Iran and the United States: A Long History of Antagonism

 The governments of both countries have repeatedly cast the other as evil, perpetuating a cycle that has culminated in the present war.

March 15, 2026, 5:01 a.m. ET

While President Trump has used a scattershot approach to explain the goals of his war on Iran — one day it’s regime change, the next stopping an immediate nuclear threat — he has been relatively consistent in framing the conflict as the culmination of historic grievances.

“For 47 years, the Iranian regime has chanted ‘Death to America’ and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder, targeting the United States, our troops and the innocent people in many, many countries,” Mr. Trump said in his first speech about the war on Feb. 28, stressing repeatedly that it was time to end the threat.

His comments fit into a longstanding narrative. No country has bedeviled the United States quite like Iran ever since the Islamic Revolution in 1979 toppled Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a brutally repressive, staunch American ally. A fundamental clash in political agendas has repeatedly brought the two countries to the brink of war.

Iran cast the United States as the “Great Satan,” with habitual chants against America and Israel at virtually every officially sanctioned prayer gathering or demonstration. All that might seem like agitprop. But the ritual underscored that a cornerstone of the Muslim Shiite theocracy was to undermine American influence in the Middle East and beyond.

“I don’t think Americans actually care that much about Iran, but Iran deeply cared about America and deeply cared about its commitment to overturning what it saw as the American-led global order,” said Afshon Ostovar, the author of “Wars of Ambition: The United States, Iran and the Struggle for the Middle East.”

“Israel was a huge piece of that,” he added, with Iran encircling it by empowering a rogue’s gallery of hostile organizations, including Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis. Iran “advanced its agenda but also stayed on the radar of the United States,” he said.

The Birth of a Rogue State

For Washington, Iran became something of a permanent boogeyman starting within months of the revolution, when militants seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 employees hostage for 444 days. Iran’s refusal to follow diplomatic protocol cemented the U.S. perception of it being a rogue state.

Iran would say the bad relationship began further back, in 1953, when the C.I.A. engineered a coup to empower the shah as an absolute ruler by overthrowing Mohammad Mosaddegh, the prime minister who had moved to nationalize the oil industry.

Burning the American flag on top of the U.S. embassy wall in Tehran in 1979. Credit...Bettmann

Both sides have repeatedly sought to reshape the region through force.

Col. Charles A. Beckwith, the founder of the Army’s elite Delta Force unit, was compelled to abort a commando raid inside Iran to rescue the American hostages in 1980 after a string of blunders, leaving eight American servicemen dead.

Asked later why military force outweighed diplomacy, Colonel Beckwith made an oblique reference to the Muslim belief that martyrdom in battle leads directly to heaven. “I am not interested in wooing terrorists,” he said. “I am interested in speeding them on their way to meet their maker.”

The hostage crisis set the tone for the ensuing decades, each marked by a cycle of confrontation.

Violence Through the 1980s

In 1983, with Iran building proxy forces across the region, the nascent Hezbollah militia drove a truck bomb into a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 241 U.S. servicemen.

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The site where a truck bomb detonated in a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983. Credit...Philippe Bouchon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

During the Iran-Iraq war, which lasted eight years after Saddam Hussein invaded in 1980, the United States provided intelligence and other support to Baghdad. When Iran began sowing mines and attacking shipping in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. Navy escorted oil tankers through the narrow waterway and the Strait of Hormuz.

In 1988, after the U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts, a missile frigate, hit an Iranian mine and nearly sank, U.S. forces attacked Iranian oil platforms and its navy. That year, another American warship, the U.S.S. Vincennes, mistakenly shot down a civilian Iranian airliner over the Strait of Hormuz, killing all 290 people aboard. Iran has never forgotten that event.

The 1990s and the New Century

During the 1990s, Iran’s proxy forces continued to wreak havoc on American interests. Suicide bombers repeatedly attacked Israelis to undermine the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty. Iran also targeted the growing U.S. military presence in the Gulf after the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait. In the worst example, a group linked to Iran blew up a U.S. Air Force dormitory in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in 1996, killing 19 U.S. servicemen.

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A terrorist group linked to Iran blew up a U.S. Air Force dormitory in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in 1996.Credit...U.S. NAVY, via Associated Press

In 2002, about a year before invading Iraq, President George W. Bush denounced Iran together with Iraq and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” After the United States overthrew Saddam Hussein, Iranian-supplied Shiite militias killed and maimed hundreds of U.S. soldiers with lethal roadside bombs.

Iran’s secretive nuclear development program was also revealed in 2002, and although Tehran denied seeking a weapon, that prompted a new cycle of confrontation and coercion, including years of harsh Western economic sanctions.

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The confrontation often operated in the shadows, including cyberspace, with joint American-Israeli weapons like the Stuxnet computer worm, which was deployed to destroy the centrifuges used to enrich uranium.

The Nuclear Deal

In 2015, Iran reached an international agreement to limit its nuclear enrichment program, but Mr. Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, in his first administration, prompting renewed tensions.

In 2020, Mr. Trump propelled the fight into the open. An American drone strike in Baghdad killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the powerful head of the Quds Force, the overseas arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

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Outside the Baghdad airport, where an American drone strike assassinated Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the head of the Quds Force, the overseas arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

After Hamas, an Iranian ally, attacked Israel in October 2023, the ensuing Gaza war led to a 12-day confrontation in June 2025 with American and Israel warplanes bombing Tehran, killing at least 20 senior military commanders. They also attacked the country’s nuclear development facilities, while Iran struck Israel with missiles. Afterward, the Trump administration initially sought to bridge differences through negotiations but ultimately went to war.

A Stumbling Block for American Presidents

Over the years, U.S. presidents have found themselves entangled with Iran in ways that influenced their domestic political fortunes.

The nagging hostage crisis contributed to Jimmy Carter losing a second term. His successor, Ronald Reagan, withdrew U.S. peacekeeping forces from Lebanon in 1984 after a series of bloody attacks by Iranian-backed militants. Then there was the Iran-Contra scandal, the revelation that Mr. Reagan’s national security team was selling arms to Iran in order to free U.S. hostages held by Iranian-backed groups in Lebanon, while using the proceeds to fund Nicaraguan insurgents.

The scandal led to public hearings, high-level resignations and a sharp plunge in Mr. Reagan’s approval rating.

Although Mr. Bush presented the war in Iraq as the springboard to greater democracy in the Middle East, Saddam’s overthrow incited a grueling civil war that fortified Iran’s regional influence.

Throughout the decades, Washington has maintained some hope that a more moderate ruling faction might pursue détente. But the regime’s twin pillars — both the former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the authoritarian ruler for nearly 37 years who was killed in an Israeli air raid on Feb. 28, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — have remained staunchly hostile toward the United States.

Attacks by Israel and the United States in Tehran earlier this month.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

“Those who want to make amends with America cannot deliver, while those who may be able to deliver do not want to make amends,” Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, wrote in an article in The Atlantic.

The current crisis, the first open war, is the most violent, sustained confrontation yet. Overall, American presidents might have preferred to ignore Iran starting decades ago if Tehran had not constantly upped the ante, said Mr. Ostovar, the political scientist.

“Iran has been picking a fight for 47 years, and it finally got that fight,” he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/world/middleeast/united-states-iran-history.html