In my first year at West Point, I was part of a cordon of cheering cadets who lined Thayer Road to welcome back to American soil 52 people who had been held hostage by the Iranian regime for 444 days. We saluted as six green-and-white Army buses took them through the scenic campus on the way to a three-day respite with their families at the Hotel Thayer. The hostage crisis was just the beginning of what would become a four-decades-long “twilight war” that the Islamic Republic of Iran has waged against the United States, Israel, and its Arab neighbors. The U.S. response, across seven different administrations, has suffered from a failure to consider adequately how historical memory, emotion, and ideology drive and constrain the theocratic dictatorship in Tehran.
The exception has been President Donald Trump, who from 2017 to 2021 implemented a strategy of maximum pressure on Iran and in January 2020 decided to kill the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, Qassem Suleimani, and his Iraqi militia puppet, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, in Baghdad. Trump recognized that the Iranian regime cannot be conciliated and that efforts to de-escalate confrontations with Iran had allowed it to escalate on its own terms with impunity. Early in his second term, Trump has reversed the self-defeating policies of the Biden administration, restored maximum pressure on Iran, and, most notably, ordered U.S. strikes on three facilities related to its nuclear program.
The wisdom of Trump’s approach—forcing Iran to choose between continued isolation and ending its hostility to Israel, the United States, and its Arab neighbors—became apparent to many only after President Joe Biden resurrected a hapless effort to appease Iran that started during the Obama administration. President Biden, in an attempt to restore the flawed Iran nuclear deal from which Trump withdrew in 2018, relaxed enforcement of the Trump administration’s economic sanctions—and as cash flow to Tehran increased, so did Iranian leaders’ confidence that they could use their terrorist proxies to get away with murder. With few exceptions, Iranian proxy attacks against U.S. facilities and personnel went unanswered.
Then, on October 7, 2023, the Iranian-supported terrorist organization Hamas lit the “ring of fire” Tehran had built around Israel with heinous acts of mass murder, torture, rape, and kidnapping. Hezbollah entered the war against Israel the next day as Iran mobilized proxies in Syria, the West Bank, and Yemen. Yet even as Israel fought this multifront war, the Biden administration stuck with its de-escalation mantra, with the president himself reportedly suggesting in April 2024 that Israel “take the win” after Israel, the United States, and other nations successfully defended against the massive, direct attack launched on Israel from Iranian soil. After another direct attack by Iran on Israel in October 2024, the Biden White House pressed Jerusalem not to strike Iran’s nuclear sites or energy-production facilities.
President Trump prefers peace deals to the use of military force, and he reportedly delayed Israel’s plans to attack Iran earlier this spring and destroy—or at least degrade—the country’s nuclear and missile capabilities. But after the first few days of Israel’s highly successful air, intelligence, and cyber offensive in mid-June, Trump did not urge de-escalation. “[Iran] had bad intentions,” he told reporters. “For 40 years they’ve been saying death to America, death to Israel, death to anybody else they didn’t like. They were schoolyard bullies. And now they’re not bullies anymore.” Trump’s comment reflected his belief that, since the Jimmy Carter administration, U.S. Iran policy produced disappointing results because decision-makers failed to understand the ideology that drives and constrains Iran’s theocratic dictatorship.
Carter himself did not realize how deeply anti-Western sentiment drove the revolutionaries in Iran. Hoping to develop a relationship with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and preserve Iran as a Cold War bulwark against the Soviet Union, officials in his administration closed their ears to the anti-American cheers of the revolution and averted their eyes from the reign of terror that Khomeini was inflicting on his people. While visiting Algiers on November 1, 1979, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski sought out Iranian Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan at a reception to tell him that the United States was open to a relationship with the new Islamic Republic. After Iranian newspapers published photos of the two men shaking hands, the Iranians in Algiers immediately ended the talks as outraged students in Tehran seized the U.S. Embassy and took 52 Americans hostage, setting off a long, painful crisis that would dominate the rest of Carter’s presidency. The Iranian government released the hostages on January 20, 1981—minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president—supposedly as a conciliatory action of goodwill. But the ideology that animated the regime was hardening.
The destructive war with Iraq from 1980 to 1988—which cost Iran more than a million casualties and nearly $645 billion—convinced Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini, the clerical order, and leaders of the IRGC Quds Force (the element that directs unconventional warfare and intelligence activities) that protecting the “purity of the revolution” also required exporting its ideology and pursuing hegemonic influence across the Middle East. Although Iranian strategy is often described as “forward defense,” it is better understood as a revanchist offensive to drive the United States out of the region and weaken Arab states (particularly Saudi Arabia) as precursors to the ultimate objective: the destruction of Israel and the restoration of the regional influence the Persian Empire lost to Alexander the Great more than 2,300 years ago.
Consider a short highlight reel from Iran’s proxy war against the United States between the 1979-80 hostage crisis and the October 7 Hamas assault on Israel. In April 1983, a truck bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut killed 63 people, including 17 Americans. Six months later, Iranian-trained terrorists killed 241 servicemen in a Marine barracks and 58 French paratroopers in their headquarters. Across the 1980s and early 1990s, Iranian-sponsored terrorists kidnapped 100 foreigners and tortured to death a CIA station chief and a Marine colonel. In Saudi Arabia in 1996, a Hezbollah truck bomb outside Khobar Towers killed 19 American airmen. In Iraq from 2004 to 2011, Iranian-backed militias killed more than 600 American servicemen and women with bombs manufactured in Iran. In Iraq and across the Persian Gulf from 2019 to 2023, Iranian forces and proxies blew up oil tankers, fired missiles into neighboring countries, attacked Saudi oil facilities with a swarm of drones, shot down a U.S. drone, attacked the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, and rocketed U.S. bases in Iraq.
Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden tended to view each of these attacks in isolation, rather than episodes in a long-term campaign of aggression grounded in the Islamic Republic’s foundational anti-American and anti-Israeli ideology. Iranian leaders reinforced U.S. presidents’ reluctance to confront Iranian aggression with false narratives about “moderates” within the government who could counterbalance the hostility of the “revolutionaries” if only U.S. leaders would open the door to conciliation. But these so-called “moderates” were no such thing.
The ruse worked. Clinton decided not to retaliate against Iran for the bombing of the Khobar Towers in part because a new Iranian president, former librarian Mohammed Khatami, held out hope for reform in Iran. In a 1998 interview, Khatami spoke of an internal political competition in which “one political tendency firmly believes in the prevalence of logic and the rule of law” and “another tendency believes it is entitled to go beyond the law.” He even called for a “dialogue between civilizations.” But the proxy war went on—and so did Iran’s nuclear program and the mounting danger to Israel.
In December 2001, former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the man who had served as the vessel for Western dreams of Iranian moderation prior to Khatami, spoke from the podium at Tehran University to deliver the government’s official weekly sermon. “If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now,” he declared, “then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything.” The Iranian bomb was meant to be the ultimate weapon in the Islamic Republic’s sustained campaign to push the United States out of the Middle East, dominate its Arab neighbors, and destroy Israel.
The Obama administration doubled down on the conciliatory approach of its predecessors. The administration scaled back initiatives to constrain Iran’s aggression, as Treasury official Katherine Bauer recalled, “for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.” And once the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action took effect, the Obama administration avoided any confrontation that might undo the agreement. Money flowed into Iran, and Iranian oil exports soared, as did funding for terrorist organizations and IRGC operations across the Middle East.
The nuclear deal emboldened Iran. Just prior to Iran signing the agreement in the summer of 2015, the U.S. State Department flew pallets of euros and Swiss francs into Geneva, where trams loaded them on Iranian cargo planes headed for Tehran. That same day, Iran released four Americans who had been, in effect, hostages. The operation was reminiscent of the arms-for-hostages arrangement under the Reagan administration.
The Obama administration’s lie that the cash payment and the hostage release were disconnected encouraged Iran’s long practice of using hostages for coercion and allowed the revolutionaries in Tehran to portray the ransom payment as an admission of American guilt and weakness. Hossein Nejat, deputy intelligence director of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, stated that ransom payments demonstrated that “the Americans themselves say they have no power to attack Iran.” In the months that followed the payoff, the regime launched multiple missile strikes, boasted about its nuclear stockpiles, awarded a medal to an IRGC commander with American blood on his hands, seized two U.S. Navy vessels, and arrested 10 sailors and paraded them in front of cameras before releasing them 15 hours later. The Iranians continued to take new hostages, detaining Princeton graduate student Xiyue Wang in 2016 while he was conducting research on the Qajar empire and learning Farsi for a Ph.D. in Eurasian history. As in the past, goodwill did not beget goodwill, and conciliation led to Iranian escalation, not moderation.
From 2017 to 2020, the Trump administration constrained Iran’s ability to wage its proxy wars, sanctioning approximately 1,000 Iranian individuals and organizations. In 2018, Iran’s rial declined fourfold against major currencies, and oil exports, which generate most of the regime’s income, dropped to 1 million barrels a day from a high of 2.5 million. Sanctions, a decline in gross domestic product, and high inflation led to a 10 percent reduction in military spending. Hezbollah’s stipend was halved, and Iran was having trouble meeting payroll for its proxy army in Syria. But the Islamic Republic’s leaders had been conditioned to believe that the United States would not act militarily against Tehran.
Just prior to the U.S. strike on Suleimani and al-Muhandis in Baghdad on January 3, 2020, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, referring to the prospect of U.S. retaliation for Iranian proxy attacks on U.S. bases and the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, taunted President Donald Trump, saying: “You can’t do anything.” Trump showed him otherwise.
Khamenei dusted off that infamous barb from his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, once again earlier this month, arguing amid nuclear deal negotiations that the United States “can’t do a damn thing about” Tehran’s nuclear program.
Trump’s decision to strike Iranian nuclear facilities earlier this month was incredibly consequential, degrading and delaying a hostile regime’s path to the most destructive weapon on earth, as well as the missiles designed to deliver it. Those strikes—and Israel’s campaign that preceded them—also decapitated leaders who had blood on their hands from Iran’s proxy wars.
But even more importantly, the Israeli and U.S. military operations directly against the Islamic Republic and its warmaking apparatus reminded officials in Tehran that they cannot antagonize their adversaries in the region with impunity—and reminded officials in Washington that Iran’s theocratic dictatorship cannot be conciliated. “De-escalation” was never a path to peace—it was an approach that perpetuated war on the Iranians’ terms.
