The Myth of the ‘Imminent Threat’ |
Foreign Policy > Iran
The Myth of the ‘Imminent Threat’
Iran has been at war with the United States for a long time.
Marc Weisman | March 10, 2026
For nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic of Iran has treated its conflict with the United States as a war. The real question is not whether Iran threatens America, but whether Americans are willing to recognize that reality.
A familiar argument has been repeated by politicians and much of the mainstream media: Iran posed no “imminent threat,” and therefore military action against it was unjustified. But this claim ignores the true nature of the conflict between the United States and the Islamic Republic.
For many advancing it, the argument is less a strategic assessment than a political one — repeated to obscure danger in the hope of undermining the policy and weakening President Trump and Republicans ahead of the coming election cycle.
Iran’s war against America began on November 4, 1979, when Islamist revolutionaries stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days — cementing hostility toward the United States as a defining principle of the new regime.
The debate over whether Iran poses an “imminent threat” misses the broader reality. The United States has been under sustained attack from the Iranian regime for nearly half a century, and Iran’s hostility toward America — measured in lives lost, resources expended, and instability exported across the region — is beyond dispute. The regime has never hidden its intentions, repeating its familiar mantra, “Death to America,” while pursuing a strategy of indirect warfare through proxies and militant allies.
Iranian-backed forces carried out the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 Americans and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. servicemen. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard later armed and trained militias in Iraq that deployed specialized roadside bombs responsible for a significant share of American casualties during the Iraq War.
Beyond direct attacks........