British Diplomatic Oil Crisis: Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Geopolitical Rivalries in the Persian Gulf: Drawing a Lesson? Or Sir Anthony Eden‘s Delusion of Grandeur.

to refer
to as “the Italian of the East”.’
27 Eden had served as Parliamentary Under-
Secretary at the Foreign Office at the time of the Iranian oil
crisis of 1933, which was discussed in the earlier part of the
thesis. He had been to Iran and had seen the oil fields. ‘In 1951 he
had denounced the Iranians for stealing British property.’
28 When Eden became Foreign Secretary after
the fall of the Labour Government, one of his major anxieties became
the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s crisis. He wrote at the end of the
critical year of 1954:

It is a strange thing about
this year that though many people have
written about the problems which we have, we hope, solved, Western
European Union, Egypt, Indo-China, Iran, Arabia (Buraimi), very few
have given much credit to Iran, which was, I believe, the toughest
of all.29

Eden did not believe that
there was any communist threat to Iran.

I did not
accept the argument that the only alternative to Musaddiq
was Communist rule. I thought that if Musaddiq fell, his place might
well be taken by a more reasonable government with which it would be
possible to conclude a satisfactory agreement.30

Later,
after the breakdown of talks in Washington, Eden declared in
the House of Commons on 20th November,

that there were three
essential elements of a satisfactory solution.
‘First. . . the Persian economy cannot be assured unless the oil
industry can be efficiently operated in all its stages. Second, the
benefits should be fairly shared between Persia and those concerned
with the development of her oil