MADRID - Brett McGurk's recent remarks at a press conference — McGurk served as the White House coordinator for the Middle East under the Biden administration — illuminate one of the most durable political fictions in American foreign policy: that there exists any substantive difference between a Democratic and a Republican administration when it comes to Iran.

McGurk stated that the United States has been "at war with Iran since 1979," and that Iranian ideology, which he described as very much alive, consists of expelling the United States from the Middle East and eliminating Israel.

The statement is remarkable not for its content, which is entirely predictable, but for its candour. It articulates directly what both parties have shared since 1979: that Iran constitutes a fundamental obstacle to the order Washington requires to maintain.

Iran remains in the Western political imaginary as a spectral presence that refuses to disappear. Attempts to neutralize it have proved fruitless. After forty days of war, Iran not only survived but returned with a force that the West has found itself unable to administer. Despite decades of governmentality designed to deny its political autonomy, Iran preserves that autonomy expressed in an Islamic grammar that produces, precisely for that reason, a particular intolerance in Western capitals. What Iran represents through its theological-political persistence calls into question the foundations of Western modernity: the supposed inevitability of secularization, the universality of certain forms of government, the idea that history moves inexorably toward a liberal destination.

Given that this analysis is shared across both American parties, the question becomes unavoidable: how to account for the surface difference between an Obama administration that signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015 and the current Trump administration, which dismantled that agreement and launched a forty-day war? The answer requires a shift from the ontic level to the ontological. At the ontic level — that of specific political facts, particular decisions, concrete approaches — clear differences exist. Obama employed multilateral diplomacy, selective sanctions and negotiation. 

Trump resorted to the abandonment of agreements, maximum pressure and open warfare. But these differences remain circumscribed to methodology, emphasis and rhetoric. They do not touch the deep structure that organizes how both administrations understand Iran.

In both cases the same epistemic order persists: Iran must be known, administered, disciplined. Iran is an object that requires intervention. Iran represents a misalignment that must be corrected. Obama believed Iran could be integrated through agreements that demonstrated the benefits of cooperation. 

Trump believed it could be neutralized through coercive pressure until capitulation. But both presuppose that a solution exists within the terms Washington establishes. Both assume that Iran can be guided, persuaded or broken toward acceptable behavior. Both, in other words, inhabit a common order of intelligibility: one in which Iran appears as a problem to be solved.

The deep structure: Family resemblances in American foreign policy

Ludwig Wittgenstein developed the notion of family resemblances to explain how concepts we share operate without requiring a single common trait. Members of a family resemble one another without all sharing the same eyes, the same mouth, the same profile. There is an overlapping network of similarities that only becomes visible from within that structure. 

Applied to American foreign policy, this logic reveals something fundamental: what unites Republicans and Democrats is not a shared identity but a set of epistemic traits that produce Iran as a problem.

Consider a family photo album. In some pictures the men wear suits and ties; in others, jeans and shirts. Some poses are solemn; others, relaxed. The visual differences are evident. But any family member recognizes something that recurs beneath those variations: a particular way of smiling, a manner of looking, a gesture at the dinner table. In Washington, 

Republicans and Democrats differ in rhetoric, method and emphasis. Republicans are louder, openly hostile, decisively interventionist. Democrats employ more diplomatic language, prefer sanctions to bombardments, invoke multilateral partnerships. But in every photograph of American foreign policy the same expression appears: Iran as an object to be monitored, controlled, kept within acceptable limits.

Washington's political family does not debate whether Iran must fit within its order of intelligibility. It debates how to make it do so. Whether through dialogue and incentives or through coercion and isolation. Whether through negotiated agreements or maximum pressure. These are tactical differences, not differences about what Iran fundamentally is. 

So long as that structure persists, any debate between Democrats and Republicans remains internal to the same family, constituting no real challenge to its constitutive logic.

McGurk formulates this continuity with involuntary precision. The war "since 1979" is not Trump's war but Washington's war. It has been waged through different means by different administrations but persists as a fundamental category of American politics. Obama understood it as such: even while negotiating the JCPOA, he continued sanctions, maintained the regional military presence and financed Washington's allies against Iranian positions. The agreement sought not peace but containment: keeping Iran within a framework of economic dependence and political isolation.

What distinguishes this analysis from more conventional liberal critiques is that it does not appeal to the incompetence or extremism of one administration or another. Such critiques maintain the fiction that different governments could produce radically different policies toward Iran. But both administrations operate from the premise that Iran constitutes a challenge to the international order, that its defensive capabilities represent a systemic danger, that its political autonomy requires correction.

Saidiya Hartman showed in her analysis of slave emancipation in the United States how abolition produced not freedom but the reconfiguration of control. Both the South and the North, enemies in the Civil War, adopted similar means of politicization to keep the liberated population under domination. Something analogous operates in American policy toward Iran. One administration offers negotiation within acceptable limits; another offers pressure until capitulation. 

Both presuppose that Iran must accept the terms Washington establishes. The choice remains circumscribed to a horizon in which Iran's genuine autonomy never appears as a possibility.

The real difference between American administrations with respect to Iran would be one that abandoned the shared presupposition: one that acknowledged Iran as a sovereign state whose foreign policy, however disagreeable to Washington, does not constitute a problem requiring a solution. That Iran has the right to develop defensive capabilities. That Iran has the right to regional alliances Washington rejects. That Iranian autonomy may be uncomfortable for the American-led order without thereby requiring neutralization. Such an administration has not existed and will likely never exist, because both parties share something deeper than any electoral difference: a vision of the world in which the West, and the United States in particular, possesses the right to structure the international order, and political entities that refuse that structuring constitute problems to be resolved.

From the Iranian perspective, both American parties share the same vision of Iran as an entity that must fit within their frameworks of intelligibility. The genuine rupture would only occur if someone broke Washington's family album: if Iran, speaking from its own political logic, were permitted to cease being an object of intervention and become a subject of its own history. That would require abandoning not only specific policies but the shared presupposition that structures American foreign policy. It would require admitting that Iran is not a problem to be solved but a political actor whose autonomy may be uncomfortable, even threatening, but requires no solution. That it will continue to exist according to its own logic, regardless of which party controls the White House.