The news is full of Iran right now.
Airstrikes. Threats. History being made in real time.
But most people watching the headlines are missing 100 years of context that explains exactly how we got here — and why this conflict is so much more complicated than it looks.
This isn’t a political take. This is the history.
First — Iran Is Not What Most Westerners Picture
Before anything else, understand this.
Iran is not a small, unstable country that stumbled onto the world stage.
It is one of the oldest continuous civilisations on earth. The Persian Empire — which Iran is the direct heir to — stretched from Egypt to India 2,500 years ago. Iran has poets, mathematicians, architects and philosophers whose work shaped the modern world.
Tehran in the early 1900s was described by the first American ambassador to the Persian court as a thriving, progressive city. By 1975 — just four years before the Islamic Revolution — American feminist Betty Friedan compared it to a Western boom town. International banks. Construction everywhere. A cosmopolitan, educated middle class.
That Iran — the one most Westerners have never seen — is the starting point for everything that follows.
The First Thing The West Did: Carve It Up
In 1907, Britain and Russia sat down and drew lines across Iran.
No Iranians in the room. No consent. The two great powers simply divided the country into “spheres of influence” — Russia controlled the north, Britain controlled the south.
Iran had been fighting for years to establish its own democratic parliament — the Majlis — and a constitutional monarchy. They succeeded in 1906. One year later, two foreign empires quietly decided that Iranian democracy was less important than their own strategic interests.
This is the wound that never fully healed.
It is impossible to understand Iranian suspicion of Western intentions without understanding that the very first thing the West did — when Iran tried to govern itself — was divide it up on a map.
Oil Changes Everything
Fast forward to 1951.
Iran had oil. Enormous amounts of it. And for decades, most of the money from that oil had flowed to the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company — not to Iranians.
A democratically elected Prime Minister named Mohammad Mossadegh decided this was unacceptable. He nationalised the oil industry. The profits would belong to Iran.
To Iranians, Mossadegh was a hero. Time magazine named him Man of the Year in 1952.
To Britain and America, he was a problem.
In 1953, the CIA and British MI6 ran Operation Ajax — a covert operation to remove Mossadegh from power. They funded protests. They bribed military officers. They orchestrated a coup.
It worked. Mossadegh was arrested, tried, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. His supporters were imprisoned or executed.
The Shah — Mohammad Reza Pahlavi — was restored to power with a firmer grip than ever, backed by American money and American weapons.
For Iranians, this moment has never been forgotten. Every time a Western leader talks about democracy and freedom in the Middle East, Iranians remember 1953 — the year America overthrew theirs.
The Shah’s Iran: Modernisation And Repression
The Shah was not simply a tyrant. Under his rule, Iran modernised rapidly.
Women gained the right to vote. Universities were built. A Literacy Corps brought education to rural areas. Tehran became one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the Middle East.
But alongside the modernisation was the SAVAK — the secret police. Political opposition was crushed. Dissidents were tortured and disappeared. The Shah ruled with increasing authoritarianism, increasingly dependent on repression to hold power.
The oil boom of the 1970s made it worse. Petrodollars poured in. Development accelerated. But the wealth was distributed unequally, and the pace of change alienated both the religious establishment and the urban poor.
By 1978, the streets were full of protesters.
On January 16, 1979 — the Shah left Iran and never came back.
The Revolution Nobody Predicted
On February 1, 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini stepped off a plane in Tehran after 14 years in exile.
Four million people came to greet him.
The Islamic Revolution that followed was not simply a religious uprising. It was the explosion of 70 years of accumulated fury — at British colonialism, at the 1953 coup, at the Shah’s repression, at the inequality that modernisation had created without resolving.
Khomeini channelled all of it.
Within months, Iran was an Islamic Republic. The constitution was rewritten. Women were required to wear the hijab. Western cultural influence was driven out. And the revolution — like most revolutions — began devouring its own moderates.
The Hostage Crisis — And Why It Happened
In November 1979, Iranian students stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage.
They held them for 444 days.
To most Americans, this was an incomprehensible act of terrorism.
To many Iranians, it made a different kind of sense. The Shah — the man who had been restored to power by a CIA coup, the man whose secret police had tortured thousands — was now in the United States receiving medical treatment. The students demanded he be returned to face justice.
That context doesn’t justify what happened. But it explains where the rage came from.
The hostage crisis ended the Carter presidency, cemented anti-American sentiment as a pillar of the Islamic Republic, and began nearly five decades of confrontation between the two countries that continues to shape the world today.
The War With Iraq — And America’s Role In It
In September 1980, Iraq invaded Iran.
The Iran-Iraq War lasted eight years. It killed an estimated one million people. It featured trench warfare, chemical weapons, and child soldiers sent across minefields.
Here is the part that rarely makes the news in the West.
The United States supported Iraq. American intelligence helped Iraq target Iranian positions. When Iraq used chemical weapons against both Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians, the Reagan administration looked the other way — because Iran was the bigger enemy.
The man the US backed was Saddam Hussein.
The same Saddam Hussein America would later invade Iraq to remove.
Iranians remember this too.
Proxies, Nuclear Programmes, and the Endless Standoff
After the war with Iraq, Iran rebuilt — and expanded its influence differently. Rather than conventional military power it couldn’t afford, Iran invested in proxy forces across the region.
Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hamas in Gaza. Militias in Iraq and Syria and Yemen.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Iranian-backed groups carried out attacks that killed hundreds of Americans — including the 1983 bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 220 US Marines.
Meanwhile, Iran began developing a nuclear programme.
The US and Israel said it was for weapons. Iran said it was for energy. Years of negotiations — culminating in the 2015 nuclear deal under Obama — produced an agreement that limited Iran’s programme in exchange for lifting sanctions.
In 2018, President Trump withdrew from the deal.
Iran began enriching uranium again.
Where We Are Now
The confrontation between the United States and Iran has been building for 47 years — longer than most people watching the news today have been alive.
It is a conflict shaped by:
A 1953 CIA coup that overthrew Iranian democracy to protect oil interests. A revolution built on that betrayal. Decades of proxy warfare and terror attacks. A nuclear standoff that has never been fully resolved. And two sides who have defined themselves — for two generations — by their opposition to each other.
Is Iran’s government responsible for real violence against Americans? Yes.
Is the history of Western intervention in Iran a legitimate part of understanding why we are here? Also yes.
Both things are true.
The history doesn’t tell you who is right. But it does tell you that the man on television who reduces all of this to “47 years of Iranian belligerence” — without mentioning 1953 — is not giving you the full story.
Now you have it.
READ ALSO:
- 20 Disturbing Facts About Wild West Saloons That Will Ruin Every Western Movie For You
- Disney Lied To You About The Little Mermaid. The Real Story Will Make Your Blood Run Cold.
- Stranger Things Is Back. But The Scariest Part? Some Of It Actually Happened.
- Iran and Israel Were Allies. Here’s Exactly How They Became Enemies.
- Everyone Is Talking About Iran. Here’s What You Actually Need To Know.