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The Trumpstein Chronicles, Simplified

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A History of US Interference in Iran

There’s a question Americans love to ask about Iran: Why do they hate us?

The answer isn’t complicated. We just don’t teach it in schools.

Oil and the Original Sin

In 1953, Iran had a democratically elected prime minister named Mohammad Mossadegh. He committed the unforgivable crime of nationalizing Iran’s oil industry — oil that the British had been extracting at colonial rates through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP, because rebranding fixes everything). Britain wanted him gone but couldn’t do it alone. This was the heyday of American empire, and Washington picked up on the first ring.

The CIA, under the direction of Kermit Roosevelt Jr. — Teddy’s grandson, because empire is a family business — orchestrated Operation Ajax. They paid off Iranian military officers, planted propaganda in newspapers, hired mobs to create chaos in the streets, and toppled a government that had the audacity to control its own natural resources.

In Mossadegh’s place, the US installed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. A puppet king on a Peacock Throne, bought and paid for with American dollars and British petroleum interests. More on the American dollars in future essays.

Democracy died in Tehran so oil could flow to London and Washington. Remember that the next time someone lectures you about spreading freedom abroad.

The Shah’s Playground

For twenty-six years, the Shah ruled Iran with American backing. The US armed him, trained his military, and helped build SAVAK — his secret police force. SAVAK was trained by the CIA and Mossad. Their specialty was torture. Electric shock, sleep deprivation, extraction of fingernails, and rape as interrogation technique. Thousands of political dissidents, intellectuals, and activists disappeared into SAVAK prisons.

Washington knew. Washington didn’t care. The Shah was our guy. He bought American weapons by the billions, kept Soviet influence out of the Gulf, and let the oil flow. That was the deal. Human rights were someone else’s problem. Empire loves to play holier than thou while devouring anyone who gets in the way of its power.

The Shah modernized Iran at gunpoint — the White Revolution, he called it. Forced secularization. Land reform that enriched his cronies. A westernization campaign that bulldozed centuries of culture while the rural poor starved and the urban middle class suffocated under censorship. He threw himself a $100 million party at Persepolis to celebrate 2,500 years of Persian monarchy while his people lined up for bread.

Blowback

By 1979, Iranians had had enough. The revolution wasn’t born in a vacuum. It was born in SAVAK’s torture chambers. In American-funded palaces. In the memory of a democracy strangled in its crib in 1953.

When Ayatollah Khomeini rose to power and students stormed the US embassy, taking fifty-two Americans hostage for 444 days, the American media acted like it came out of nowhere. Like these people just woke up one morning and decided to hate freedom. The media has always been complicit — manufacturing context-free outrage that serves power and the people who hold it.

Nobody on the nightly news mentioned Mossadegh. Nobody mentioned SAVAK. Nobody mentioned twenty-six years of propping up a dictator. The hostage crisis became the entire story — stripped of every ounce of context that made it comprehensible.

This is how empire works. You erase the cause and then act bewildered by the effect.

Arming Both Sides

The Iran-Iraq War broke out in 1980. Saddam Hussein — another American asset — invaded Iran. Eight years. Over a million dead.

I’ve stood at the Iraqi monument to their fallen. I’ve seen the helmets full of bullet holes. I bear witness for the dead, because someone should.

The US backed Saddam. Intelligence. Weapons. Diplomatic cover. When he gassed Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians, the Reagan administration blocked UN condemnation. Donald Rumsfeld flew to Baghdad and shook the man’s hand on camera. That photograph should be in every American history textbook. It never will be.

And here’s the part that should make your blood boil: while arming Iraq, the Reagan White House was secretly selling weapons to Iran. The Iran-Contra affair. Arms to both sides of the same war. The profits? Funneled to right-wing death squads in Nicaragua. Three conflicts, one policy, zero accountability. The efficiency of American empire is something to behold.

In 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 — a civilian airliner. Two hundred and ninety people dead. Sixty-six of them children. The US never apologized. Vice President George H.W. Bush said, “I will never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don’t care what the facts are.”

He won the presidency four months later.

The Sanctions Regime

After the Cold War ended, the US pivoted from covert interference to economic strangulation. Clinton signed the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act in 1996. Bush named Iran part of the “Axis of Evil” in 2002 — a phrase so cartoonishly stupid it would be funny if it hadn’t helped justify two decades of escalation.

Sanctions hit the Iranian people hardest. Medicine shortages. Economic collapse. Inflation that gutted the middle class. The ruling clerics stayed fat. The Revolutionary Guard found workarounds. Ordinary Iranians — the ones who might have pushed for reform from within — got crushed.

This is the other thing empire does well. It punishes populations for the sins of governments it helped create.

The Deal and the Betrayal

In 2015, the Obama administration brokered the JCPOA — the Iran nuclear deal. Iran agreed to dismantle centrifuges, reduce enriched uranium stockpiles, and submit to the most invasive international inspections regime ever negotiated. In return, sanctions would ease.

It wasn’t perfect. No deal is. But it was working. Iran was in compliance. The IAEA confirmed it repeatedly.

Then Trump pulled out in 2018. No evidence of Iranian violations. No strategic rationale beyond Obama did it and Netanyahu wanted it gone. Reimposed sanctions. Called it “maximum pressure.” The Iranian economy cratered. Hardliners in Tehran who’d warned that America could never be trusted got to say told you so.

In January 2020, Trump ordered the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s top military commander, via drone strike at Baghdad International Airport. A sovereign nation’s general, killed on the soil of a third country, with no congressional authorization and no declaration of war.

The message was clear. Diplomacy is for suckers. Comply with our demands and we’ll move the goalposts. Make a deal and we’ll tear it up. Cooperate and we’ll kill your people anyway.

The Latest Chapter

And now it’s 2026, and we’re doing it again. Worse this time.

On February 28th, the United States and Israel launched surprise airstrikes across Iran — during active nuclear negotiations, after an Iranian diplomat said a historic agreement was within reach. They killed Supreme Leader Khamenei. They hit military bases, government buildings, schools, hospitals, cultural heritage sites. Over a thousand dead in the first week. Iran retaliated with missiles and drones across the Gulf. Oil prices spiked. The Strait of Hormuz choked shut. Embassies closed. The world economy shuddered.

Trump didn’t bother getting congressional authorization. Republicans blocked a resolution that would have required it. The Constitution is a suggestion now, apparently.

That same morning, a US Tomahawk cruise missile hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, southern Iran. The roof collapsed on the children inside. A hundred and sixty-five dead — most of them girls between seven and twelve. The school had been separated from a nearby military base by its own walls and gates since 2016. A Pentagon probe determined the US was likely responsible. Al Jazeera’s investigation found the strike pattern bypassed a clinic sitting between the base and the school — hit the military compound, skipped the clinic, hit the schoolgirls. That’s not negligence. That’s targeting.

UNESCO called it a grave violation of humanitarian law. The UN said there is no excuse for killing girls in a classroom. Iran held a mass funeral. A hundred and sixty-five small coffins in a row.

This is what American precision looks like.

Now let’s talk about timing.

In January, the DOJ released three million pages of Epstein files. Trump’s name appeared over a thousand times. Buried in those files was an FBI list of sexual assault allegations against Trump — compiled by agents on the Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force.

One woman, interviewed four times by the FBI, alleged that Epstein introduced her to Trump when she was between thirteen and fifteen years old. She described, in graphic detail, Trump sexually assaulting her. A DOJ source told the Miami Herald that agents found her credible — that they wouldn’t have interviewed her four times if they thought she was lying. The DOJ initially withheld those interview summaries. Called them “duplicative.” NPR caught the discrepancy. The files got released — some of them. As of this writing, thirty-seven pages remain missing.

Meanwhile, Ghislaine Maxwell is serving twenty years for sex trafficking and seeking clemency. From Trump.

So let’s do the math. Epstein files land in January. The allegations surface. The DOJ scrambles to suppress them. And by late February, we’re at war with Iran. The largest US military buildup in the Middle East since Iraq. Cruise missiles falling on Tehran. A hundred and sixty-five schoolgirls in the ground. And the news cycle buried right alongside them.

Wag the dog doesn’t begin to cover it.

The Pattern

Every chapter of US-Iran relations follows the same logic: American interests override Iranian sovereignty. When Iran resists, it’s terrorism. When America interferes, it’s foreign policy.

1953 taught Iran that democracy means nothing if Washington disapproves. The Shah years taught them that American friendship means a secret police force and a torturer’s manual. The revolution taught them that independence comes at the cost of total isolation. The war years taught them that America will arm your enemy and sell you weapons simultaneously. The sanctions taught them that compliance buys nothing. The JCPOA taught them that even signed agreements are worthless. And 2026 taught them that even when you’re hours from a deal, the bombs come anyway.

This is empire in decline. Not the slow, dignified kind. The kind where the emperor starts a war to bury the fact that the Epstein files have his name on them. The kind where a thousand Iranians die so the news doesn’t lead with a thirteen-year-old girl’s FBI testimony.

The seventy-year history of US interference in Iran isn’t a mystery. It’s not complicated. It’s a straight line from a CIA coup to a cruise missile, with a million corpses and a shattered democracy in between.

The Iranians don’t hate us for our freedom. They hate us for theirs.