U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran caught many off guard.
The president had distanced himself over the years from prominent neoconservatives, like former Vice President Dick Cheney and former National Security Advisor John Bolton.
He also ran his campaign as the “pro-peace ticket” and denounced regime change wars during stump speeches.
This disconnect has created confusion, helping grow the perception that this was a war Israel pushed the United States into.
While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu played a major role in convincing Trump that the timing for military action against Iran was auspicious, this reasoning ignores a much more complex reality.
This war was not an outlier, but the consequence of decades of narrative building and political lobbying portraying Iran as one of the United States’ greatest geopolitical enemies.
Years of work by a wide range of legislators, think tanks, media pundits, and Washington policy circles stirred emotions against a minor ideological adversary, inflated Iran’s global capabilities and built a perception that war was inevitable.
Donald Trump, increasingly erratic in nature, may not have much affinity with the George Bush era neoconservatives, but has long been personally vulnerable to one of the most dominant narratives in U.S. defence policy due to his own dislike of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Water to a fish
The United States and Iran have not had a good relationship since 1979, when Iranian revolutionaries overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah and took staff at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran hostage.
The failure of Operation Eagle Claw to extract the hostages birthed a deep-seated sense of American humiliation among its political elite, driving them toward a mentality of “payback”.
From 1979 up until 2001, there was a growing list of Iranian affronts, often tied to ambiguous foreign-based plots, that reinforced an emotionally charged view of Tehran as a persistent nemesis in U.S. policy circles.
Post-9/11 developments essentially locked in the sense of strategic confrontation against Iran, with intense lobbying for direct American military action growing against Tehran.
The incoming administration of neoconservatives, members of the Republican Party who argued for the U.S. to spread democracy and capitalism against “international tyranny”, built a new global framework in which the U.S. would oppose the “axis of evil”, made up of Iraq, North Korea, and notably Iran.
Despite this, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the long occupations that followed, severely weakened the neoconservative movement and pushed it to the fringes of the Republican Party.
Yet, Iran’s position as a primary U.S. antagonist got stronger, notably driven by Iranian activity in Iraq, America’s most politically and militarily sensitive theatre for almost a decade.
For actors like North Korea, the last member of the “Axis of Evil”, scrutiny would wane, with Trump even seeking diplomatic rapprochement his first term.
Since 2001, a near-constant political and media narrative has continued to liken Iran to China or Russia in its capabilities and intentions towards the United States.
While Iran and the United States were adversaries, seeking different political outcomes in the Middle East, the country’s capabilities have been vastly overstated.
This narrative of rising Iranian power began to build on itself, and soon became the political norm in Washington.
In the halls of Congress, national security experts and think tank leaders gave briefings claiming Iran would ultimately represent a threat to the homeland as a result of its oft-overblown illicit global networks allegedly stretching from Lebanon to the jungles of Paraguay.
In reality, Iran was a country straining its global standing through foreign adventurism, relying on weak regional partners, while failing governance at home and struggling to suppress growing internal dissent.
Yet this narrative became so strong that when President Barack Obama finalised the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), an international agreement that would have imposed enforceable nuclear restrictions on Iran, conservative commentators decried it, arguing it would never be able to stop Iran’s seemingly inevitable march towards a nuclear weapon.
War, not diplomacy, had become the only perceived way to stop the Islamic Republic.
