The Enemy We Made: America's 70-Year History with Iran

The United States and Iran have been locked in hostility for nearly seventy years. American politicians treat that hostility as a given — a fact of nature, like weather. But it isn't. It has a beginning. And that beginning is a decision America made, in secret, in 1953, that changed everything.

Now, as the latest chapter of US-Iran hostility plays out — American and Israeli strikes, Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, a fragile ceasefire that may or may not hold — it is worth asking a question most Americans never get to ask: How did we get here?

The answer is not flattering. But it is important.

The Coup Nobody Taught You About

In 1953, Iran had something unusual for the Middle East: a democratically elected prime minister who was genuinely popular. His name was Mohammad Mosaddegh, and his defining project was straightforward. He wanted Iran to control its own oil.

At the time, Iran's oil was largely controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company — a British firm that took the lion's share of profits while Iranian workers saw little in return. Mosaddegh nationalized the oil industry. The British were furious. They turned to Washington for help.

The Eisenhower administration obliged. In August 1953, the CIA and British intelligence executed a coup — codenamed Operation Ajax — that overthrew Mosaddegh, who was democratically elected, and reinstated the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, as Iran's absolute ruler.

The CIA has since declassified documents confirming its role. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is documented history.

The justification at the time was anti-communism — a familiar label used to neutralize anyone who inconvenienced Western interests during the Cold War. Mosaddegh was not a communist. He was a nationalist. The distinction did not matter to Washington.

That coup is where the modern US-Iran relationship begins.

The Shah's Iran: An Ally Built on Repression

For the next 26 years, the United States backed the Shah's government with money, weapons, and diplomatic cover. Iran was considered a pillar of American strategy in the region — a stable, pro-Western anchor in a volatile neighborhood.

The stability was real. So was the brutality used to maintain it.

The Shah's secret police, SAVAK — trained in part by the CIA — monitored, imprisoned, and tortured political opponents. Thousands were jailed. Executions were not uncommon. Civil liberties were suppressed. The Iranian people were not consulted about any of this.

The United States knew. It didn't much care, because the Shah bought American weapons, kept oil flowing, and opposed Soviet influence.

That bargain made strategic sense in Washington. It made a different kind of sense on the streets of Tehran.

1979: The Blowback

When the Iranian Revolution came in 1979, it came hard. The Shah fled. Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile. And within months, Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.

Americans experienced that crisis as an act of irrational aggression — a religious mob attacking a diplomatic mission for no reason. That is how it was covered. That is largely how it is still remembered.

But the revolutionaries did not appear out of nowhere. They were the children of a country that had watched its democracy overthrown by American intelligence, lived for decades under an American-backed dictator, and internalized the lesson that the U.S. Embassy was not just a diplomatic outpost — it was the place where Iranian sovereignty had been traded away.

None of that makes the hostage-taking acceptable. It does make it comprehensible.

The hostage crisis poisoned the relationship in ways that have never fully healed. It hardened American public opinion against Iran into something close to permanent. It gave both governments an enemy they could use.

The 1980s: When We Armed Both Sides

If you want to understand just how cynical the US-Iran relationship became, look at the 1980s.

In 1980, Iraq's Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. The war that followed lasted eight years and killed hundreds of thousands of people. The Reagan administration, viewing Iran as the greater threat, tilted toward Iraq — providing intelligence, economic support, and diplomatic cover even as Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian forces.

At the same time, the Reagan administration was secretly selling weapons to Iran in exchange for help freeing American hostages held in Lebanon — a scandal that became known as Iran-Contra. The U.S. was simultaneously arming both sides of a war in which both sides were dying.

Then, in 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian airliner, killing all 290 people aboard. The U.S. military said it was a mistake. The Reagan administration awarded the ship's commander a medal. Iran has never forgotten.

By the end of the decade, the relationship had accumulated layer upon layer of grievance — some of it Iran's doing, much of it America's.

The Nuclear Question

When Iran began developing its nuclear program in earnest in the 2000s, American officials presented it as proof of Iranian aggression — a rogue state racing toward a bomb.

The history suggests a more complicated picture.

Iran watched the United States invade Iraq — a country that did not have nuclear weapons — and leave it in ruins. It watched North Korea develop nuclear weapons and receive cautious diplomatic treatment rather than military confrontation. The lesson, visible to any outside observer, was that nuclear capability deters American military action in ways that conventional forces do not.

Whether or not Iran was pursuing a weapon, the logic driving its nuclear ambitions was not irrational. It was rational, in the cold arithmetic of a country that had watched what happens to governments the United States decides to remove.

The sanctions regime that followed — designed to cripple Iran's economy and force concessions — fell hardest not on the government's leadership but on ordinary Iranians: families who couldn't afford medicine, businesses that couldn't access the global financial system, young people locked out of international opportunities by policies their government made and they couldn't change.

The Deal, and the Betrayal

In 2015, after years of negotiations, the Obama administration reached the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the Iran nuclear deal. Iran agreed to dramatic limits on its nuclear program in exchange for relief from sanctions. International inspectors verified compliance.

It was imperfect. But it was working.

In 2018, the Trump administration withdrew from the agreement. Iran had been complying. The U.S. simply decided the deal — negotiated by a previous administration — was no longer convenient. Sanctions were reimposed, tightened, and expanded.

From Tehran's perspective, this confirmed what many in the Iranian government had argued all along: agreements with the United States are not binding, because American commitments change with each election. If you make concessions, you lose your leverage. If you give up your nuclear program, you get nothing permanent in return — just policies that evaporate the next time Washington changes its mind.

That lesson will shape Iranian strategy for a generation.

The Pattern, Plainly Stated

The United States overthrew Iran's democracy. It backed the dictator who replaced it. It armed Iran's enemies while secretly selling Iran weapons. It shot down a civilian airliner and decorated the officer responsible. It negotiated a nuclear deal, then abandoned it.

Through all of it, American political leaders have described Iran as irrational, hostile, and uniquely dangerous — a country whose behavior defies explanation.

The behavior does not defy explanation. It follows directly from seventy years of experience with American power.

That does not make the Iranian government's actions defensible. The theocratic regime that has ruled Iran since 1979 has committed serious abuses against its own people and its neighbors. Those abuses are real, and they matter.

But the relationship between the United States and Iran is not a story of innocent America and irrational Iran. It is a story of two governments, each of which has made the other's moderation harder, each of which has used the other as justification for its own worst impulses.

Understanding that history doesn't mean accepting Iranian hostility. It means understanding where it comes from — and recognizing that American policy has often made it worse, not better.

Whatever Comes Next

Whatever the current moment holds — ceasefire, escalation, or something in between — the underlying dynamic will not change until the history does.

The seventy years of decisions that produced this relationship were not inevitable. They were choices. Choices to overthrow a democracy, to back a dictator, to arm both sides of a war, to walk away from a working agreement. Those choices accumulated into the crisis we are now managing.

Most American leaders don't tell the public this history when they're building the case for military action. A few have come close — Obama acknowledged the 1953 coup directly, an almost unprecedented admission from a sitting president. But even moments of honesty at the top don't change the pattern, because the pattern isn't just about what presidents know. It's about what Congress allows, and what the American people demand.

War with Iran did not go to Congress for a vote. It rarely does anymore. The executive branch has claimed the authority to launch strikes, sustain campaigns, and commit the country to conflicts that the Constitution explicitly requires Congress to authorize. That norm has eroded so gradually that most Americans barely notice when it happens.

That is where the pressure needs to go. Not just on presidents to be more honest — but on Congress to reclaim its constitutional role in decisions about war, and on the American people to insist that it does. The history of what the United States has done to Iran is available. It is not hidden. What's missing is the political demand that it be part of the conversation before the bombs fall — not after.