THE enduring crisis between the United States and Iran is often framed as a conflict over nuclear ambition, regional influence, or ideological hostility. Yet such explanations remain superficial. What lies beneath is not merely disagreement, but a deeper failure – an inability of power to understand civilisation.
For decades, Washington has approached Iran not as a historical entity shaped by memory, identity, and continuity, but as a strategic problem to be contained. In doing so, it has replaced understanding with coercion, analysis with pressure, and history with immediacy. The result is not just failed diplomacy; it is a sustained pattern of misreading.
1953: The Erased Beginning
The modern rupture in relations cannot be understood without the 1953 Iranian coup d’état. In that year, the United States, alongside Britain, orchestrated the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh after he nationalised Iran’s oil industry, challenging Western control.
The coup reinstalled Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and marked one of the earliest instances of covert regime change in modern US foreign policy. What followed was not stability, but a quarter-century of authoritarian rule, sustained by American military and intelligence support. The Shah’s regime relied on surveillance, repression, and the suppression of political dissent – conditions that would later fuel revolutionary anger.
For Iran, 1953 is not history – it is memory. It represents the moment when democratic possibility was subordinated to foreign interests. Yet in American discourse, this episode remains marginal, overshadowed by later events that recast the United States as the aggrieved party. This asymmetry in historical consciousness continues to obstruct meaningful engagement.
Assertion of Civilisational Identity
The 1979 Iranian Revolution was not simply a political upheaval; it was a civilisational reassertion. Under Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran rejected not only monarchy but the entire architecture of the Western-backed dominance.
The revolution fused religious authority with anti-imperial resistance, producing a state that defined itself through independence, neither aligned with Western capitalism nor Soviet communism. It was, in effect, a refusal to be read through Western categories.
The United States, however, interpreted the revolution through a narrower lens: extremism, instability, and hostility. The possibility that Iran’s actions were grounded in a coherent historical and civilisational logic was largely dismissed. What Iran saw as reclamation, Washington saw as deviation.
War, Survival, and Strategic Memory
The Iran–Iraq War further shaped Iran’s worldview. When Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, invaded Iran, the war became a defining experience of national survival.
The United States, while officially neutral, supported Iraq diplomatically and materially, even as chemical weapons were used on the battlefield. For Iran, this reinforced a stark lesson: international norms were conditional, and survival depended on self-reliance rather than external guarantees.
This experience deepened Iran’s strategic culture – one rooted in endurance, deterrence, and suspicion of global power structures.
Sanctions as a Language of Power
In the decades that followed, the United States turned to sanctions as its primary instrument of engagement. These were not limited or symbolic—they were expansive, targeting Iran’s financial systems, oil exports, and access to global markets.
Sanctions significantly affected Iran’s economy, contributing to inflation, currency instability, and reduced growth. Yet their political impact was paradoxical. Rather than weakening the state, they often strengthened its internal cohesion, reinforcing narratives of external hostility.
In Washington, sanctions were framed as tools of pressure. In Iran, they were experienced as instruments of collective punishment. The divergence in perception was profound—and consequential.
The Nuclear Dispute: Sovereignty Misread
The conflict over Iran’s nuclear programme illustrates this deeper misreading. Iran maintains that it has the right to enrich uranium under international law, as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, subject to oversight by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
For Tehran, enrichment is not merely a technical issue. It is bound to sovereignty, scientific progress, and national dignity. To relinquish it under pressure would be to concede autonomy.
The United States, however, has treated enrichment primarily as a proliferation risk. This framing led to decades of confrontation, culminating in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—an agreement that briefly demonstrated the possibility of diplomacy grounded in reciprocity.
Yet the US withdrawal from the agreement in 2018 under Donald Trump, followed by renewed sanctions, reinforced Iran’s long-held suspicion: that American commitments are provisional, shaped more by domestic politics than international obligation.
Power Without Comprehension
What emerges from this history is not merely a record of conflict, but a pattern of intellectual failure. The United States has consistently approached Iran through frameworks that prioritise control over understanding.
Iran, by contrast, operates as a civilisational state—its policies shaped by historical memory, identity, and a long view of time. This does not make its actions benign or beyond critique. But it does make them intelligible—if one is willing to engage on those terms.
Washington, however, has rarely done so. Its policies oscillate between pressure and negotiation, without a sustained effort to understand the underlying logic of Iranian behaviour. The erratic shifts in policy under Donald Trump – from withdrawal of agreements to escalatory military signalling – did not represent an anomaly. They exposed a deeper continuity: the substitution of force for thought.
An Unequal Terrain
To treat the United States and Iran as equivalent actors is to obscure a fundamental asymmetry. The United States operates as a global military power with an extensive network of bases and a long history of intervention across regions.
Iran’s posture, while assertive within its region, has been shaped by invasion, isolation, and sustained external pressure. Its strategies—whether through deterrence or regional alliances—are rooted in survival rather than expansion. This asymmetry does not eliminate complexity. But it demands clarity. Without it, analysis collapses into false equivalence.
The Limits of Power
The impasse between the United States and Iran is not simply a diplomatic failure. It is a failure of recognition.
Power, when unaccompanied by understanding, becomes self-defeating. It can coerce, isolate, and punish – but it cannot interpret. It cannot grasp memory, identity, or the deeper currents that shape political behaviour.
The United States has yet to engage Iran as a civilisation – only as a challenge. Until that changes, policy will continue to reproduce the very tensions it seeks to resolve.
The tragedy is not that the two nations remain in conflict. It is that one continues to rely on instruments that make understanding impossible.
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Ranjan Solomon is a writer, researcher and activist based in Goa. He has worked in social movements since he was 19 years of age. The views expressed here are the author’s own and Clarion India does not necessarily share or subscribe to them. He can be contacted at ranjan.solomon@gmail.com
