalan military officers and provided intelligence support through much of this period, bore significant responsibility for enabling those abuses.

In El Salvador through the 1980s, the United States provided over $4 billion in military and economic aid to a government whose security forces operated death squads responsible for thousands of extrajudicial killings. Because the United States was financially and diplomatically backing the Salvadoran government, it had a strong incentive to classify those fleeing the violence as economic migrants rather than political refugees. Admitting refugee status would require admitting that U.S. allies were perpetrating the abuses driving people to flee. In El Salvador alone, over one million people, roughly one-fifth of the country’s population, were displaced during the civil war period. (Migration Policy Institute, Central American Migration: Root Causes and U.S. Policy, 2019.)

In Nicaragua, the Reagan administration funded and directed the Contras, a rebel group attempting to overthrow the Sandinista government, after Congress explicitly prohibited such funding through the Boland Amendments in 1982 and 1984. Administration officials circumvented Congress by secretly selling arms to Iran (at the time subject to an arms embargo) and routing the profits to the Contras. This was the Iran-Contra affair: a double violation of the constitutional order, in which the executive branch secretly defied explicit congressional prohibition while simultaneously negotiating with a government publicly designated as a state sponsor of terrorism. Reagan described the Contras as “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.” Congress had said no. The administration did it anyway.

The long-term consequences of these Central American interventions are not abstractions. Gang violence in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, specifically the expansion of MS-13 and Barrio 18, has direct roots in the U.S. policy of mass deportation of gang members from Los Angeles back to countries that lacked the institutions to absorb them: countries whose institutions had been systematically weakened by decades of civil war that American support had sustained and prolonged. The displacement, violence, and poverty that now drive migration from the Northern Triangle back toward the United States are not the product of some generic failure of those countries’ cultures or peoples. They are, in significant and traceable measure, the downstream consequences of policy decisions made in Washington, most of them without a declaration of war, without congressional authorization, and without any public accounting for the predictable blowback.

2003: The Largest Unforced Error

The 2003 invasion of Iraq requires its own reckoning, even though Iran is the nominal subject of this article. The two are inseparable.

The Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by Congress in October 2002 was not a declaration of war. It delegated the decision to the president, bypassing the deliberative function that Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution assigns to Congress: the power to declare war, to deliberate its necessity, and to force the executive to make the case publicly before the nation commits. The AUMF was a way of getting to war while maintaining the political fiction of congressional oversight. Supporters of the invasion argued that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and had operational ties to al-Qaeda. Both claims were either unsupported by the evidence available at the time or were known to be false by officials who made them. No weapons of mass destruction were found. The 9/11 Commission found no credible evidence of an operational relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda. (The 9/11 Commission Report, National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 2004.)

The invasion dismantled the Iraqi state. The decision by the Coalition Provisional Authority to disband the Iraqi army and implement aggressive de-Ba’athification, removing all senior Ba’ath Party members from government, instantly created several hundred thousand unemployed, armed, humiliated men with no stake in the new order. Many of them became the core of the insurgency. Al-Qaeda in Iraq emerged from that chaos and eventually evolved into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which seized a territory the size of Great Britain by 2014 and created a humanitarian catastrophe that killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions more.

The 2015 European migrant crisis, in which more than one million refugees and migrants arrived in Europe, overwhelming border systems, stoking nationalist reactions, and reshaping European politics in ways that are still reverberating, was substantially driven by the displacement from wars in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. The Syrian civil war itself was accelerated by the power vacuum and Sunni radicalization that flowed from the Iraq invasion. The instability radiates outward, further than its architects planned, longer than their planning horizon extended.

The Brown University Costs of War project, a rigorous nonpartisan accounting of post-September 11 military expenditures, estimated the total financial cost of U.S. post-9/11 wars (including direct appropriations, Veterans Affairs obligations, Homeland Security spending, and projected interest payments on borrowed money) at approximately $8 trillion. (Costs of War Project, Watson Institute, Brown University, 2021.) These wars were financed almost entirely through deficit spending. The money was borrowed. The interest accumulates. It is a direct contribution to the fiscal pressure that has driven inflation, elevated interest rates, crowded out domestic investment, and made the federal government’s long-term budget math increasingly precarious. When Americans debate why their grocery bills are high and their mortgage payments have doubled, the $8 trillion borrowed to wage undeclared wars is part of that answer. It is not the only part, but it is a part that receives far less attention than it deserves.

The JCPOA, Maximum Pressure, and the Road to 2025

Understanding how the United States arrived at open military conflict with Iran in 2025 requires understanding the decade that preceded it.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the Iran nuclear deal) was signed in July 2015 by the United States, Iran, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China after two years of difficult multilateral negotiations. Under the deal, Iran agreed to dismantle most of its uranium enrichment infrastructure, reduce its enriched uranium stockpile by 98 percent, submit to intrusive international inspections, and limit its nuclear activities for fifteen years or more, in exchange for the lifting of nuclear-related economic sanctions. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which conducted the inspections, repeatedly certified that Iran was in compliance. (IAEA Board of Governors reports, 2016-2018.)

In May 2018, the Trump administration withdrew from the agreement unilaterally, without the agreement of the other signatories and over strong objections from European allies. The stated rationale was that the deal did not address Iran’s ballistic missile program or its regional activities. These were legitimate concerns. The deal’s architects acknowledged it was not comprehensive. But the decision to withdraw rather than negotiate addenda destroyed the agreement without replacing it with anything better.

The reimposition of maximum pressure sanctions, including secondary sanctions that penalized third-party companies doing business with Iran, achieved significant economic damage to the Iranian economy. Oil revenues dropped sharply. The Iranian rial collapsed. Ordinary Iranians faced real hardship, including reduced access to medicines and medical equipment. What the maximum pressure campaign did not achieve was its stated goal: it did not bring Iran back to the negotiating table with a more expansive agenda. Instead, Iran methodically resumed enriching uranium, increasing its stockpile and its enrichment levels. Where the JCPOA had extended Iran’s nuclear breakout time to roughly twelve months, Iran’s post-withdrawal nuclear progress compressed that timeline dramatically. (International Crisis Group, How to Stop an Iran-Israel War, 2023.)

The Soleimani assassination in January 2020 (the drone strike that killed Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport) was ordered by President Trump without congressional notification or authorization. It was not an act of self-defense in any conventional legal sense; Soleimani was killed while traveling in a third country. The Iraqi parliament responded by passing a resolution calling for the expulsion of all U.S. forces from Iraq. Iran launched ballistic missile strikes on U.S. bases in Iraq, injuring more than 100 American service members with traumatic brain injuries. The strike removed one of the most influential and, in some analysts’ view, pragmatically calculating figures in the Iranian military command structure. His successors lacked his institutional authority to restrain proxy forces. (Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, 2020.)

By 2025, the combination of a compressed nuclear timeline, no operative diplomatic framework, a regime whose moderation the maximum pressure campaign had discredited domestically, and escalating proxy conflicts in the region produced the conditions for open military conflict. Operation Epic Fury in February 2026 and the subsequent fragile ceasefire are not the story of a problem that suddenly appeared. They are the conclusion of a story that has been building for seventy years, chapter by chapter, each one written by officials who were certain they knew what they were doing.

What Madison Knew

James Madison, who understood executive power better than most because he helped design the Constitution to constrain it, wrote in his 1793 “Helvidius” essays that the executive branch is “most interested in war, and most prone to it.” He was not describing despots. He was describing the structural incentives of any executive: glory, decisiveness, the appearance of strength, the ability to act without the inconvenience of deliberation. He argued that depositing the power to initiate war in the branch most tempted to use it was a constitutional error the nation could not afford. (James Madison, “Helvidius No. 1,” Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, 1793.)

The Constitutional Convention deliberately changed the language of the war clause from “make” war to “declare” war, preserving the president’s ability to repel sudden attacks while vesting in Congress the sole authority to commence offensive military action. Madison and Elbridge Gerry moved that amendment together. The purpose was to require the people’s representatives to deliberate on whether a war was necessary, to communicate to the public why it was necessary, and to build the consensus required to sustain it. That process is slow and imperfect. It was designed to be.

World War II, the last war Congress formally declared, illustrates what that deliberative process produces when it works. Pearl Harbor was the kind of sudden attack the founders anticipated the president would need authority to repel. Congress convened the next day and declared war within hours, with one dissenting vote. The American public understood why the war was being fought. They accepted the sacrifice (rationing, debt, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of their sons) because the case had been made to them and they had endorsed it through their representatives. The country sustained an extraordinarily costly conflict for four years and finished it.

Korea was not declared. Vietnam was not declared. The Gulf War was authorized but not declared. Iraq 2003 was authorized on claims that turned out to be false. Libya was not authorized. Syria was a legal patchwork. The Soleimani strike was authorized by nobody. In each case, the erosion of the constitutional requirement was justified at the time by urgency, by the need for flexibility, by the argument that the enemy does not wait for congressional schedules. And in each case, the absence of genuine democratic deliberation (the kind that requires a president to make a true public case, to accept amendments, to face opposition, and to build real consensus) produced interventions that lacked the public mandate to be sustained, the strategic clarity to succeed, or both.

Prohibition by Another Name

There is a structural parallel here that libertarians should recognize immediately, because it is the same argument we make about drug prohibition, alcohol prohibition, immigration prohibition, and every other instance where the state attempts to suppress complex human dynamics by force.

Prohibition does not make the underlying reality go away. It redirects it, usually in directions that are harder to manage and more dangerous than the original problem. When you prohibit trade, you get black markets. When you prohibit dissent, you get underground resistance that is more radical than the surface opposition it replaced. When you overthrow a democratic government because you do not like its policies, you do not get no government. You get whatever fills the vacuum. In 1953, you got the Shah, and then the Ayatollah. In 1954 Guatemala, you got four decades of military dictatorship and civil war. In 2003 Iraq, you got ISIS.

The people who make these decisions are not villains. Most of them believed they were doing the right thing. The CIA officers who planned Operation Ajax believed they were preventing a Soviet takeover of Iranian oil. The Reagan officials who funded the Contras believed they were preventing communist dominance of Central America. The officials who ordered the 2003 invasion believed they were preventing a gathering threat from a dictator with a history of using weapons of mass destruction. Epistemic humility requires us to acknowledge that these fears were not entirely fabricated. The Cold War was a real contest with real stakes, and Saddam Hussein was a real danger to his own people.

But epistemic humility also requires acknowledging that the people making these decisions were not omniscient. They did not know what would fill the vacuum they created. They did not know that the Shah’s repression would eventually produce a theocratic revolution more hostile to Western interests than anything Mosaddegh represented. They did not know that arming the Contras while secretly selling missiles to Iran would end up strengthening the regime they were trying to weaken. They did not know that disbanding the Iraqi army would create the recruiting pool for al-Qaeda in Iraq. They knew they were smart, experienced, and motivated by genuine patriotism. That turned out not to be enough.

The constitutional requirement of a declaration of war is a formal mechanism for acknowledging that the executive branch does not know enough, and does not bear the costs personally enough, to make these decisions alone. It requires the people, through their representatives, to deliberate on whether the projected benefits are worth the unpredictable costs. That is not a weakness in the system. That is its design.

The Compounding Bill

Every undeclared war has a fiscal dimension that connects directly to the lives of ordinary Americans in ways that are rarely stated plainly.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were financed almost entirely through borrowing. Congress authorized the spending but did not raise taxes to pay for it, a choice with significant consequences for how seriously anyone had to take the cost-benefit calculation. When wars are funded by debt rather than immediate taxation, the people bearing the cost are future taxpayers and people on fixed incomes whose purchasing power erodes when that debt is eventually monetized. They are the people who never voted on the war and often never understood they were paying for it.

Brown University’s Costs of War project estimated that interest payments alone on money borrowed for post-9/11 wars could add trillions to the total cost over the coming decades. The federal debt, which stood at roughly $5.7 trillion in 2001, had grown to more than $33 trillion by 2023, with war spending a significant contributor. Rising federal debt has contributed to upward pressure on interest rates, as the federal government competes with private borrowers for capital, and has constrained the Federal Reserve’s ability to manage inflation without causing economic pain. The inflation surge of 2021 to 2023 had multiple causes, but the long-term fiscal looseness enabled by decades of debt-financed military spending is part of the structural context. (Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, 2023.)

The immigration pressure on the southern border, which has driven enormous political conflict and produced increasingly draconian policy proposals on both sides, is also partly a downstream consequence of these interventions. The instability the United States helped create in Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, and the gang violence that U.S. deportation policies seeded in weakened post-war states, are among the structural drivers of the migration flows that reach American borders today. Treating that immigration as an alien invasion, rather than as a consequence of American policy choices that can be understood and addressed, is both historically illiterate and strategically counterproductive.

What This Argument Is Not

It is worth being explicit about what this argument does not say, because it is often caricatured.

This is not an argument for isolationism. There are genuine threats in the world. Totalitarian governments do commit genocide. Terrorist organizations do plan mass-casualty attacks. Nuclear weapons in the hands of states with ideological commitments to regional dominance do represent legitimate dangers. The argument is not that the United States should never respond to any of these. The argument is about how it should respond, and who should authorize the response.

This is not an argument that Iran’s government is benign or that its behavior in the region has been acceptable. The Islamic Republic has sponsored proxy violence across the Middle East, has pursued a nuclear program under conditions of deliberate opacity, and has brutally repressed its own people. These are real facts that deserve honest acknowledgment.

This is not an argument that all interventions have been failures. There are cases where U.S. military force achieved defensible objectives with manageable consequences. The First Gulf War (authorized by a genuine congressional vote, conducted with a clear and limited objective, executed with a large multilateral coalition, and ended when the objective was met) is a plausible example of how intervention can work when it has the right structural conditions.

The argument is narrower than any of these objections would require. It is this: the constitutional requirement of congressional deliberation before committing to war is not a procedural technicality. It is a mechanism for forcing the people who authorize violence to make a public case, build genuine consensus, and accept collective responsibility for the consequences. Every time that mechanism has been bypassed (through covert operations, executive orders, delegated AUMFs with no sunset provisions, or straight-up ignoring the law) the results have been worse than the mechanism’s supposed inefficiency would have produced. Not every time, not in every respect, but systematically, and at enormous cost.

Madison did not set the bar high because he was a pacifist. He set it high because he understood that wars are launched by optimists and ended by realists, and that the time between the two is paid for by people who had no vote on either.

Conclusion: The Bar Is There for a Reason

The situation with Iran in 2026 is not a crisis that fell from the sky. It is the accumulation of seventy years of choices: some made with genuine patriotism and real strategic logic, some made in secrecy by people protecting corporate interests, some made by officials who simply thought they knew better than the democratic process allowed them to do. The cascade from 1953 to the present includes dozens of branch points where different choices would have produced different outcomes. We cannot know precisely how different. History does not run controlled experiments. But the general direction of the evidence is not ambiguous: covert regime change produces governments we later have to fight; arming one side of a conflict produces enemies we later have to confront; borrowing trillions for undeclared wars produces inflation and fiscal pressure that real people live with; destabilizing regions produces the refugees that arrive at borders we then militarize.

The libertarian case here is not simply about anti-war ideology. It is about the epistemic humility that should accompany any exercise of concentrated power. The people who bypassed Congress in 1953 did not know what they were creating. The people who bypassed the Boland Amendments in the 1980s did not know what they were seeding. The people who bypassed genuine deliberation in 2002 did not know what vacuum they were opening. The constitutional requirement of a declaration of war is a check on the arrogance of people who think they know more than they do, which is all of us, at our worst.

A culture of liberty requires not just restraint from government overreach in domestic life. It requires the same restraint from the executive branch in its decisions to use force abroad. It requires the recognition that the people who will bear the costs of a war (the soldiers, the taxpayers, the displaced, the future generations carrying the debt) deserve to have their representatives vote on whether those costs are worth it, not merely to be informed after the fact that someone smarter than them decided to start one.

The bar for a declaration of war is high. It should be. The Founders set it there not to make America weak, but to make sure that when America fights, it fights because it must, with the consent of the governed, with a shared understanding of the sacrifice required, and with the accountability that comes when elected officials have to look their constituents in the eye and say: this war is necessary, and here is why, and here is what we are asking of you.

That conversation is not a vulnerability. It is how a republic stays a republic.

Go Deeper: Books by Alex Merced

The ideas in this article draw on libertarian political philosophy, the history of economic thought, and the complex landscape of American political ideologies. If you want to explore these arguments further, Alex Merced has written on all three.

Economic Ideas: From Beginning to Early 2026 traces the history of economic thought from classical origins through the AI era. It provides the foundational vocabulary for understanding why debt-financed wars impose real costs on real people, how governments use inflation to monetize their obligations, and what the economic tradition has to say about the relationship between state power and prosperity.

The Field Guide to Libertarianism is a clear, thorough survey of libertarian ideas and the debates within the movement. If you found yourself nodding along to the constitutional argument about war powers and the prohibition parallel, this book builds out the full framework, from natural rights theory and public choice economics to foreign policy and the practical case for limiting state power.

Political Thought and Debates of the United States places the constitutional war powers argument in its full historical and ideological context. The tension between executive unilateralism and congressional deliberation is not new; it has been contested across every major school of American political thought, from Federalists and Anti-Federalists to progressives and libertarians. This book maps those debates in detail and helps explain why the same constitutional design question keeps resurfacing every generation.

All three are available on Amazon. The full catalog of Alex Merced’s work, spanning economics, political philosophy, tech, and fiction, is at books.alexmerced.com.

Sources and Further Reading

1. Central Intelligence Agency, CREST Database, declassified documents on Operation Ajax, released 2013. Available via CIA.gov FOIA portal.

2. National Security Archive, George Washington University. Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction and The Dirty War: CIA Files on U.S. Policy During the Iran-Iraq War. nsarchive.gwu.edu, 2003.

3. Commission for Historical Clarification (Guatemala). Guatemala: Memory of Silence, Tzínil Na’tab’äl. United Nations, 1999.

4. Migration Policy Institute. Central American Migration: Root Causes and U.S. Policy. migrationpolicy.org, 2019.

5. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. The 9/11 Commission Report. W.W. Norton and Company, 2004.

6. Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University. Costs of War Project. watson.brown.edu, updated 2021.

7. International Atomic Energy Agency. Board of Governors Reports on Iranian Nuclear Activity, 2016-2018. iaea.org.

8. International Crisis Group. How to Stop an Iran-Israel War. crisisgroup.org, 2023.

9. Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School. Analysis of the Soleimani assassination and regional consequences. belfercenter.org, 2020.

10. James Madison. “Helvidius No. 1.” Published in Gazette of the United States, 1793. Reprinted in Letters and Other Writings of James Madison. Lippincott and Co., 1865.

11. Brennan Center for Justice, New York University School of Law. War Powers Reform. brennancenter.org, ongoing.

12. Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The Cost of the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. crfb.org, 2023.

13. Kinzer, Stephen. All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. Wiley, 2003.

14. Grandin, Greg. Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2006.