The Long War

Iran’s Half-Century Struggle Against America and Israel, and the Question of Who Won

I. The Original Sin: 1953

The story of America’s conflict with Iran does not begin in 1979 with the hostage crisis, or in 1983 with the Beirut barracks bombing, or even in 2003 with the rhetoric of the “Axis of Evil.” It began in 1953, in a CIA-orchestrated coup that overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and restored the absolutist rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The operation, designated TP-AJAX by the CIA and Operation Boot by British MI6, was the first time the United States used its intelligence apparatus to topple a democratically elected civilian government (Britannica, “1953 coup in Iran”; CIA declassified documents, National Security Archive, 2013).

The rationale, as always, was cloaked in Cold War anxiety. Britain, shut out from Iranian oil after Mosaddegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (precursor to BP), leaned on Washington by framing the Iranian premier as a communist sympathizer aligned with the Soviet-backed Tudeh Party. Mosaddegh was, in fact, an avowed anti-communist. But the Eisenhower administration, receptive to covert action, approved the operation. CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt Jr., grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, led the effort on the ground, disbursing funds to street gangs, bribing military officers, and engineering the chaos that led to Mosaddegh’s arrest and the Shah’s return from his brief exile in Rome (Lapham’s Quarterly, “Operation Ajax”; History.com, “CIA-Assisted Coup Overthrows Government of Iran”).

As thanks, the Shah signed over forty percent of Iran’s oil fields to American companies (History.com). The CIA then helped build SAVAK, the Shah’s brutal secret police, which would become one of the most repressive internal security forces in the modern Middle East (Washington Institute for Near East Policy; Heritage Foundation). The agency’s own internal history, declassified decades later, described the coup’s success as transformative for the CIA’s self-image: covert action became viewed as a cheap and effective instrument for reshaping world events. Guatemala followed in 1954. The pattern was set.

This is the taproot. Everything that follows in the American-Iranian relationship grows from this original intervention. The Islamic Revolution of 1979, the hostage crisis, the creation of Hezbollah, the decades of proxy warfare, and the strikes of February 2026 all belong to the same vine. American policymakers speak of Iran as if it were an inexplicable menace that materialized from thin air, a rogue state motivated by nothing more than theocratic fanaticism. The historical record is less flattering to Washington.

II. The Proxy War: 1979 to 2023

The 1979 Islamic Revolution and the subsequent occupation of the U.S. embassy in Tehran must be understood in the context of what Americans had done to Iran twenty-six years earlier. The revolutionaries who seized the embassy did so in part because the U.S. embassy had served as the operational hub for the 1953 coup, and they feared it would be used again to suppress the revolution (The Latin Library, “Operation Ajax”). This does not excuse the taking of hostages. It does explain why the embassy, specifically, was targeted.

From that moment, Iran pursued a strategy of asymmetric resistance that would span nearly half a century. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) established a base in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley in 1982, and from it created, financed, trained, and equipped Hezbollah to operate as a proxy force (Heritage Foundation, “The 1983 Marine Barracks Bombing: Connecting the Dots”). The proxy model would become Iran’s signature contribution to modern warfare: support for non-state actors capable of imposing costs on far more powerful adversaries without triggering direct conventional retaliation.

On October 23, 1983, a truck bomb destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American servicemen, the deadliest single-day loss for the Marines since Iwo Jima. A simultaneous attack killed 58 French paratroopers. U.S. intelligence had intercepted an Iranian directive on September 26, 1983, instructing the Iranian ambassador in Damascus to contact Hezbollah leadership and direct them to carry out an attack on the Marines and the multinational coalition. Tragically, the intercept was not passed to Marine commanders until three days after the bombing (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “Echoes of 1983 Beirut Bombings”; Heritage Foundation). A U.S. federal judge later ruled in 2003 that Hezbollah carried out the attack at the direction of the Iranian government (CNN, “Beirut Marine Barracks Bombing Fast Facts”).

President Reagan, despite declaring that peace in the Middle East was vital because of America’s “moral obligation to assure the continued existence of Israel as a nation,” withdrew U.S. forces from Lebanon by February 1984 (EBSCO Research Starters, “Beirut Bombings”). The CIA later reported in 1987 that Iranian leaders viewed the episode as proof that terrorism could break American resolve. Osama bin Laden would later cite the same lesson when planning his own attacks on America (Washington Institute; Heritage Foundation).

Iran’s proxy network expanded methodically over the following decades. The Stimson Center has documented at least four principal fronts in Iran’s “Axis of Resistance”: Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shiite militias in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen (Congressional Research Service, “Iran-Supported Groups in the Middle East and U.S. Policy”; Council on Foreign Relations, “Iran’s War With Israel and the United States”). The IRGC’s Quds Force operated on the ground in Syria, Iraq, and other countries. Iran reportedly spent more than one billion dollars annually on terrorist financing, making it the foremost state sponsor of terrorism in the assessment of the U.S. government (CFR Global Conflict Tracker).

The proxy strategy reached its most devastating expression on October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched its attack on southern Israel, killing approximately 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages. While the Office of the Director of National Intelligence assessed that Iranian leaders did not orchestrate the specific attack, Iran had provided Hamas with decades of military aid, training, and financial support that enabled the operation (CRS; Wikipedia, “Iran-Israel proxy conflict”). The Wall Street Journal reported that the IRGC helped plan the assault and gave its approval at an October 2 meeting in Beirut (Wikipedia, “Iran-Israel relations”).

III. Israel First, America Second

A candid assessment of American foreign policy in the Middle East requires confronting an uncomfortable reality: for decades, U.S. policy has been oriented primarily around the security interests of Israel rather than the broader strategic or economic interests of the American people. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is observable in the policy record.

President Reagan explicitly stated after the Beirut bombing that U.S. involvement in Lebanon was rooted in a “moral obligation to assure the continued existence of Israel as a nation” (EBSCO Research Starters). The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) represented one of the rare diplomatic off-ramps, freezing Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. In 2018, President Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the deal. Iran then began stockpiling enriched uranium and suspending international monitoring (Wikipedia, “Twelve-Day War”). Israel was wholly opposed to the negotiations and maintained an unwavering commitment to dismantling Iran’s nuclear program by any means necessary (CFR Global Conflict Tracker).

The February 28, 2026, strikes on Iran, designated Operation Epic Fury by the U.S. and Roaring Lion by Israel, were carried out jointly and without congressional authorization (TIME, “After Iran Strikes, Congress Confronts Its Limited Power Over War”; PBS NewsHour; AJC, “The Iran Strikes, Explained”). The operation killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with thirty Iranian generals, nine nuclear scientists, and hundreds of civilians (Wikipedia, “Twelve-Day War”; Times of Israel). Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted the operation was not regime change. The evidence suggests otherwise.

The Stimson Center has observed that the continuity of U.S. dominance over the international order has long rested on bipartisan support for Israel, regardless of the cost to American interests. As one senior G7 diplomat told the Financial Times regarding the Gaza war, the West’s support for Israel’s assault means: “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South . . . Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again” (Stimson Center, “The Impact of the US Presidential Election on the Future of the International Order”). An America First foreign policy and an Israel First foreign policy are not identical. The persistent conflation of the two has cost the United States dearly in blood, treasure, and global credibility.

IV. The Military Without a Leash

The Constitution vests the power to declare war in Congress. Article I, Section 8, is unambiguous. Yet the last time Congress formally declared war was in June 1942, against Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania (National Constitution Center, “Does the president need Congress to approve military actions in Iran?”). In the eighty-four years since, American presidents have conducted military operations in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, The Philipines, Grenada, Panama, Iraq (twice), Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Venezuela, and now Iran, all without a formal declaration of war.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973, passed over President Nixon’s veto in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, was designed to reassert congressional authority. It requires presidents to notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying forces and limits unauthorized engagements to 60 to 90 days. In practice, most presidents since 1973 have ignored parts or all of the resolution, citing the Commander-in-Chief power and broad Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMFs) dating to 1991 and 2002 (National Constitution Center; FactCheck.org, “Legality of Latest Iran Attack in Question”).

The February 2026 strikes on Iran were conducted without advance congressional authorization. The so-called Gang of Eight was notified by Secretary of State Rubio shortly before the strikes began, but given no role in approving them (TIME). This followed a pattern under the second Trump administration: a January 2025 military operation in Venezuela that captured President Nicolas Maduro, and a summer 2025 strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, both carried out without congressional approval (TIME). Senator Tim Kaine has characterized the process bluntly: Congress is asked to respond to military action after the fact rather than debate it beforehand (CBS News, “Lawmakers stress new urgency around war powers votes after Iran strikes”).

The practical result is that the U.S. military functions as a tool for whatever elite faction controls the executive branch at any given moment. Constitutional scholar Oona Hathaway of Yale has written that under the most persuasive reading of the founding era, the Constitution does not authorize presidents to deploy military force abroad without advance congressional authorization (FactCheck.org). The Office of Legal Counsel’s longstanding counter-position, that history has ratified unilateral presidential action, is a legal fiction built on precedent rather than text. The absence of constitutional constraint means the American war machine can be redirected toward any target, for any reason, without the consent of the governed.

V. The Mandate That Was Not

In November 2024, a majority of American voters chose Donald Trump, whose campaign promised an “America First” foreign policy, skepticism of regime-change wars, and an end to forever conflicts in the Middle East. Trump had called Biden’s airstrikes on Yemen “crazy” and suggested negotiating with the Houthis. He pledged to end the war in Gaza through negotiation (Wikipedia, “2024 United States presidential election”). Polling showed that a majority of Americans supported a ceasefire in Gaza, with 52 percent favoring a halt to weapons shipments to Israel (Wikipedia, citing YouGov).

Within fourteen months of inauguration, the administration has conducted a military seizure of Venezuela’s president, launched two rounds of strikes on Iranian territory, threatened Mexico with military force, and signaled action against Cuba (TIME; PBS NewsHour). Each action was taken without congressional authorization, without a formal declaration of war, and without anything resembling a public mandate for regime change abroad.

Senator Kaine captured the disconnect plainly: “The American people want lower prices, not more war” (CBS News). Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona stated: “President Trump promised no more forever wars. Instead, he has illegally dragged us into another one without congressional authorization and no long-term strategy” (FactCheck.org). The bipartisan war powers resolutions introduced in both chambers, by Kaine and Rand Paul in the Senate and Massie and Ro Khanna in the House, represent a rare moment of cross-party alignment on the question of executive overreach. Yet even if passed, the resolutions face a presidential veto and an insufficient congressional supermajority to override it (PBS NewsHour).

This is the constitutional crisis in miniature. The people vote against war. The government makes war anyway. The constitutional mechanism designed to prevent this, the congressional power to declare war, has been functionally dead for eight decades. The military operates not as the instrument of the republic but as the instrument of whichever faction of the permanent national security elite happens to occupy the Oval Office.

VI. Did Iran Win?

This question will seem absurd to anyone watching the February 2026 strikes. Iran’s supreme leader is dead. Thirty of its generals were killed in a single night. Its nuclear infrastructure has been struck. Its air defenses, largely destroyed by Israel in October 2024 when nearly all of Iran’s Russian-supplied S-300 systems were eliminated, offered almost no resistance (Wikipedia, “Twelve-Day War”). Hezbollah has been decimated, its leadership assassinated, its supply routes through Syria severed by the fall of the Assad regime. Hamas has been ground down in Gaza. The Houthis, for all their persistence, cannot project power beyond the Red Sea. By any conventional military metric, Iran has suffered a catastrophic defeat.

But wars are not won only on the battlefield. They are also won in the interior of the adversary’s civilization.

In “The Proposition Nation Is Ending (Because It Never Existed on Creed Alone),” I argued that America’s coherence as a nation depended not on abstract creedal commitments but on a thick cultural substrate: a dominant language, a network of civic institutions, a public school system tasked with forming citizens, a shared set of mythic reference points, and an underlying cultural consensus that made assimilation real rather than rhetorical. That substrate has been dissolving for decades. America is increasingly a state with multiple nations inside it, sub-communities with distinct moral codes, distinct media ecosystems, and distinct conceptions of what “America” even is (Tyson, “The Proposition Nation Is Ending,” Substack, January 8, 2026).

Iran’s proxy strategy was never designed to defeat the United States militarily. It was designed to impose costs, drain resolve, deepen internal contradictions, and exploit the vulnerabilities of a nation that was already fragmenting from within. Every year that America spent blood and treasure policing the Middle East on behalf of interests that were not obviously its own was a year in which its domestic institutions continued to decay, its civic culture continued to erode, and its citizens continued to lose faith in the system that governed them.

The October 7 attack, whatever its tactical motivation, triggered a chain of events that exposed every fissure in American civic life. The campus protests, the antisemitic resurgence, the bitter fights over dual loyalty and foreign aid, the spectacle of an American president launching a major war without congressional authorization while claiming a mandate against forever wars: all of this confirmed that the American creed, such as it was, no longer binds.

A proposition nation cannot afford any group whose deepest identity is hatred of another citizen class. A proposition nation cannot afford a foreign policy that consistently prioritizes the interests of a foreign state over its own citizens. A proposition nation cannot afford a military establishment that operates outside constitutional constraints. And a proposition nation cannot survive when its citizens no longer share basic assumptions about what a person is, what rights are, what authority is, or what truth is for.

Iran may have lost every battle. But the civilization it was fighting has been losing its coherence for decades. The proxy war was a sideshow. The real war was always internal.

VII. What Comes Next

The February 2026 strikes will likely topple the Islamic Republic. What replaces it is anyone’s guess. The track record of American-facilitated regime change, from Iran in 1953 to Iraq in 2003 to Libya in 2011, does not inspire confidence. Nor need it necessitate Cassandra-like dread, considering that the Vietnamese were rescuing US pilots during WWII, shooting them down, and imprisoning them twenty years later, and today are our allies in the struggle to contain China.

The Iranian people, who were already protesting their own government in the streets of Tehran and Isfahan before the bombs fell, may build something better. Or the country may fracture along ethnic and sectarian lines. Or a new authoritarian order may emerge, backed by whatever external power fills the vacuum.

But the deeper question is not about Iran. It is about America.

The American republic was designed with a specific set of structural constraints on the use of military force. Those constraints are dead. The American electorate voted for a president who promised to end regime-change wars. He is conducting them at an unprecedented pace. The American creed, the set of propositions that were supposed to hold the nation together in the absence of ethnic or cultural homogeneity, has fractured into competing liturgies, each faction claiming the Declaration and the Constitution as its own private scripture.

As I wrote in January: “A proposition can inspire. It cannot, by itself, assimilate millions, restrain faction, and substitute for culture. Creeds need churches. Nations need something thicker than slogans” (Tyson, “The Proposition Nation Is Ending”).

Iran’s half-century war against the United States was, in the end, a war against a nation that was already at war with itself. The Islamic Republic may not survive the bombs. But the question of whether the American republic can survive its own contradictions remains open. That question will be answered not in Tehran but in Washington, Minneapolis, and the border towns of Texas, and the committee rooms where nobody bothers to vote on war anymore.

Sources

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