Iran's Rise and Fall: What History Actually Shows

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Whenever you open Axe or TikTok, you're guaranteed to be subjected to the most backward, historically illiterate takes imaginable, that a lot of things. These days, a lot of those takes involve Iran. Hacks will tell you that the United States is the aggressor in the region. They'll tell you that if we just played nice, if we just apologized to Iran for our history, then peace would break out everywhere. Yeah, so that's bullshit. So as the war in Iran continues, let's look at exactly how we got here from the beginnings of the conflict right up until the current day. Essentially, I did what no other president was willing to do. If you've ever argued with a college sophomore who just took an intro to Middle Eastern Studies class, they will immediately shout Operation Ajax at you. That, of course, is the operation the CIA initiated in 1953 to remove Muhammad Mossadeh, who was the prime minister of Iran. They will tell you that Iran was a beautiful, flourishing utopian democracy until the evil nefarious CIA swooped in, overthrew Mossadegh, and installed a brutal dictator in the Shah. Therefore, everything that Iran does today is simply understandable blowback for American imperialism. Now, what's weird about this is a few things. First of all, let's point out, the Shah was removed by the Ayatollahs. So why the Ayatollah would be upset with the United States for removing Mossadegh, who was a Marxist secularist in 1953, is confusing. But let's go all the way back to 1950, the height of the Cold War. Iran was essentially aligned with the West at that time. We, of course, had developed their oil resources, so had Britain. Meanwhile, Stalin and the Soviet Union were looking directly at Iran. They saw Iran as an asset. Back in 1946, Stalin had actually attempted to set up a puppet regime in Iran, and he failed. Well, 1950 and now 1951, and a man named Muhammad Maceda is elected by the so-called Majlis, that is the parliament. Now, the reason I say, elected is because the Shah actually is the one who had the power under the Iranian constitution to both appoint and remove prime minister, sort of like the president names a Supreme Court justice, and then the Senate confirmed. In fact, the Shah did this a lot. As Peter Thoreau pointed out at Tablet Magazine between 1953 and 79, the Shah would appoint and dismiss 10 more prime ministers, including Mossadeh twice. So, what went wrong? Well, Mosadd tried to essentially centralize all power. He tried to break the Constitution. He dissolved the parliament unconstitutionally. He was ruling by decree. He nationalized the oil industry, essentially seizing Western assets, and he was aggressively cozying up to the Soviet Union. The United States and the British looked at this and decided that it was a bad idea to have a Soviet puppet state sitting on top of some of the largest oil reserves on planet Earth, that handing the keys to the Middle East to the Soviet Union was actually kind of stupid. The CIA helped support the Shah in removing Mossadeh. The Shah issued what was called a fireman that was a royal edict terminating Mossadeh's prime minister. Mossade refused to leave. The entire military infrastructure backed the Shah. Some demonstrations broke out and eventually Mossade acknowledged disaster. That's the whole story. We didn't overthrow a regime. The Shah was in charge the whole time. We weren't even against the military infrastructure. They were on the Shah's side. We didn't send arms to the insurgents.

We helped the Shah do the thing that he had the constitutional ability to do. Well, under the Shah for the next two and a half decades, Iran was a staunch U.S. ally. The Shah pushed through the so-called white revolution. He modernized the country. He expanded women's rights. He secularized the education system. He built up the economy. Again, if you look at pictures of Tehran in the 1970s, it looks a lot like L.A. in the 1970s. People are wearing Western clothing. They're going to the movies. They're living relatively normal lives. But rapid modernization bred heavy resentment among radical traditionalists. And the Shah was an autocratic leader. He did use secret police to crush political dissent. And of course, because he was an autocrat, this also created corruption issues. And so you ended up with this bizarre coalition of weird bedfellows, Marxist college students, and radical Islamist clerics, all united by sheer hatred of the Shah. Which brings us to 1979, the year everything went completely off the cliff. The Shah felt ill with cancer, and he grew isolated from the people. Mass protests, strikes, religious processions swelled in the streets, the state's will to repress collapsed. The Shah ran from Iran, ostensibly for medical treatment. The revolution then took off from there, having recorded sermons and smuggling tapes in Iran. From exile in Paris, Ayatollah Khomeinii returned to Iran triumphant and prepared to leverage the caste to create an Islamic revolution. He stepped into the power vacuum, and his return was welcomed by moronic Westerners who perceived him as a sort of anti-imperialist. French intellectual and complete piece of human direct, Michel Foucault, called Khomeini a saint. He wasn't really a saint since he began executing thousands of political opponents, purging the army, subjugating women with compulsory hijab laws, and establishing a medieval theocracy. The new Mullahs regime made its central organizing principle abundantly clear. They didn't say, we don't like America's foreign policy. They didn't say we'd like to renegotiate our trade deals. They chanted death to America, they burned American flags, and they officially branded the United States as the Great Satan and Israel as the Little Satan. To prove they meant it, in November of 1979, radical Iranian students with the blessing of the new regime stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and seized 52 American diplomats and staff as hostages. This would become the first great test of American will in the Middle East with regard to the new Iranian regime. and President Jimmy Carter completely failed. He rang his hands, he botched a rescue mission, and then he spent the rest of his term begging the Ayatollahs for mercy. For 44 days, a year and 79 days, the Iranian regime humiliated the United States on live television. Jimmy Carter tried asking nicely for our citizens back. He sat in the Oval Office looking impotent. The Ayatollahs learned a very crucial lesson. Having a weak American president was useful, and you could take hostages and basically do what you wanted. The Iranian hostage crisis was American weakness embodied on the global stage. Well, how do we know? Well, literally the very moment that Ronald Reagan was sworn into office as president, they released the hostages. Weird how that works. The Ayatollahs looked at Ronald Reagan, who projected strength and realized that they had a problem, so they backed it down. Papers were signed, the hostages were put on a plane, our fellow Americans finally came back home. This is a basic tenet of reality-based foreign policy. Strength deters, weakness invites aggression.

While the West squabbles about the niceties of diplomacy, peace through strength has always been the iron law when it comes to foreign policy. At this point, the Middle Eastern Studies sophomores are on the edge of their seats with their next objection. They point to the Iran-Iraq War of the 80s, and they complain that the United States armed both sides. Which is sort of half true. In the real world, foreign policy is a game. of picking among the best of bad options. Foreign policy isn't a Marvel movie, you don't always get to choose between Captain America and Thanos. In 1980, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, kicking off an eight-year industrial-scale slaughter along the Iran-Iraq border. Saddam was a secular blood-soaked dictator, but Ayatollah Khomeini was something even more destabilizing, an expansionist apocalyptic Islamist whose explicit goal was to export his revolution across Iraq, the Gulf, and beyond, and cement a fundamentalist caliphate. So the United States made a cold strategic calculation. We provided limited support to Iraq to contain Iran. At the same time, the Reagan administration was engaging in the Iran-Contra affair. Iran-Contra was essentially a desperate back-channel effort to free seven American hostages being held by Iranian terror proxies in Lebanon. by selling anti-tank missiles to Iran, and then taking the money from that and sending it to anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua to keep it off the books. Their resistance to the Marxist-Sandinista government would eventually result in 1990 elections, where the Sandinistas were blown out of office. All this sounds complicated because it was. But none of it speaks to the idea that America was the bad guy here. Iran was a theocratic Islamist tyranny promoting an apocalyptic vision. Iraq was a brutal dictatorship. Nicaragua was a communist authoritarian state. We had to choose among a bunch of bad options. So the decision was, contain Iran, don't allow Iraq enough support to actually win, try to free hostages, and support the anti-communists in Nicaragua at the same time. Again, none of this makes America the bad guy with any of these players here. Iran spent the Iran-Iraq War sending literal children into minefields to clear the minefields, and they put plastic keys to heaven around their necks to incentivize them. That's not some sort of bizarre hunger games rip-off. That's reality. In 1983, a suicide car bomber killed 63 people, including 17 Americans at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. That bomber belonged to an early iteration of a terrorist group in Lebanon that would come to be known as Hezbo. A few months later, Chisbalah terrorist drove a truck packed with explosives into the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American service members in a single morning. It was the deadliest single-day death toll for the Marine Corps since Iwojima. The attack was planned and executed with Iranian money, training, and direction. In March 1984, Iranian-sponsored terrorists kidnapped and killed CIA Station Chief William Buckley in Beirut. In December 1984, Iranian-backed terrorists hijacked two USAID workers. In June of 1985, Chisbalah terrorists hijacked a TWA flight. In July, 1989, Chisbalah terrorists killed a U.S. Marine colonel. During the Iran-Iraq War, both of those countries were attacking commercial tankers in the Persian Gulf. Sound familiar. The U.S. Navy began escorting reflagged Kuwaiti oil tankers to protect them from Iranian attacks. An Iranian mine struck the USS Samuel B. John Roberts in 1988, it did heavy damage to the ship. So, in Operation Prang Mantis, the United States sank virtually the entire Iranian Navy in one day. That did not stop Iran. They kept building their global terror network. They bombed the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, killing 19 U.S. airmen. In 1998, with the assistance of Chisbalah,

Al-Qaeda suicide bombers simultaneously blew up U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people, including 12 Americans, wounding thousands. U.S. courts found Iran responsible for indirect support for the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. coal. Again, American blood Iranian fingerprints. Most of the time, when you see a major attack on U.S. or Western interests in the region, you will find the same pattern, training camps, money trails, ideological indoctrination, leading back to the Ayatollahs. After 9-11, things got worse. President George W. Bush correctly labeled Iran part of the axis of evil, but while the United States was sending hundreds of thousands of troops into Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran saw a vacuum. While American officials conducted counterinsurgency across the region and tasked our troops with a near-impossible mission to promote democracy, the Islamic Republic moved weapons, operatives, and cash into Shiite militias in Iraq, whose sole focus was to kill more Americans. Iran's elite military wing, The Kuds Force, led by the now-deceased Qasem Soleimani, engineered a higher-end IED design designed to pierce through American armored Humvees. Hundreds of American troops, at least 600 actually, were murdered, having their limbs blown off because of Iranian weapons. We'll get some more on this in a moment. First, freedom isn't free. We all know that freedom has to be defended. The same goes for your online freedom. Strong encryption defends your privacy and keeps those hackers out, which is why I use our sponsor ExpressVPN all the time. ExpressVPN is an app that roots all your online activity through secure encrypted servers. Without it, Your internet provider can log everything you do, and in the United States, they can even sell that data. Not with ExpressVPN. I use it whenever I am traveling. I'm not at home right now. That means I'm using ExpressVPN because my data is my business. Public Wi-Fi, airports, coffee shops, total disaster zone for hackers. ExpressVPN encrypts your connection, protecting your passwords, credit cards, and personal info. It even keeps bad people in foreign governments from snooping or censoring what you can see. Here's what really sets ExpressVPN apart. Transparency. They've opened their servers to independent audits from top security experts. Their trusted server tech runs entirely on RAM, its volatile memory. That means it can't store user data. It's privacy by design. They've also just launched Express MailGuard. It works with any email provider. It shields your real email address. wherever you sign up online. The result? A cleaner inbox and tougher defense against spam and fishing without changing how you use your email. Find out how you can get up to four extra months by scanning that QR code on screen, clicking the link in the description box below or by heading on over to expressvPN.com slash Ben Shapiro. Meanwhile, Iran had been pursuing nukes since the 1980s with the help of Russia and China. By the late 90s, they developed something they called the Ahmad plan. It was a plan to covertly develop and test nukes by 2004. In 2002, Iranian dissidents revealed that Iran had built two nuclear sites, a uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and a heavy water production facility at Iraq. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 put the Iranians off that plan temporarily. They soon started speeding to a bomb again.

when Mahmoud Ahmadinejab, the president of Iran decided to race toward a bomb along with the Ayatollahs. This ended with significant sanctions on the Iranian government. Then things got worse. We elected Barack Hussein Obama. Barack Obama's grand foreign policy vision was if we just hugged the Ayatollah and engaged with the regime, showed goodwill, you know, flexibility. The Ayatollah would somehow magically moderate. Meanwhile, Iran was still racing toward a nuclear weapon. Even under the supervision of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Iran began developing secret nuclear infrastructure. Through ties with Pakistani nuclear scientists, Iran acquired designs for a centrifuge and component parts. North Korea and Russia helped out with technicians. The regime's nuclear strategy was simple. Distribute the program across multiple hidden sites and bury it, literally, under mountains. Needless to say, Barack Obama's Huggeron strategy did not actually draw a clear red line. Instead, the Obama administration sent John Kerry shuttling across Geneva and Vienna chasing a signature on a godforsaken piece of paper, the JCPOA or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. This was, objectively, the most disastrous, cowardly foreign policy agreement of my lifetime. The deal did not stop Iran from getting the bomb. In fact, it just told Iran that they could have a bomb in 10 years. The terms of the agreement. allowed key restrictions to sunset or expire, leaving Iran with infrastructure and know-how to sprint toward the bomb in a set period of time. With the world's go-ahead, what did we get in exchange? Nothing. Obama unfrozed sanctions and billions of dollars of Iranian assets, including a $1.7 billion payment tied to an old arms dispute, delivered, literally as pallets of cash on unmarked cargo planes into Tehran in the dead of night. Well, that doesn't take a super genius to predict what Iran would do next. Instead of building hospitals, reforming its economy, moderating, the Islamic Republic poured cash into Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, the Houthis in Yemen, and a gigantic ballistic missile program, all of which are currently threatening millions of people across the Middle East today. And then President Donald Trump was elected. President Trump took one look at the JCPOA and called it what it was, the worst deal in the history of deals. He withdrew from the agreement. He immediately rectified American foreign policy in the Middle East with a maximum pressure campaign of sanctions on Iran's oil exports, crippling their economy. In early 2020, President Trump did what no previous president was willing to do. He ordered a drone strike at Baghdad airport and killed IRGC General Qasem Soleimani. Remember, Soleimani was the architect of Iran's external terror machine and was personally responsible for countless Americans maimed and murdered. Iran's response was... kind of telling. They launched a small missile barrage at U.S. forces in Iraq, but they gave us warning because they didn't actually want to hit anybody. Because if they did, then we might have to end the regime. Once again, when faced with a tough president with the will to use force, the regime rattles its sabres, and then it retreats. Deterance works. Peace through strength, works. The Biden administration was next. They immediately reverted to the Obama administration type. Biden literally brought back the exact same officials who did the JCPOA, relaxed oil sanctions, unfreezed billions as part of hostage swaps just week before October 7th, 2023.

and what followed is exactly what you would expect. Hell, we've been living through the result of Obama and Biden weakness over the last few years. Iran saw an American government terrified of the word escalation, completely unwilling to enforce red lines, and giving the green light to all of their homicidal terrorist proxies. We all saw the October 7 massacre, the Houthis choking off global shipping in the Red Sea, American troops killed in Jim Jordan, and according to the IAEA, Iran accelerating its efforts to build nuclear weapons. In response, Israel heavily damaged or destroyed many of Iran's terrorist proxies, including Hamas and Chisbalah. But it was really with the commencement of President Trump's second term last year that maximum pressure came back into play. This time, the Ayatollahs made a series of fatal miscalculations. They assumed that they could just slow play or bluff President Trump. Wrong. Well, first, they were wrong in 2025. They refused to complete negotiation with President Trump. Israel, which was not willing to allow the further development of Iranian ballistic missile buildup or nuclear development, launched the 12-day war, achieving complete air superiority over Iran. That was an operation that culminated in President Trump's Operation Midnight Hammer, the B-2 bombing of the Fordo nuclear facility. And then Iran was wrong again in 2026. Again, they kept slow playing or lying in negotiations. They were murdering their protesters by the tens of thousands at home. They continued to pursue nukes and ballistic missile activity. President Trump is not just going to sit there. He saw a historic opportunity to cut off Iran at its needs and acted to take down the greatest menace to the Middle East, America and the West, with Operation Epic Fury. Right now, the United States is systematically dismantling Iran's military and economic power. The Iranian regime is on its last legs, or last leg, depending on if you're talking about Moshtaba Khameina'i, the son of the Ayatollah that we killed at the very beginning of the war. Moshtaba is in a coma, and may be missing a leg. Pretty much everybody at the top ranks of the IRGC has been killed, replaced, and killed again. Their ballistic missile launcher capacity has been radically diminished. Their nuclear facilities are literally under rock at this point. A siege forces have been hit with specific drone strikes. Major infrastructure is gone. The Iranian people are awaiting a signal to go out into the streets. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said it best, we didn't start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it. Here's the bottom line. The history of Iran and America over the last half century since 1979 is not a story of a tragic misunderstanding between equals. It is certainly not a story of America as the evil aggressor and Iran as the innocent. It is the story of a radical apocalyptic theocratic regime that defines itself in opposition to Western civilization. The West Honor's life. Iran celebrates death. The West wants to spread prosperity. Iran has only ever spread suffering and sure terror under the current regime. The Islamic regime has told us who they are time and again, with hostages, with car bombs, with IEDs, with missiles, not handshakes and wishful op-eds. They built a regime whose foundational slogan is death to America, and then they've spent their entire existence trying to put that into practice by arming every jihadist psychopath they could find. Our face-off with Iran has for a long time oscillated between clear-eyed deterrence and cowardly appeasement. But you can't bribe a snake. You can't reason with a snake. You have to cut off its head. And that's what President Trump is doing right now. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills. But it turns out,

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