Iran Crisis Notebook #2: The Layered Roots of the Current War
To explain the current conflict through Trump, Netanyahu, or even the nuclear file alone is to begin far too late in the story.
This is part of Iran Crisis Notebook, a short twice-weekly series of analytical notes. The aim is to isolate one key argument at a time—in a form more developed than the quick exchanges of public debate, including television, but shorter and more immediate than a conventional essay or op-ed.
Introduction: What is this war about?
In a number of recent lectures, presentations, and media appearances—including most recently a talk at the New School and an interview on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC—I have been asked a recurring question: does the Trump administration actually have a clear purpose, strategy, or rationale for this war?
It is a fair question. And as I said recently in a segment with Chris Cuomo on NewsNation, President Trump would still benefit from addressing the American public directly in a major speech that explains the rationale in clear terms.
What follows is my own reconstruction of that rationale—not as a political defense, but as an analytical attempt to explain how we arrived at this point.
The key point is simple: the roots of this war are layered. To understand it, one has to move backward through those layers.
1. Immediate Trigger: 2026 — Collapse of the Oman Talks
The most immediate trigger was the collapse of the Oman talks.
A diplomatic channel existed. It failed when Iran refused to negotiate on the core U.S. demands: limits on enrichment, missiles, and regional proxies.
This matters because it suggests that diplomacy did not fail for lack of opportunity, but because the regime would not compromise on the very instruments of power that define it.
2. Proximate Cause: 2023 — October 7
October 7 changed the strategic landscape in two critical ways.
First, it exposed the cost of treating Iran’s proxy network as separable from the nuclear issue, as the Obama-era JCPOA largely did. Missiles, proxies, and regional warfare could no longer be treated as secondary problems. The older habit of compartmentalization no longer looked sustainable.
Second, the logic of deterrence shifted. After Israel’s 12-day war with Iran, senior Iranian figures began speaking more openly about the possible need for a nuclear weapon, suggesting that military weakening might produce not moderation but desperation. This was the point at which the costs of inaction began to look greater than the costs of action, including kinetic action, for the United States, Israel, and Arab regional partners, many of whom had long believed, mostly in private, that the only way to contain the Iranian threat was to “cut off the head of the snake.” The fear was not only Iran’s existing missile and proxy capabilities, but the prospect that Tehran might eventually build a stronger deterrent umbrella behind which it could move more rapidly toward a bomb.
In that sense, October 7 did not simply trigger a new round of escalation. It discredited the older framework for managing the conflict and made it far harder to separate the nuclear issue from proxy warfare and regional deterrence.
3. Strategic Layer: 1980 — The Carter Doctrine
The conflict is also rooted in a longer geopolitical logic.
Since 1980, the United States has treated any attempt by a hostile power to dominate the Persian Gulf—especially the Strait of Hormuz—as a threat to vital interests.
This war is therefore not only about centrifuges or enrichment levels. It is also about whether a revolutionary regime can retain the capacity to threaten a chokepoint through which a significant share of the world’s energy flows.
4. Regime Logic: 1979 — Revolution Becomes State
The deepest modern layer begins in 1979.
The Iranian Revolution did not simply overthrow a monarchy. It created a revolutionary and dictatorial regime with an ideological project. From the beginning, that project effectively declared war on four fronts: against the United States, against Israel, against Western liberal modernity, and against the majority of the Iranian population that rejects the regime.
Its anti-Americanism has never been merely rhetorical. Iran has been willing to bear enormous costs to sustain it, remaining only one of two countries in the world without a U.S. embassy while turning “Death to America” into part of official political culture and supporting forces that have killed over a thousand American personnel. Its anti-Israel position is sharper still. Iran helped create Hezbollah and has long backed armed groups committed not merely to resisting Israel but to eliminating it, which is why Israel sees this not as a normal rivalry but as an existential threat. Its hostility to liberal modernity has also been unmistakable, as in the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, never rescinded, which stands as a direct assault on freedom of thought and expression. And its war against its own people has culminated repeatedly in mass repression, most recently in the January massacre, when perhaps 7,000 to 10,000 unarmed protesters were killed in just two days, an unprecedented bloodbath in Iranian history.
The American creed is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Iranian Islamist creed is submission, martyrdom, and the imposition of God’s order on others. That does not make negotiation impossible, but it does help explain why negotiation is so often frustrated, tactical, and temporary: the conflict is not only over interests, but over fundamentally opposed visions of political and moral order.
The Islamic Republic is not only a state pursuing interests. It is also a revolutionary system shaped by ideology. That is why, as I argued in my Atlantic essay, “Iran Is Not a ‘Normal’ Country,” —i.e. it cannot be understood, or negotiated with, as if it were a normal status quo power.
5. Foundational Grievance: 1947–48 — Palestine and Israel
Behind 1979 lies a broader political imagination shaped by 1947–48.
For many Islamists, and more widely across the region, the creation of Israel became a foundational grievance and a permanent organizing principle of mobilization.
Iran’s position is distinct—Shi‘i, Persian, revolutionary—but it operates within that wider field of anti-Israel politics.
6. Civilizational Rupture: 1924 — Abolition of the Caliphate
Going deeper still, one encounters 1924.
The abolition of the Ottoman caliphate marked not just an institutional change but, for many Islamist thinkers, a civilizational rupture—a sense of political dispossession and historical decline.
Modern Islamist movements, including the Iranian revolutionary project in its own form, emerge partly from that longer reaction.
A Note on 1953
Much commentary treats the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953 as the master key to understanding the Islamic Republic.
That is overstated.
The memory of 1953 has mattered more to secular nationalists and parts of the left than to the regime itself, which has never truly treated Mossadegh as one of its central heroes.
Frankly, I have little patience for the ritual invocation of 1953. I think its role in shaping Iran’s later development, including 1979, is often exaggerated; but even if one accepts the strongest version of that claim, nations that endured far greater devastation—Japan, Germany—did not make permanent grievance a governing principle of political life.
To understand this regime, 1979 matters far more than 1953. And behind 1979 lie deeper ideological and historical currents that 1953 alone cannot explain.
Conclusion: Why This Framing Matters
If this layered account is right, then the familiar question—why did Trump or Israel start this war?—is the wrong place to begin. More accurate, and more illuminating, is to say that the United States and Israel did not so much start this war as move to finish a war that the Islamic Republic began in 1979 and has never stopped fighting. That war, of course, will not truly be finished unless the revolutionary regime in Iran is eventually replaced by a legitimate and normal government that relinquishes the four revolutionary antagonisms described above.
The current conflict is better understood as the convergence of several longer trajectories: failed diplomacy, the post–October 7 transformation of regional politics, the enduring logic of the Carter Doctrine, and the ideological project set in motion in 1979, itself embedded in deeper historical grievances.
Seen this way, the war is not a sudden rupture. It is the latest phase of a conflict whose roots have been accumulating for decades.
Well said. Thank you. I agree with all your points. This us a great piece to share with my American ki eral friends
The article succeeds in reframing the war not as a choice made by specific leaders, but as the "latest phase" of a decades-long accumulation of friction. The conflict feels like a systemic clash rather than a series of avoidable misunderstandings.