Name: How The US & Iran Became Arch-Enemies
Uploaded: 2025-07-17T08:34:03.000Z
Duration: 26 min 27 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The United States and Iran have one of the world's most complicated and controversial relationships.

The United States is the world's most preeminent superpower with a population of more than 320 million, while Iran is a major power in her own right, with a population of more than 80 million.

These countries represent 4% and 1% of the living human population, and for the past 41 years, they've had absolutely zero diplomatic relations, and have come close to the brink of total war on more than one occasion.

At the beginning of 2020, war between the two sides seemed almost inevitable.

The United States assassinated an Iranian major general in a drone strike, and Iran retaliated by initiating artillery strikes against American military bases across Iraq.

Had a war broken out from there, it had the potential to become the biggest conflict in human history since the Second World War.

This time, that fate was thankfully avoided.

But in order to understand how it got so close, and why it could still happen during another crisis in the future, you've got to understand the entire history of the conflict between America and Iran so far.

And that story begins back before the start of World War II.

At the beginning of the 20th century, oil was first discovered within the deserts of Iran by the British.

As more and more of these discoveries were made, it was revealed that Iran in fact contained the fourth largest proven reserves of oil anywhere on the planet, and that the country was an undiscovered and unrealized energy superpower.

The only problem for the British, of course, was that these discoveries were located within Iran, and Iran wasn't within Britain's vast colonial empire that already spanned a quarter of the globe.

Not too worried about that pesky little detail, Britain negotiated a deal with Iran to share in the massive profits that were bound to come from the extraction of all this oil.

They created the jointly owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, but it wasn't exactly set up very fairly.

Iran, the country where all of this oil was actually located, was only entitled to 16% of the company's profits, whereas the other 84% of profits were going directly to the British.

By the start of the Second World War, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company grew to control all of Iran's oil, and had grown to become the largest company in the entire British Empire.

But this massively valuable asset was coming under threats.

Discontent at the company's unfair terms was growing within Iran itself, while at the same time in 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and opened up the largest military front line ever seen in human history.

Iran stood geographically at the Soviet Union's southern flank, and their intentions were considered suspect by both the British and the Soviets.

Despite having declared neutrality at the onset of the war, Iran's ruling Shah, or Emperor, was widely considered by the Allies to be too friendly towards the Nazis.

If Iran were to have cooperated with the Axis, it could have opened up another southern front for the Soviets to deal with that would have diverted vital troops away from the critical eastern front.

It could have jeopardized the Soviet Union's own oil fields in the Caucasus right on Iran's doorstep, and it would have potentially placed Britain's largest oil company in the hands of the Nazis.

So in order to prevent any of that from happening, and in order to ensure that Iran could be used as a transportation corridor to get vital supplies into the Soviet Union, neutral Iran was invaded by both the Soviets and the British.

Vastly outnumbered and far behind in technology, Iran never stood a chance and surrendered within just a week.

The old, troublesome Shah was overthrown and replaced by the invaders with his much younger 21-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whom the Allies felt would be far less capable of acting against their interests.

Iran was effectively occupied for the entire Second World War by the Allies, which eventually saw the deployment of more than 30,000 Americans and the transportation of nearly one-third of all the supplies that America sent to the Soviet Union.

After the war ended, the Allies left and ended their occupation, but the unfair terms that the British had established in regards to Iran's oil came back into question.

By the early 1950s, Britain was still taking home the majority of Iran's oil profits, while the conditions for Iranian oil workers and their families remained terrible.

At the same time, the British were also withholding all of the company's financial records from the Iranians and had refused all of their requests that being audited.

The support for nationalizing the company within Iran was getting overwhelmingly massive, and by 1951, Iran's democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, with unanimous approval from the Iranian parliament, finally did so.

Britain responded to this by immediately embargoing all Iranian oil, and then two years later, in 1953, Britain's MI6 and America's CIA organized a military coup within the country to overthrow Mossadegh's government.

As many as 300 Iranians were killed during the coup.

Mossadegh himself was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life, while the Shah was elevated to being essentially an authoritarian dictator within the country.

Having had his position installed and guaranteed by Western powers twice now, the Shah became widely viewed in Iran as little more than a Western puppet.

And as the Cold War developed out of the ashes of the Second World War, Iran's strategic location at the Soviet Union's southern flank, her vast strategic reserves of oil, and her authoritarian leader who owed his position and loyalty to the West, made Iran a natural and valuable ally of the United States for the very first time.

The Shah pursued a staunchly pro-American and pro-Israel foreign policy, and for decades, Iran became one of America's most important Cold War era allies.

But over the decades, the Shah's policies and cozy relations with the West alienated much of his home base support.

He ran a vast network of secret police within the country who arrested thousands of political opponents, and many more, like Ayatollah Khomeini, were exiled.

Widespread torture of political dissidents in prison was reported.

He continued friendly relations with both America and Israel, despite nearly none of the rest of the Islamic world even recognizing Israel, while he carried out a domestic policy of modernization, secularism, and the enfranchisement of women.

All of these policies combined alienated Iran's leftists, the working class, and the hardcore Shiite Muslim conservatives and clergy.

And by the late 1970s, Iran's long-standing political unrest had transformed into full-scale revolution.

A movie theater was set on fire in Abadan that killed at least 420 people, with the Shah's regime blaming Marxist and Islamist insurgents, while many of the protesters felt like it was more likely the Shah's own secret police.

The following month, protesters gathered in the capital, Tehran's main square, and the Shah's army opened fire on them indiscriminately, killing and wounding hundreds more.

More than 5 million Iranians took to the streets demanding the Shah's abdication, and after defections from his army became rampant, Mohammad Pahlavi realized that his position was impossible to maintain, and he fled the country in exile in early 1979.

The new radical Shiite Islamist government that replaced the Shah's regime immediately abolished the monarchy and invited Ayatollah Khamenei back to the country after 15 years of exile to become Iran's new supreme leader, and the modern Islamic Republic of Iran was born.

And this new Iranian regime was radically different from the one that it preceded.

It was a totalitarian Shiite theocracy that was staunchly opposed to the United States and Israel, and mass executions and purges of political opponents and members of the former regime were almost immediately carried out.

To the United States and the rest of the world, Iran's Islamic revolution came as an enormous shock.

Almost overnight, Iran had flipped from being one of America's most important Middle Eastern allies to her greatest Middle Eastern enemy.

After the Shah was overthrown, the United States welcomed him into their country for a cancer treatment operation, and the new Iran demanded that he be extradited back to stand trial for the crimes that he had committed throughout his reign against the Iranian people.

Knowing that his return would mean a certain execution, the United States rejected all of Iran's demands, but that did little to dissuade Iran's revolutionary paranoia.

Since the Shah was actively inside America, and since Western powers had already initiated two previous coups in the past to install him over the will of the Iranian people, the paranoia was widespread that America and the CIA could be plotting yet another third coup attempt from within their embassy inside Tehran.

And so, in November of 1979, thousands of Iranian revolutionaries and students stormed the American embassy and took 52 American diplomats and civilians as hostages.

America eventually sent the Shah away to Egypt while the Carter administration worked for months to secure the hostages' release.

But when diplomacy went nowhere, Carter authorized a raid by the United States Army Rangers in April of 1980 to attempt a rescue operation, but the raid turned into a disaster.

Codenamed Operation Eagle Claw, a helicopter crashed into a transport plane before any contact with the Iranians was even made, and eight American soldiers lost their lives.

Carter ordered the mission to be abandoned, and the hostages remained under Iranian control.

It was at this point that the United States decided to sever all diplomatic relations with Iran's new regime, and they have been frozen ever since.

But a few months later, something else incredible and unexpected happened.

In September of 1980, Saddam Hussein's Iraq launched an all-out invasion of conquest into Iran.

For years preceding this, Saddam had wanted Iraq to overtake and supplant Iran as the dominant power in the oil-rich Persian Gulf.

But they were never capable of doing anything about it, because Iran had a colossally larger military, and they had the support of America and Israel, all of which made her vastly more powerful.

But after Iran was thrown into chaos by her revolution and regime change, with massive purges and executions of government officials, and after she was abandoned by both America and Israel, and was left without any major foreign allies, Saddam calculated that now was better than ever to take advantage and attack.

Iraq expected a rapid victory, but the war that followed turned into an eight-year-long stalemate that most resembled the Western Front of World War I.

After the massive Iraqi invasion, Iran was forced to reevaluate the American hostage situation, and they agreed to release all 52 back into U.S. custody after holding them for 444 days.

America levied heavy economic sanctions upon Iran as a consequence, and then began heavily supplying Saddam and Iraq in their war effort that they hoped would destabilize Iran even further.

The Iran-Iraq War would ultimately prove to be one of the largest and the bloodiest of the 20th century's second half, with as many as 400,000 Iranians losing their lives across the front line, owing in part to the widespread deployment of chemical weapons and landmines from Iraq, who is being heavily supplied and supported with conventional weapons by the United States.

Throughout the war, the U.S. contends that Hezbollah, a Shia Islamist militia organization operating out of Lebanon, who is a client of Iran, carried out multiple anti-American terror attacks across the region.

In 1983, they carried out a bombing of the U.S.

Embassy in Beirut, which killed 17 Americans, and later that same year, they carried out another massive truck bombing attack against the barracks of a military compound in Lebanon, which killed a further 241 American and 58 French soldiers.

These events and others contributed to the United States placing Iran on their State Sponsors of Terrorism list the following year in 1984.

By April of 1988, the Iran-Iraq War was still raging, and Iran had mined a large section of the Persian Gulf in order to counter the Iraqi Navy.

An American frigate, who happened to be passing through, struck one of these mines and became severely damaged and almost sank, but with no loss of life.

Regardless, America decided to initiate a retaliatory attack against Iranian targets and initiated Operation Praying Mantis.

It was the largest U.S. naval combat operation seen since the Second World War, and it saw two American surface groups launching coordinated strikes that blew up two Iranian offshore oil platforms and sank six of their warships.

The attack destroyed or severely damaged half of Iran's entire fleet and killed 56 Iranians, while resulting in only two American deaths.

Just three months later, in July of 1988, an American cruiser strayed into Iranian territorial waters and received warning shots fired from Iranian speedboats.

At the same time, Iran Air Flight 655 was taking its normal flight route above from Tehran to Dubai, and was at this point flying over Iran's territorial waters above the Strait of Hormuz.

The American cruiser misidentified this commercial aircraft as an Iranian fighter jet, and, assuming that they could have been under attack, they launched a missile that targeted and then completely destroyed the whole plane.

There were 290 people on board that flight, and 254 of them were Iranians.

None of them survived the missile strike, and it was the deadliest aviation shoot-down incident in history, until the horrible shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine by pro-Russian rebels more than a quarter century later.

These deadly events between both sides sharply escalated tensions between America and Iran, and each felt that the other had done grievous harm towards them.

In 1995, the Clinton administration enacted a total embargo on all dealings with Iran by any American-based company, which effectively killed all trade between both countries.

In 1996, the Iranian client Hezbollah carried out yet another terror bombing strike against a U.S. target in Saudi Arabia, this time killing 19 American Air Force personnel and wounding nearly 500 others.

And then, 5 years after that came the September 11th attacks.

President Bush made his Axis of Evil speech, in which he lumped Iran, Saddam's Iraq, and North Korea all together as an Axis of Evil conspiring against America.

Just a little more than a year after that speech, the United States used the pretext of Saddam possessing weapons of mass destruction to invade Iraq, and completely toppled his regime in around a month.

No weapons of mass destruction were ever uncovered, and the message sent to both Iran and North Korea was clear as day.

It was either develop nuclear weapons, or you would be next.

North Korea managed to successfully test an atomic bomb just 3 years after the American-led invasion of Iraq, while Iran hastily carried out their own nuclear weapons research as well.

However, the United States made it clear that a nuclear-armed Iran would never be tolerated, and a combination of sanctions and diplomacy were used for years to try and convince Iran to stop.

By 2015, the Obama administration had successfully negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known colloquially as the Iran Nuclear Deal.

The treaty's terms are complex, but the TLDR is that the U.S. agreed to end a sweeping series of sanctions they had previously placed upon Iran, while Iran agreed to give up their pursuit of nuclear research, and allowed foreign inspections to routinely investigate them.

Iran's and America's relationship was beginning to show some signs of reproachment.

In 2016, Donald Trump was elected the new President of the United States, on a platform that included a vow to fully withdraw the U.S. from the Iran Nuclear Deal, and to reinstate tougher economic sanctions.

In 2018, Trump carried through with his campaign promises, and Iran counter-threatened that they would continue on with their nuclear program, and even closed the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping if things escalated any further, which would have completely crashed the global oil economy.