The toppling of Mosaddeq’s nationalist government was the leading story in the international press. Despite his role in this confrontation with a popular government, Mohammad-Rezā Shāh still had many assets to make his country a model of political and social success. The Iranian nation had been awakened to democratic aspirations since the Constitutional Revolution. Thanks to its oil wealth, the country could hope to transform its economy, which was still essentially an agrarian one, into an industrial power with means that few Third World nations had. Because of its outlier position in the Islamic world and its vicinity to the Soviet Union, it could hope to play a regional role.