It was around 9.45 am, Iran Standard Time, on Saturday, 28th February 2026, when Israel launched a large pre-emptive strike on Iran. Coordination was done with the USA, which also participated with missiles, drones and other military assets.

This happened within 48 hours of the statement given by Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Muhammad bin Abdulrahman Al Thani that “significant progress” had been made in the Geneva talks. This followed his statement on CNN to Christiane Amanpour on 19th February 2026 that “a US-Iran deal was very close”. Thus, instead of giving diplomacy a chance, Israel attacked Iran.

This was the second time that an attack had occurred during positive nuclear diplomacy. On 13th June 2025, while parleys were being held between the USA and Iran, Israel launched a major strike on Iran, which later came to be known as the “Twelve Day War”.

The fundamental questions which arise are: why is this war taking place? And how will it impact the future not only of the Middle East but the entire world?

Over the next five columns, I will unpack the historical, geopolitical, legal, strategic and military dimensions of this ongoing confrontation.

Iran, historically called Persia, is one of the oldest and most continuous civilisations in human history. Archaeological evidence shows organised settlements as early as the fourth and fifth millennia BCE. By the first millennium BCE, the Medes and Persians had emerged as the dominant forces. Cyrus the Great created the Achaemenid Empire in the sixth century BCE. It was then one of the largest empires on the planet.

Alexander the Great conquered Persia after the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BCE, which ended the first Persian Empire. However, Persia remained a major regional power. After the Arab conquest of the seventh century, Persian culture, language, scholarship, and history influenced the Islamic world. In 1501 CE, Shah Ismail I, the founder of the Safavid dynasty, declared “Twelver Shi’ism” as the state religion of Persia.

The power of Persia ebbed and flowed during the intervening centuries. But despite having been conquered by the Greeks, Muslims and Mongols, Persian culture, administrative systems, language and other elements of daily life evolved. The Persian ethos was so strong that this phenomenon is described by historians as the “Persianisation of the conquerors”. Thus, pride in their 2,500-year-old civilisation became a seminal part of the Persian consciousness.

On 21st March 1935, the Persian New Year, King Reza Shah Pahlavi decreed that the name Persia be changed to Iran, meaning the Land of the Aryans. It reflected the multi-ethnic composition of Azeris, Kurds, Baluch, Arabs and others.

The aggressive pursuit of a Western way of life, highlighted as the “White Revolution”, although it did modernise some parts of Iran, also led to backlash from religious scholars, especially Ayatollah Khomeini, who was exiled in 1964

The aggressive pursuit of a Western way of life, highlighted as the “White Revolution”, although it did modernise some parts of Iran, also led to backlash from religious scholars, especially Ayatollah Khomeini, who was exiled in 1964

In Iran, oil reserves were discovered on 26th May 1908. This discovery led to the creation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1909. Iran became intertwined with global geopolitics and attracted strong British and American influence. During the Second World War, Britain and Russia jointly invaded and occupied Iran to secure supply routes and oil resources. This occupation continued until after the war.

Iran was a constitutional monarchy, whereby Reza Shah Pahlavi was the King. Mohammad Mossadegh became the Prime Minister of Iran on 28th April 1951. The Prime Minister exercised executive authority through parliament. But slowly, he started eclipsing the power of the King.

In 1951, Mossadegh nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which dramatically increased his popularity and power within Iran but generated intense international pressure. When he temporarily resigned after the King delayed ceding his power over the military to the Prime Minister, huge protests broke out in July 1952. He was reinstated and given greater authority.

The United States and Britain could not wait any longer. Operation Ajax was launched jointly by the CIA and MI6 in August 1953, culminating on 19th August. It orchestrated a coup which overthrew the elected government. The King regained his authority. Mossadegh was arrested and tried for treason by a military tribunal and was given a three-year sentence. After his release from prison in 1956, he was kept under house arrest until he died in 1967, at the age of 84.

This incident sowed hatred among the Iranian people against the USA and Britain. It worsened further when the rule of the Shah became increasingly authoritarian, backed by his infamous intelligence agency, SAVAK. Although not among the most lethal regimes of the twentieth century, his reign became widely known for intense political repression.

Research by historian Ervand Abrahamian suggests around 3,000 political killings during his rule. Thousands were imprisoned. And the common Iranian believed that all this had happened because of Operation Ajax, which had deeply wounded the pride of the Iranian nation.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979, in which Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the King, did not occur overnight. The repression mentioned above acted as a major catalyst, causing widespread anger among students, intellectuals and the clergy.

The aggressive pursuit of a Western way of life, highlighted as the “White Revolution”, although it did modernise some parts of Iran, also led to backlash from religious scholars, especially Ayatollah Khomeini, who was exiled in 1964.

Rapid industrialisation because of oil revenues led to inflation, urban migration and severe unemployment. The common Iranian blamed the Shah and the United States for his woes. With increasing American involvement after 1953, nationalist anger also increased against the USA.

The pent-up anger finally spilt over into protests in 1978. Despite excessively harsh measures, the situation could not be controlled. The result was that the King fled Iran and Khomeini returned from exile and established the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The ruling clergy used the hatred of America to its advantage, giving it the title “The Great Satan”. Besides other propaganda, they used the 1964 legal immunity given by the Shah to American military personnel as a powerful narrative to prove collusion between the two and the subordination of proud Iranians to the Americans, who had overthrown their elected Prime Minister Mossadegh 25 years earlier. Thus, opposition to America was turned into the central pillar of the ideology of post-1979 Iran.

Since 1979, hostility between Iran and the USA has shaped the strategic landscape of the Middle East. Starting from the American hostages, to the botched rescue attempt, and successive crises ranging from the Iran-Iraq War to sanctions, to the creation of proxies by Iran and the ensuing violence, reinforced the belief that the other side was a strategic threat. Periodic diplomatic openings rekindled hope of improving relations, but the accumulated weight of history and the prodding of the USA by Israel extended the adversarial relationship.

On numerous occasions, Israel used this animosity to its advantage and tried its best to involve the Americans in an active war against Iran. And finally, Prime Minister Netanyahu succeeded in getting America, under President Trump, fully involved in 2026.

Thus, what began as a revolutionary rupture in 1979 evolved into one of the most enduring geopolitical rivalries of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with the result that what started as an Israel-Iran conflict is now primarily an Iran-USA war.

© The Friday Times