Bottom line it is always about resources, the money that ensues and who controls it as we move on to other resources needed for the AI and digital age.
I remember reading years ago as we were attacking Iraq that China was acquiring the rights to rare earth minerals in other countries.
Just a quick search of "china buying up rare earth minerals"
"AI Overview China completely dominates the global rare-earth minerals supply chain, controlling an estimated 60% of worldwide mining and over 90% of refined output and magnet production. By utilizing state subsidies, overseas asset acquisitions, and specialized academic ecosystems, China has created an unassailable chokehold over materials essential for consumer electronics, electric vehicles, and defense manufacturing."
https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/iranprimer.html
".... BRITAIN WAS AT THAT MOMENT FACING A GRAVE CHALLENGE. ITS ABILITY TO project military power, fuel its industries, and give its citizens a high standard of living depended largely on the oil it extracted from Iran. Since 1901 a single corporation, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, principally owned by the British government, had held a monopoly on the extraction, refining, and sale of Iranian oil. Anglo-Iranian's grossly unequal contract, negotiated with a corrupt monarch, required it to pay Iran just 16 percent of the money it earned from selling the country's oil. It probably paid even less than that, but the truth was never known, since no outsider was permitted to audit its books. Anglo-Iranian made more profit in 1950 alone than it had paid Iran in royalties over the previous half century.
... Mossadegh, a European-educated aristocrat who was sixty-nine years old when he came to power, believed passionately in two causes: nationalism and democracy. In Iran, nationalism meant taking control of the country's oil resources. Democracy meant concentrating political power in the elected parliament and prime minister, rather than in the monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah. With the former project, Mossadegh turned Britain into an enemy, and with the latter he alienated the shah.
In the spring of 1951, both houses of the Iranian parliament voted unanimously to nationalize the oil industry. It was an epochal moment, and the entire nation celebrated. "All of Iran's misery, wretchedness, lawlessness and corruption over the last fifty years has been caused by oil and the extortions of the oil company," one radio commentator declared.
Under the nationalization law, Iran agreed to compensate Britain for the money it had spent building its wells and refinery, although any impartial arbitrator would probably have concluded that given the amount of profit the British had made in Iran over the years, Iran's debt would be less than nil. Mossadegh loved to point out that the British had themselves recently nationalized their coal and steel industries. He insisted that he was only trying to do what the British had done: turn their nation's wealth to its own benefit, and make reforms in order to prevent people from resorting to revolution. British diplomats in the Middle East were, of course, unmoved by this argument..."
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