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The Decades-Old Roots of Trump’s War on Iran

An interview with historian Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi about the generations of US presidents who have tried to destroy the Iranian regime.

Iranians walk past an anti-Trump billboard along a street in Tehran on September 23, 2026.

Donald Trump’s current war on Iran is the culmination of decades of hostile US policy dating back to the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Administrations from both political parties have sought to blunt the impact of this fundamental shift in the Middle East’s geopolitics, which they see as running counter to the United States and Israel’s freedom of action in the region.

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi’s work helps explain how America has found itself in yet another Middle East conflict and what the West misunderstands about Iran. He’s an Iranian-born sociologist and historian who has written four books on the different aspects and historical context of the Iranian revolution and its aftermath. His latest, The Long War on Iran: New Events, Old Questions, sheds light on the complexities of Iranian society and how US policy has failed to grapple with the ramifications of modern Iran. He is affiliated with the Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of Toronto, and was formerly chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies and director of the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University.

Luca GoldMansour: In your introduction to The Long War on Iran, you share a harrowing anecdote about watching the Iranian prison that you were once jailed in get bombed by the Trump administration and Israel during last year’s 12-day war. Why did you start there?

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi: I was in prison in Iran from 1981 to the beginning of 1985. This was what in Iranian history is known as the Reign of Terror. It was sort of the equivalent of what happened in the French Revolution—meaning that the new post-revolutionary state is trying to consolidate power and eliminate all the opposition, many of whom were part of the revolutionary movement. I was one of those people.

At that time there was also a brutal war going on with Iraq, which had invaded the southwest of Iran—the oil-rich regions—with the encouragement of the Americans. Saddam Hussein was armed by the Germans, French, and Americans. There were some arms delivered to Iran, too, because the philosophy at the time was to let the two countries destroy each other for the greater cause of containing the Iranian Revolution and providing a more secure space for the state of Israel.

In prison, my guards were the same people who had to go to the war front to fend off the Iraqi invasion. They had rotations.

In 1984, for the first time, Saddam Hussein acquired missiles that could reach Tehran. I was very sick at the time with cancer, and I was in a prison infirmary. I could hear these missiles hitting near us. My guard, whose brother was killed in the war, never talked. But he came, checked on me, and then for the first time, these missiles opened up a conversation between us. We realized that if the missiles hit the prison, both of us will be buried under the same rubble.

So in 2025 when Israel bombed the Evin prison—the same prison I was in—it brought back all these memories to me. This time, bombing the prison was intentional on the Israeli side. They thought that bombing the gates of the prison would lead to some sort of storming-of-the-Bastille moment, and it actually happened exactly like in that situation when I was in prison. The prisoners and the prison guards found themselves on the same side of Israeli bombs. Most of the people who were injured were prison guards and personnel who were in the prison infirmary. And the prisoners, instead of running away, rescued the guards.

I opened the book with that scene to show that wars like this create very unyielding and uncanny situations that make it very hard to know the right thing to do.

LG: Do you see a similar pattern playing out in how Iranian society is reacting to the current war?

BGT: One of the most surprising consequences of this war was the way people reacted to it. There is massive discontent in [Iran]. There is a deep economic crisis, some of which is caused by the draconian sanctions that were imposed on Iran. It’s also because of deep corruption. Once you institute these sorts of sanctions, you open up the possibility of crony capitalism, black market deals, and non-transparency. That’s a recipe for very widespread corruption.

Then there is a very repressive state that doesn’t allow a flourishing civil society in which people can enjoy building networks, associations, and parties. That doesn’t mean that there is no civil society in Iran. There is still a remarkable kind of life in civil society in Iran. There are publishing businesses, interesting media conversations, YouTube channels, and conversations happening in coffee shops.

[But] people are constantly under economic and political and social pressures, and they show that discontent in so many different ways, including massive........

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