One of the major powers in the Middle East, Iran, has been dominating global headlines for decades now. However, in the last couple of months, all major news outlets have been flooding our screens with warnings of the dangers of this “Rogue Nation” and the threat it imposes on everyone’s lives. This progression culminated with the unprovoked bombing of Iran’s military and nuclear facilities and the assassination of senior nuclear scientists by the zionist entity on June 13th 2025. A step that would start a 12-day regional war. To understand Iran’s hardened stance today, we must look back and analyze the long history that shaped its distrust of the outside world.
Often portrayed as a major threat to world peace, Iran (or Persia) hasn’t launched an offensive war against any nation in over 280 years, since the Persian invasion of India in the late 1730s.
The Achaemenid Empire, the first great Persian empire, founded by Cyrus the Great around 550 BC, faced its first loss and embarrassment against the Greeks, who resisted Persian expansion. This failure had a symbolic importance that though the empire might be mighty, it has vulnerabilities and it could be resisted.
Two centuries later, the fall of this empire, and the burning of Persepolis, at the hands of Alexander the Great in 330 BC, caused a Persian civilizational trauma seeing the destruction of their lands at the hands of foreign forces. After the death of Alexander, Seleucus The First, one of his generals, took control of Persia, formed the Seleucid Empire, imposed Greek language and culture, suppressing Persian identity in most areas. This led to the rise of the Parni, an Iranian tribe that overthrew the Seleucid Empire, in eastern Persia around 247 BC. Over the next century, the Parni controlled most of the Iranian plateau.
The Parthian empire, created by the Parni, rose to power at the same time as one of the greatest empires in history, the Roman Empire. It did not survive untouched as it was attacked multiple times by Rome led by Crassus, Mark Anthony, and Trajan. Eventually, the weakened Parthian empire was overthrown by The Sasanians, led by the house of Sasan, who inherited the wars with the Roman Empire, specifically with the Eastern Roman Empire. This constant state of war and defense against the West, led by Rome, helped lay the foundations of the geopolitical divide between “East” and “West”, and the stance of defense that we can actually see in Iranian politics.
After fighting against western imperialism for centuries, this time the danger came from the south with the Arab conquest during the rashidun caliphate. Persia fell, and with it the Persian identity once again. After Karbala, many Persians started to align themselves and follow Shiism opposing the tyranny of the people in power.
Even during the first world war, despite staying neutral, Iran got occupied by Britain, Russia, and the Ottoman empire. Iran became a battlefield for other’s wars, with towns and villages being destroyed and looted, and the widespread famine . Some estimate that around 25% of the population died of hunger. This led to a deep distrust of foreign forces that have invaded and killed their people despite staying neutral.
Despite this long history of foreign invasion, one of the main reasons for distrust in the West was rooted in the overthrowing of Mohammad Mosaddegh by western intelligence agencies. In 1925, the Pahlavi dynasty was established with Reza khan, a commander of the Persian army who rose to power and became the ruler of Iran by staging a coup d’etat in 1921. However, after the failure of his foreign policy, and the occupation of Iran by the British and the Soviet Union in 1941, he was forced into exile and abdicated in favor of his son Mohammad Riza Pahlavi. Following this event, Mohammad Mosaddegh returned to political life. A member of the ruling elite, former governor, minister of finance, minister of foreign affairs and member of parliament, Mosaddegh was re-elected as a member of the Iranian parliament in 1944. As a nationalist, he fought against foreign control over the country and played a leading role in opposing Soviet and British control over Iranian oil. His fight to nationalize Iranian oil, a cause that will be passed as an act by the parliament in 1951, gained him so much political strength that the shah was forced to assign him as prime minister. This success resulted in a political crisis in Iran between the Shah and Mossadegh which resulted in the attempt to dismiss Mossadegh. However, the streets of Iran filled with protestors against the shah which forced him to flee the country.
After nationalizing Iranian oil, it was clear that Mosaddegh wouldn’t accept anything but the benefit of his own people no matter which foreign power stood in the way. Faced by the serious problem of western hegemony, the British sought help from the United States of America, and with a cooperation between the MI6 (British Intelligence Agency) and the CIA (American Intelligence Agency), operation Ajax was born. After decades of denying responsibility, in August 2013, the CIA declassified documents admitting that it orchestrated the coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. “The plan was to create conditions within Iran that would lead to the collapse of the Mossadeq government and the restoration of the Shah’s authority… The Shah was seen as a guarantor of stability and a reliable ally of the United States and Great Britain in the region… Mossadeq’s government was perceived as vulnerable to Communist infiltration and hostile to Western oil interests… The use of propaganda and psychological warfare was essential to undermine the popular support for Mossadeq and to foster unrest.” The overthrow of the elected Prime Minister by foreign agencies and local elites furthered the distrust towards both the elites and the West leaving a scar in the collective Iranian memory that still affects current politics.
Following the successful overthrow of Mossaddegh, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi returned to Iran not as a constitutional monarch, but as a fully empowered ruler backed by Western intelligence and military planners. The United States and Britain had secured a dependable client, one who would open the country once again to foreign oil interests. This return marked the death of Iranian democracy and the birth of a brutal security state. Under the Shah’s rule, Iran was transformed into a police regime where opposition was crushed, dissent criminalized, and political prisoners filled the cells of the infamous SAVAK (the Shah’s American and Israeli trained secret police). Torture, surveillance, and disappearances became the norm. Oil revenues soared and the elite basked in royal patronage and imported luxuries, meanwhile the majority of Iranians remained in poverty, shut out from the wealth extracted beneath their own feet with about 42 percent of Iranian villages lacking basic services like electricity, clean water, or roads.
While Western governments paraded Iran as a “modernizing” ally, they turned a blind eye to the repression that fueled popular rage, rage that would one day boil over and turn against them overthrowing The Shah. After mass protests against the regime in 1978, the government used violence against protesters which caused public outrage that overthrew the shah in 1979 and established a new rule under Ayatollah Khomeini. Iran’s identity shifted due to all this historical manipulation into self-reliance and anti-imperialist rhetoric.
A year after the revolution won, Iran was invaded by its neighbor Iraq under Saddam Hussein who feared the revolution would spread into his territory and thought Iran was weak after the revolution which would help him take control over the disputed Shatt Al Arab. This war, which would last 8 years, would leave around 1.5 million Iranian casualties and heavily damage the country’s infrastructure. This war and the repeated historical betrayals reinforced centuries of defensive psychology which led Iran to focus on local military manufacturing as well as missile and nuclear programs as defense strategies.
From the fall of Persepolis in 330 BC till the Zionist attacks in 2025 AD, more than twenty three centuries of invasions, wars, betrayals, and sanctions have forged the Iranian subconscious. Each aggression, each wound, layered on top of the previous one shaping a collective memory defined by survival against external threats. This explains why Iran, despite being portrayed as the aggressor, views the world through a lens of caution and resistance. Its defiance is not born from reckless ambition but from centuries of learned distrust and a determination never again to see its sovereignty consumed by the ambitions of others.
Edited by Amin Kharrat and Judie Chakass