On 19 August 1953, a military coup orchestrated by the CIA and MI6 deposed Iran’s elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. The stated rationale was Cold War logic; the real issue was control of oil. That operation, codenamed TPAJAX, did more than reinstate the Shah.

The classical period of Japan, culminating in the Tokugawa Pax (Shogunate), bequeathed to modernity a set of unresolved dialectics: the tension between imperial sacrality and military governance; the syncretic entanglement of kami and Buddha; the latent violence of a warrior class stripped of war; and the suspicion of foreign ideologies that nonetheless proved irresistible.