A war to culminate half a century of hostility between Washington and Tehran

BarcelonaThe current war between Washington and Tehran is the culmination of a hostile relationship of almost half a century A spatter of misunderstandings and missed opportunities for reconciliation. The root of this enmity lies in the clash of ideologies and interests between two countries aspiring to hegemony, one global and the other regional. However, it is often overlooked that the first major tension between the US and Iran predates the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. In fact, the Ayatollahs' regime is a direct consequence of that establishment.

This key moment in the relationship between the two countries came in 1953 with the CIA-backed coup against the government of Mohamed Mossadegh, a democratically elected and highly popular prime minister. sin Mossadegh, a nationalist, aimed to nationalize Iranian oil, which until then had been controlled by British and American companies. Following the coup, the first of many in the history of the CIA, Washington installed an absolute monarchy under Mohammad Pahlavi.

Corruption, repressive tendencies, and the ostentatious lifestyle of the Shah Pahlavi, along with his US-aligned foreign policy, fueled the Islamic Revolution. Its leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, was the antithesis of the Shah: an austere, religious, and anti-imperialist man. Initially, once Washington understood that the Shah's regime was unsustainable, it did not look unfavorably upon the alternative represented by the astute Khomeini. Before his return, he had a moderate discourse, and the US believed he would simply become a kind of moral compass for the country, not its absolute political leader. However, relations between the US and the new Iranian regime could have been more amicable had a group of fervent revolutionary students not stormed the US embassy and kidnapped nearly 70 Americans in its first months. The hostage crisis dragged on for over 400 days and was a major humiliation for Washington. The relationship between the Islamic Republic and the world's superpower could not have gotten off to a worse start.

Khomeini, already invested as supreme leader, did not force the release of the hostages for one reason: hostility toward the US served as a legitimizing element for the regime. And so it has remained to this day. In fact, at all regime events and celebrations, those present chant the slogans "Death to America" ​​and "Death to Israel" like a mantra. Analyst Karim Sadjadpour, of the think tank Carnegie argues that the Iranian regime has never sought to resolve its conflict with Washington. For Tehran, maintaining a kind of... Cold war The relationship with the US is ideal, as it provides an enemy that unites society around the regime. However, it was crucial that the conflict not escalate, which is what happened after the October 7 attacks against Israel, which Tehran did not endorse.

In this almost half-century, Iranian-American relations have been punctuated by several crises that have only added fuel to the fire. For example, the US backed Saddam Hussein's military aggression against Iran, which led to a bloody war lasting almost a decade and resulting in over a million deaths. Meanwhile, Tehran sponsored the creation of several Shiite militias during the Lebanese Civil War, which would eventually become Hezbollah. Hezbollah's most well-known action was the 1983 bombing of the US military headquarters in Beirut, which killed over 300 people, one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in history.

The attempted rapprochement

However, there have also been moments of détente when it seemed the relationship could be salvaged. This was the case in the mid-1990s, with the election in Iran of the reformist president Mohammad Khatami, who wanted to liberalize the political system and open up to the West. During his presidency, the 9/11 attacks took place in the US. Initially, Tehran collaborated with Washington, since Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda organization, which considers Shiites heretics, was a common enemy. One event squandered that opportunity to straighten out the relationship and set the two countries on a path to a head-on collision: President George Bush's coining of the term axis of evil To justify his 2003 invasion of Iraq, Bush, influenced by a group of neoconservative and Zionist advisors, included Tehran and Pyongyang, in addition to Baghdad, in that group. Bush's about-face was met with astonishment in Tehran: instead of thanking them and strengthening their cooperation in the fight against Al Qaeda, Washington rewarded Tehran with the threat of an invasion and regime change.

Khamenei, Supreme Leader since 1989, reacted to Bush's threats by relaunching his nuclear program and creating a network of militias in the region—two policies intended to serve as a deterrent against a potential US attack. However, the consequence of this strategy was precisely the opposite of what was desired: instead of averting a confrontation with the US, it provoked one. The threat posed by the nuclear program and the network of regional militias has been the argument Netanyahu has used to drag the Trump administration into a war that is far from being in the US national interest. This marked the culmination of the history of hostility between Washington and Tehran, as well as the roadmap of Netanyahu and the Israeli right wing, which during the 1990s chose to impose Israeli-American hegemony in the region by force instead of making peace with the Palestinians to guarantee Israel's security.