Following the Twelve-Day War in June 2025, the United States and Israel launched a new war against Iran on February 28, 2026—an illegal war neither authorized by Congress nor supported by the American public. The Trump administration has scrambled to manufacture justifications for this war, attempting to sell it to a skeptical public as a preemptive mission to eliminate a dangerous regime in Tehran. Yet the brutality and authoritarianism of the Iranian state cannot serve as a blank check for foreign aggression. The repression of the Iranian regime is real, but it does not legitimize an unprovoked war carried out in the name of “liberation.”
The struggle against the regime belongs to the Iranian people alone. It is not a cause to be hijacked by Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu, nor a pretext for yet another catastrophic war imposed from outside. Iranians have resisted their rulers for decades—through protests, strikes, and immense personal sacrifice. Their struggle does not need bombs, opportunistic saviors, or cynical geopolitical theater masquerading as humanitarian concern.
Contrary to American and Israeli calculations, war has strengthened hardline factions within Iran’s political system rather than weakening them. Under direct threat, ruling elites have invoked sovereignty and resistance as unifying narratives. Dissent is framed as disloyalty. Security institutions gain expanded authority under the logic of national emergency. Instead of destabilizing the regime, the war has narrowed political space. Reformist and pragmatic factions have been pushed aside while hardliners consolidate power—most clearly demonstrated by the elevation of Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the former supreme leader who was killed in a United State–Israeli strike. In this atmosphere, survival has displaced reform as the dominant political priority.
Meanwhile, mainstream Western media continues to portray Iran as a perennial breeding ground of radicalism and irrational anti-Western hostility. This narrative has long been used to justify American- and Israeli-led wars and regime-change campaigns in the region. The same rhetoric once paved the way for invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and for intervention in Syria. The same logic of intervention was used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a war that dismantled the Iraqi state and helped create the conditions for the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq.
Within this framework, instability in the Middle East is rarely treated as the product of historical and political processes. Instead, it is framed as the manifestation of some inherent cultural pathology—an alleged tendency toward violence and extremism supposedly embedded within the region itself. Such narratives conveniently provide moral cover for repeated foreign intervention. Their tone echoes the rhetoric of nineteenth-century imperialism, when European powers justified domination by depicting colonized societies as backward, irrational, and incapable of governing themselves without external supervision.
The recent history of the Middle East tells a very different story. Colonial intervention, Cold War geopolitics, foreign occupations, and the alliances Western powers forged with particular regimes, militias, and ideological movements all played a decisive role in cultivating radicalism—sometimes deliberately, sometimes as the predictable consequence of domination and war.
After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, European colonial powers—particularly Britain and France—moved quickly to secure control over the territories once governed from Istanbul. Rather than ruling exclusively through direct colonial administration, they often relied on indirect methods: cultivating alliances with local rulers, co-opting religious authorities, and shaping political institutions designed to stabilize imperial control while suppressing organized resistance.
In the Arabian Peninsula, this strategy was evident in Britain’s relationship with Abdulaziz Ibn Saud. As the First World War weakened Ottoman authority across the region, British officials sought dependable allies who could safeguard imperial interests and counter rival powers along critical trade routes. London provided Ibn Saud with diplomatic recognition, financial subsidies, and political backing as he consolidated power across central and eastern Arabia. His expanding authority rested on an alliance with the religious movement known as Wahhabism, whose clerical leaders granted religious legitimacy to the ambitions of the Al Saud dynasty. This fusion of political power and religious authority ultimately laid the ideological and institutional foundations for the creation of Saudi Arabia in 1932.
Militant organizations such as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS) later emerged from broader Salafi-jihadist currents whose ideological roots intersect with the doctrinal legacy of Wahhabism.
During the Cold War, foreign intervention continued to reshape the political landscape of the Middle East and Central Asia. One of the most consequential examples occurred in Afghanistan, where the United States supported the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989). Through a covert CIA program known as Operation Cyclone, Washington—working closely with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan—channeled billions of dollars in weapons, funding, and training to anti-Soviet fighters. The objective was strategic: weakening Soviet influence and containing communism in the region.
Although the policy contributed to the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, it also left behind a volatile legacy. The massive influx of weapons, foreign fighters, and militant networks destabilized Afghanistan and fueled a prolonged civil war among rival factions of former mujahideen. Out of this fractured political landscape eventually emerged the Taliban, a movement that promised to restore order through a rigid interpretation of Islamic law. By 1996, the Taliban had captured Kabul and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, providing sanctuary to militant organizations including Al-Qaeda.
Following the September 11 attacks in 2001, carried out by Al-Qaeda under the leadership of Osama bin Laden, the United States launched a military invasion of Afghanistan to dismantle the network and remove the Taliban from power. Although the Taliban government was quickly overthrown, the conflict evolved into a twenty-year war. After the withdrawal of United State and allied forces in 2021, the Taliban rapidly regained control of the country following the collapse of the internationally backed Afghan government.
Afghanistan thus became a stark illustration of imperial blowback: a war fought to weaken one rival superpower ultimately helped produce militant networks that would shape global conflict for decades.
Iran’s modern history reveals an even clearer example of how foreign intervention can reshape political trajectories. In 1953, the United States and Great Britain overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. In his place they restored Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose monarchy would rule for another twenty-six years while relying heavily on Western backing.
The Shah’s regime became synonymous with repression, inequality, and political suffocation. When the Iranian Revolution erupted in 1979, it was not a sudden upheaval but the culmination of decades of social tension and suppressed political demands. The revolution unleashed powerful anti-imperialist and popular energies that swept away the monarchy.
Yet the outcome was deeply paradoxical. The Islamic Republic emerged as a new political order that absorbed revolutionary momentum while reconstructing hierarchy under a different ideological framework. The monarchy collapsed, but domination persisted—reorganized through the institutions of theocratic authority.
Today, Iran is often invoked in Western discourse as a country where authoritarianism must be confronted through external pressure. Yet the policies pursued by Washington—especially under Donald Trump—reveal how little genuine concern for democracy actually shapes imperial strategy.
Trump’s approach to Iran was never about human rights or the well-being of the Iranian people. It was about forcing the Iranian state into submission while advancing Israel’s strategic agenda in the Middle East. What he sought was not genuine regime change but regime reorientation: compelling Iran to alter its alliances, trade relationships, and regional posture so that they aligned with American strategic interests.
Within this framework, the internal character of the Iranian regime is largely irrelevant. Whether authoritarian or democratic matters little to Washington. What matters is obedience.
The “maximum pressure” campaign exposed this logic clearly. By withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear agreement and imposing sweeping economic sanctions, the United States did not empower Iranian society or expand democratic space. Instead, it devastated the Iranian economy, slashed oil revenues, and intensified the hardships faced by ordinary people. The goal was never democratic transformation but coercion—discipline imposed through economic suffering.
When the Iranian regime endured the “maximum pressure” campaign rather than capitulating, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu escalated further, turning to military force in an attempt to coerce the regime where economic warfare had failed.
Conclusion
Western imperial powers—particularly the United States—have played a profound role in producing the very instability they now claim to combat in the Middle East. Through colonial domination, Cold War proxy wars, coups, and repeated military interventions, they have helped cultivate the forces of radicalization and fundamentalism that are later invoked to justify yet more war and intervention. In the process, moments of genuine popular and progressive transformation have repeatedly been crushed, diverted, or corrupted.
This cycle is not accidental. It is structural—and it continues.
Contact information
Nader Rahimi
Email: nrahimi@bu.edu
