Seventy Years of Enmity

The United States and Iran have been locked in a cold war of their own for over 70 years. The relationship's original wound was August 1953, when the CIA and British MI6 orchestrated a coup — Operation Ajax — that overthrew Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The Shah was restored to absolute power, and Iranian oil fields returned to Western control. For a generation of Iranians, it was the original betrayal.

The 1979 Islamic Revolution overturned everything. Ayatollah Khomeini's followers stormed the US embassy in Tehran and held 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days in a crisis that defined Jimmy Carter's presidency and reshaped US-Iranian relations permanently. The US backed Saddam Hussein's Iraq during its devastating 1980–88 war against Iran, even as Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian troops. The US shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988 — killing 290 civilian passengers — and paid no legal penalty.

After 9/11, Iran briefly cooperated with the US in Afghanistan — the Taliban were mutual enemies — before George W. Bush placed Iran in the 'Axis of Evil.' Iran's nuclear program accelerated under the cover of its legitimate civilian energy needs. The 2015 JCPOA deal, negotiated under Obama, restricted Iran's uranium enrichment in exchange for sanctions relief — a fragile diplomatic achievement. Trump's 2018 withdrawal from the deal and renewed maximum pressure sanctions sent Iran's program surging forward. By 2023, Iran was enriching uranium to 83.7% purity — a threshold's breadth from weapons-grade.