For nearly a half-century, U.S. leaders, and perhaps Americans themselves, have viewed Iran as the “ultimate rogue.” Tehran’s unchanging anti-American ideology combined with a religiously dogmatic leadership have set it apart in the American imagination from other difficult enemies.
Just two weeks before U.S. President Donald Trump launched the current war against Iran, Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed a long-standing view of the regime’s leaders, arguing: “These people make policy decisions on the basis of pure theology. That’s how they make their decisions. So it’s hard to do a deal with Iran.”
The rhetoric was such a staple of Washington talk about Iran that hardly anyone noticed. But this profoundly ingrained anti-Iran sentiment in Washington helped set the stage for Trump taking the United States to war. It is a set of attitudes fueled in part by decades of hostile Iranian actions, from the original sin of taking U.S. diplomats hostage in Tehran during the 1979 revolution to decades of support for militant groups across the region and acts of terrorism globally, all of which were supercharged by a nuclear standoff beginning in the early 2000s.
Yet the current war cannot be seen as merely a natural progression of U.S.-Iranian hostility. Despite a deep well of animosity, previous U.S. presidents never went this far. U.S. policy largely defaulted to containment, drawing on policies short of war such as economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and military deterrence. Successive administrations, Democratic and Republican, even attempted diplomacy to resolve U.S. differences with Iran, though domestic politics, in both Washington and Tehran, repeatedly stifled any chance of sustainable breakthroughs. U.S. officials debated military options in previous administrations but ultimately ruled them out, viewing the risks as too high and the outcomes as too uncertain. Until now.
Trump’s decision to choose war over diplomacy continues a well-trodden path of confrontational attitudes and policies, but more importantly, it also marks a radical departure, taking the United States on a path that is unlikely to “solve” Iran. Trump claims that he has done what no previous president “had the guts” to do. But his overreach will bring infamy rather than glory, with dire regional and global consequences that will outlive his presidency.
It seems unlikely that, in the months leading up to this U.S.-Israel attack on Iran, Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner were engaged in genuine attempts to strike a diplomatic deal to stave off war. The track record of U.S. attacks in the midst of diplomacy, as occurred last June during the 12-day war, did not bode well for dealmaking. Then there were the wide gaps in positions on the nuclear and missile issues as well as Washington’s maximalist demands, premised on a belief that Iran was so weakened after the June war that it would capitulate on previously unattainable concessions, such as zero nuclear enrichment.
The absence of technical expertise on the U.S. team and even a basic grasp of fundamental details on the nuclear file cast further doubt on the seriousness of the negotiations. Trump’s military buildup in the aftermath of the widespread protests in Iran in January and his promises that “help [was] on the way” also sent mixed messages throughout the talks, suggesting regime change, not a nuclear or even wider deal, was his goal.
Trump’s tepid commitment to diplomacy with Iran was not unprecedented. It followed a long history of U.S. ambivalence about engaging Iranians and a mindset that one cannot deal with the Islamic Republic as a “normal” state. Indeed, the narrative of Iran as an abnormal state—and rhetoric labeling the country as “evil” and “fanatical”—set the stage for how Trump and his top officials viewed the country. Rubio was not alone in his rhetoric. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth expressed similar skepticism in previous speeches and writings toward diplomacy and the notion that any Iranian leaders could be considered moderates. Demonstrating just how little has changed in U.S. policymakers’ view of Iran over 40 years, Caspar Weinberger, President Ronald Reagan’s defense secretary, once remarked that “the only moderates in Iran … are in the cemetery.”
Not everyone in the U.S. government has viewed Iran as an irrational state driven solely by Islamic ideology; many intelligence assessments over the years have offered sober analyses to explain Iranian behavior as that of a rational, albeit dangerous and extremist, state actor. But the public conversation, often reflected in policy debates, circles around Iranian irrationality and fanaticism. Given such views, why would U.S. leaders expend the political capital to test diplomacy? Such widespread perceptions of Iran illuminate why Trump could move the United States toward war throughout January and February with so little domestic debate or significant pushback even from leaders in the Democratic Party.
Unfortunately, it’s precisely this political climate that helps explain why diplomacy has often fallen short. Multiple U.S. presidents were tempted by the possibility of striking a diplomatic opening with Iran, a “Nixon goes to China” moment. But that moment never came, not only because of Iran’s hostile posture toward the United States and militant policies that undermined diplomacy but also because Washington’s own domestic constraints limited the space for testing openings. The domestic toxicity associated with Iran began with the hostage crisis and the Carter administration’s failed rescue attempt but deepened after the exposure of the Iran-Contra scandal in Reagan’s second term. The political fallout of the scandal cast a shadow over future dealings with Iran.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 Iran nuclear deal agreed under President Barack Obama, went furthest in breaking the mold in U.S.-Iran relations. But that agreement, which was so contested within the U.S. political system that some referred to it as the “Obamacare” of U.S. foreign policy, did not succeed in setting relations on a new footing. Even Democrats who supported the deal felt the need to keep up a “tough on Iran” posture, supporting continued pressure on Iran that ultimately limited the sanctions relief benefits the Iranians had been expecting.
Trump’s approach to Iran in his first term did not substantially depart from long-standing U.S. positions. To be sure, his exit from the JCPOA to fulfill his campaign promise to leave what he called the “worst deal ever”—against even the advice of some of his own advisors—was a disruptive decision that triggered the beginning of the end of a diplomatic resolution to Iran’s nuclear program. His “maximum pressure” policies went further than his predecessors’ in curtailing Iran’s ability to export oil due to stringent enforcement of secondary sanctions. Yet Trump, like his predecessors, was enamored with the idea that he could strike a deal with Iran. His motivations may have been more personal and political than previous U.S. presidents, with him constantly suggesting he could strike a “better” deal than Obama. But in the end his interest in a deal resulted in no more than talk of talks and the reality of an advancing Iranian nuclear program.
Trump did cross the first red line in the U.S. confrontation with Iran with the U.S. killing of Qassem Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force, in 2020, though it’s notable that the strike was conducted while Suleimani was in Iraq, not on Iranian soil. In that sense, Trump’s first-term policies largely resembled the reluctance of previous administrations to attack Iranian territory directly, continuing a well-established mix of containment and military deterrence measures. In other words, the more transformative goals of either regime change or rapprochement were not in the cards.
President Joe Biden similarly continued long-standing U.S. containment policies, despite expectations early in his presidency that he would reverse Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal. Domestic priorities overshadowed resetting diplomacy with Iran, and when U.S. officials did turn to negotiations, they held unrealistic expectations about how much leverage they held to push a new deal forward on better terms, particularly when facing a harder-line Iranian president after Iran’s June 2021 elections. With the onset of Russia’s war in Ukraine and the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests in Iran, the political appetite for diplomacy only further diminished. The Israel-Hamas war also disrupted limited U.S.-Iran de-escalation talks and moved the United States and Iran into direct confrontation with the tit-for-tat Israeli-Iranian missile attacks in April and October 2024. However, the U.S. involvement in those exchanges was limited to the defense of Israel; the Biden administration was not interested in launching an offensive war against Iran.
All that changed with the second Trump administration. Instead of restoring factory settings in U.S. Iran policy, Trump broke precedent when he joined Israel in attacking Iran’s nuclear sites first in June 2025 and then in the joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran on Feb. 28, triggering the ongoing war with open-ended and ill-defined goals. With the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and top Iranian leadership in the first salvo of the war, along with Trump’s own early messaging in the war, regime change was for the first time explicit U.S. policy. Even the hawkish neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration declined to take on such an ambitious goal.
Trump is now trying to achieve what was previously deemed unattainable: the toppling of the Islamic Republic through external military intervention. Trump has repeatedly invoked the Venezuela model as a possible endgame with Iran—that is, a low-cost war bringing about subservient leaders, whether or not they are democratic. But after nearly three weeks of war, it is clear that this model will not work with a country like Iran, with a far more entrenched leadership and military forces committed to the regime’s survival and no unified opposition ready to replace it. At this point, U.S. goals appear to have shifted to degrading Iran’s military capabilities, particularly its missile and drone capacity, in an attempt to defang its ability to threaten Israel and the wider Middle East in the future.
Such vague goals make measuring success nearly impossible. Trump has nonetheless declared the war successful even as he indicates there is more to do. Iran’s new leaders appear only more hard-line and defiant, insisting that the end of the war will not be up to Washington; they want guarantees they won’t be attacked again and may be eager to inflict high costs on the United States and the global economy in a bid to restore Iran’s weakened deterrence. Israel is unlikely to stop its attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon even if Trump calls it quits on strikes against Iran. In short, how this war ends is as uncertain as the reasons Trump decided to start it. What is certain is that Trump has fundamentally broken with long-standing U.S. avoidance of war with Iran.
Every U.S. president would have liked to see the demise of the Islamic Republic, but there is a reason no previous president authorized a war against Iran, certainly not a war that would be read in Tehran as an attempt to bring down the regime. If the Iranian people could topple their own government, that would be another story. But there is wide consensus—among previous U.S. officials and the expert community—that overthrowing a regime through external military force, and certainly by airpower alone, is unlikely to work and risks unleashing dangerous consequences.
The risks were well known and have been written about and discussed for decades. More hard-line leadership could rise to power. Regime collapse could lead to civil strife and armed conflict that would spill over Iran’s borders. Iran’s retaliation could threaten the entire region and disrupt global oil supplies. The escalation could lead to humanitarian disaster, and U.S. adversaries could benefit from the turmoil. Many of these hypothetical risks are now playing out in real time. But Trump and his senior advisors chose to ignore these risks, believing that Iran was a paper tiger, weakened and disoriented after Israel’s relentless assault on Tehran and its partners since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack. Iran’s unprecedented popular protests calling for the end of the regime, and its brutal slaughter of the protesters, was read as further evidence that the Iranian regime was on the ropes, only needing a push from the outside to achieve a knockout punch.
The high costs of this war, unpopular among the U.S. public and creating resentment across the region and globally, indicate dangerous overreach. If the United States can extricate itself from this war, Trump may find himself back where previous presidents did—learning to live with and mitigate the negative impacts of a conflictual relationship with a difficult country, probably now even more dangerous if its current leaders survive. Tragically, reaching either a rapprochement or a decisive end to an adversarial regime seems as unattainable as ever.
