Iran: The History Behind the War

Eighty-five ships a day. That's how many normally crossed the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most critical oil chokepoint, carrying a fifth of the entire planet's oil. Today, as you listen to these words, one gets through. Between those two numbers sits the story of a war, an assassinated leadership, and a friendship that collapsed into one of the deepest enmities in the modern Middle East. How did we get from eighty-five to one? To understand that, we need to go back seventy years, to a time when Iran was one of the West's closest allies.

Until the late nineteen-seventies, Iran was a kingdom, ruled by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi — a close ally of the United States, open to Western influence, with an army armed by Washington. But that friendship already had a crack in its foundation. In nineteen fifty-three, Iran's then democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, nationalized the country's oil industry, until then controlled by British interests. Britain and the American CIA jointly organized a coup — known as "Operation Ajax" — that removed Mosaddegh and consolidated the Shah's power. The US officially admitted its role only sixty years later. Most Iranians never needed that admission: they already knew who had taken their democracy from them, and they never forgot it.

The Shah, now secure, ruled for another twenty-six years, growing steadily more authoritarian. He modernized the country at speed — land, industry, education — but through a fearsome secret police, SAVAK, that imprisoned, tortured, and exiled every voice of dissent, clergy included. One of those exiled clerics was named Ruhollah Khomeini. The Shah's close relationship with the West, instead of building stability, was built on repression that kept deepening beneath the surface — and a regime that rests on fear instead of legitimacy pays for it, sooner or later.

The price came due in nineteen seventy-nine. After months of protests and strikes across the country, the Shah left Iran for good, and the exiled Khomeini returned in triumph from Paris, with millions of people flooding the streets of Tehran to welcome him. The Islamic Revolution didn't just replace one ruler with another. It replaced a pro-Western kingdom with a theocratic Islamic Republic, with Khomeini as "Supreme Leader" — an office above the president, above parliament, answerable, in theory, only to God. The turn was total, and it was fast: within months, America's closest ally in the Middle East had become its sworn enemy.

The break was sealed a few months later. On November the fourth, nineteen seventy-nine, students backing the revolution stormed the American embassy in Tehran and held fifty-two American hostages for four hundred and forty-four days — over a year. The two countries have never fully restored diplomatic relations since: there is still no US embassy in Tehran today, and no Iranian embassy in Washington. What had started as a crack in nineteen fifty-three had now closed, for good, into a rupture.

The young Islamic Republic didn't even get to steady itself before it was at war. The following year, Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Iran — and the reasons weren't only territorial, though Saddam did want to reclaim the Shatt al-Arab waterway. Khomeini made no secret of his intent to "export" his revolution, especially to neighboring Iraq, a country with a Shia majority but a Sunni government. Saddam saw that as an existential threat to his own regime, and struck first. The war that followed lasted eight full years, until nineteen eighty-eight, with hundreds of thousands dead on both sides. It didn't weaken the new regime — it forged it. It taught Tehran's leadership a lesson it never forgot: alone, surrounded by enemies, with no superpower patron like its old protector, Iran had to find another way to project power.

That other way was a network of allied armed groups beyond its own borders. In nineteen eighty-five, Hezbollah in Lebanon formally aligned itself with Iran's leadership — and became the template for an entire strategy: Iran funds, arms, and trains armed groups across the region, from Hezbollah (seven hundred million to one billion dollars a year, by American estimates) to the Houthis in Yemen, Shia militias in Iraq, and Hamas in Gaza. The United States calls this network the financing of terrorism — a strategy of projecting power through others rather than through its own army, designed precisely to make up for what Iran lacks: a strong, modern military able to face Israel or the US directly.

At the very same time it was building that external network, the regime was tightening its grip just as hard at home. Every form of dissent is treated as an existential threat. In two thousand twenty-two, twenty-two-year-old Mahsa Amini was arrested by the "morality police" for allegedly wearing her headscarf wrong; she died three days later, with witness accounts of being beaten about the head. Her death triggered the largest wave of protests the country has ever seen, under the slogan "Woman, Life, Freedom." It wasn't an isolated incident, but the visible tip of a system that has kept women, for decades, under institutionalized inequality: mandatory head covering with prison as the penalty for refusing, courtroom testimony worth legally half a man's, inheritance cut in half for daughters, and a right to divorce that in practice belongs only to the husband.

The regime's answer to the protests was harsher repression, not less: in two thousand twenty-four, Iran was responsible for sixty-four percent of all recorded executions worldwide, more than nine hundred and seventy, according to Amnesty International — and a year later, that number more than doubled, passing two thousand one hundred and fifty-nine, the highest annual figure since nineteen eighty-one.

Beyond these allied armed groups and the crackdown at home, there was a third, even more explosive issue: Iran's nuclear program. After years of negotiations, in two thousand fifteen, Iran and six major powers — the US among them — signed a deal known as the JCPOA: Iran accepted strict limits and inspections on its nuclear program, in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions. The International Atomic Energy Agency repeatedly confirmed that Iran was keeping its side of the deal. For the first time in decades, there was something that looked like stability.

That stability didn't last. In two thousand eighteen, President Trump withdrew the US unilaterally from the agreement, over the objections of the other signatories and despite the Agency's own confirmation of compliance. He cited gaps in the deal, which didn't touch Iran's ballistic missiles at all, nor the network of allied armed groups we just described, and which had sunset clauses that would have allowed, after a decade, a legal return to large-scale enrichment. The US reimposed heavy sanctions. Iran held out for about a year before it started gradually breaching the very limits it had accepted in two thousand fifteen — and so each side blamed the other for the collapse of a deal that, until two thousand eighteen, had been working.

Tension simmered for years, until it boiled over into open war. On June the thirteenth, two thousand twenty-five, Israel suddenly struck senior Iranian military commanders and air-defense systems. Iran answered with waves of missiles against Israeli targets. Nine days later, on June the twenty-second, the United States joined the war too, bombing the nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan with deep-bunker bombs — the only firepower capable of reaching enrichment plants built deep inside mountains. Iran struck back at an American base in Qatar, with no casualties, and two days later, on June the twenty-fourth, a ceasefire ended this first, twelve-day war.

The ceasefire, though, brought neither dialogue nor de-escalation. Quite the opposite: Khamenei withdrew even deeper, literally — building a bunker so deep inside the mountain that its elevator took over five minutes to reach the bottom, convinced the next strike would come for him personally. Negotiations over the nuclear program carried on formally over the following months, without real progress in either direction. Both sides seemed to be preparing not for peace, but for something far more final.

That "far more final" came on February the twenty-eighth, two thousand twenty-six. Using location intelligence from the CIA, the US and Israel launched coordinated precision strikes against Iran's top leadership — not just military targets this time, but the people at the very top. Within hours, forty to forty-eight senior officials were dead, Khamenei himself among them. The US and Israel called it preemptive self-defense and an opportunity for regime change. It was the deepest wound the Islamic Republic's leadership had ever suffered — and the start of a war far bigger than the one before it.

Iran struck back with the strongest weapon it had, without firing a single missile: it closed the Strait of Hormuz to all foreign shipping. It's a passage only a few dozen kilometers wide, between Iran and Oman, through which about a fifth of the entire planet's oil normally flows. Closing it doesn't require defeating any army — just controlling both of its shores. The move rattled global energy markets within hours and turned a Middle Eastern conflict into a global economic problem.

And yet, the closing of the strait wasn't the most striking part. That came in Tehran, only eight days after the strike. The Assembly of Experts, the body that selects the Supreme Leader, announced a consensus successor: Mojtaba Khamenei — the assassinated leader's own son. A strike designed to decapitate an entire system of leadership had instead proven just how deeply rooted, and self-perpetuating, that system really was. It didn't even take a week to find a replacement.

Seven months later, the war hasn't ended — it's just changed shape. A framework agreement in June two thousand twenty-six tried to put an end to the hostilities, but Iran keeps demanding that commercial ships follow its own "approved" routes and pay transit fees — and strikes those that refuse. Traffic through the strait remains close to zero: only one crossing was recorded on one day in September, against eighty-five a day before the crisis — the number you heard at the start. On September the twenty-third, a cargo ship came under attack off the coast of Oman, with one sailor killed. A few days ago, President Trump rejected an Iranian proposal to reopen the strait within a week, and hours later, new explosions were reported in the same strait. As this book is being recorded, the situation remains open, day by day.

Ask why it came to this, and you'll get two different answers. The official US and Israeli version speaks of self-defense: a nuclear program that could no longer be ignored, ballistic missiles, and a country that funds armed groups across the region. Analysts, though, point to other pieces too: the Agency, which kept confirming Iran's compliance right up until America itself withdrew from the deal; Netanyahu's long-standing, personal wish to see the Iranian regime fall; even theories about domestic political motives on both sides. Neither version fully cancels out the other — and that may be the most honest conclusion anyone can draw.

Wars rarely begin with missiles. They begin with decisions nobody paid much attention to at the moment they were made — a coup that looked like a solution, a revolution that looked like vindication, a decision that looked insignificant. The next chapter of this story is being written right now, in rooms in Washington and Tehran, by people who probably don't yet understand how far their own decision will reach. It might be the one that reopens the strait. It might be the one that closes it for good.