Nancy Ohanian
It would be a mistake to view the U.S. bombing of Iran and support for Israel’s twelve-day war on that country as simply about preventing the Iranian regime from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Ultimately, it’s about punishing Iran for its refusal to acquiesce to the hegemonic aspirations of the United States and its Middle Eastern allies.
There was a time when Iran was the most important ally of the United States in the region. In 1953, the CIA facilitated the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government following its nationalization of the country’s oil resources, and returned the Shah from exile. For the next generation, the United States used the Shah as a surrogate for advancing U.S. strategic interests in the oil-rich region while helping his brutal secret police suppress leftist, liberal, nationalist, and other secular oppositionists.
In 1979, the Shah was overthrown by a multifaceted popular revolutionary movement, and reactionary Islamists soon consolidated their power. The United States has never forgiven the Iranians for ousting an important ally, seizing American hostages at the U.S. embassy, refusing to give up the nuclear program that the United States had initially established for its allied monarch, and challenging U.S. interests in the region.
Stopping Iran from potentially converting its civilian nuclear program to military purposes has been a major focus of Washington for decades. This is what prompted the Obama Administration to lead an international effort to negotiate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015, which made it physically impossible for Iran to build a nuclear bomb.
By pulling out of the agreement and reimposing sanctions three years later, Donald Trump effectively provoked Iran into enriching uranium beyond the strict limits set by the JCPOA, to a degree that Iran could conceivably become the tenth country to build an atomic bomb within the next few years. This, in turn, has provided a convenient pretext for war. If the United States was actually concerned about an Iranian bomb, Washington would have simply returned to the JCPOA.
Nor was the war about defending Israel. Iran has never attacked Israel except when Israel attacked first. Despite their country’s small size, the Israelis have vastly superior armed forces, including a nuclear deterrent. Iran’s military budget is not only significantly smaller than Israel’s, but also below that of neighboring countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates.
The actual goal of the recent war appears to have been to weaken Iran as much as possible. Israeli air strikes, with support from Washington, went well beyond targets related to its nuclear program. Furthermore, the U.S. and Israeli bombings of nuclear facilities may have set back Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months.
The war on Iran is the logical extension of the 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy, which essentially made the case that the United States would not tolerate regional powers challenging its hegemony in important regions like the oil-rich Middle East. After the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the removal of Moammar Gadhafi from power in Libya in 2011, and the 2024 ouster of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Iran has become the only recognized government in the Middle East that is actively resisting effective U.S. control of the entire region.
When we think of the obsession U.S. policymakers had with Nicaragua’s Sandinistas in the 1980s and with the island nation of Cuba for the past six and a half decades, due to their resistance to U.S. domination, it’s not surprising that a large, relatively powerful, and resource-rich country like Iran would become such a focus. And, given the reactionary and authoritarian nature of the regime, its isolation in the region, and its unpopularity among its own people, it has become a perfect foil.
This may explain the bipartisan effort to try to link any new nuclear agreement to unrelated issues, such as Iranian support of extremist groups and human rights abuses. Given how the United States arms and supports Arab regimes that also support extremists and have even worse human rights records, Washington’s motivation for demanding such linkage may be more sinister.
U.S. policy seems to rest on the naïve notion that it can somehow return Iran, which has been a major regional power for most of the past 2,500 years, to the twenty-five-year period following 1953 when it was a willing surrogate for U.S. regional interests. And the United States will continue to isolate, sanction, arm Iran’s rivals, and launch an occasional airstrike if it does not.
No one would like to see the downfall of the so-called Islamic Republic more than the Iranians themselves. The overwhelming majority of Iranian dissidents, however, are uninterested in being American puppets or having the United States or Israel bomb their country. Indeed, war and the threat of war only strengthen the more hard-line elements of the regime and weaken both reformists within the government and those among the Iranian people desiring regime change—ultimately the only forces that can move Iran in a more democratic and responsible direction.