MADRID - Across much of the coverage of the latest escalation between the United States and Iran, a reassuringly simple explanation has taken hold. The problem, it is suggested, has a proper name. Donald J. Trump, with his confrontational style, his contempt for multilateral agreements and his preference for displays of force, is portrayed as the primary figure responsible for pushing the bilateral relationship to the edge of the abyss.

This reading, dominant in diplomatic circles in Brussels, Paris and Berlin, offers a convenient alibi. If the source of the crisis lies in an individual, his departure from the stage would be enough to restore a previous sense of normality.

Reducing a long-standing confrontation to the psychology of a single leader, however, is not merely historically inaccurate. It is a deeper analytical mistake. It assumes that politics is little more than the aggregation of contingent decisions, rather than a domain structured by enduring discourses that define what is thinkable, negotiable and legitimate. The so-called “Trump problem”, in this sense, is best understood as the most explicit and least concealed expression of a US discourse on Iran that long predates him and that, with variations in tone, has traversed Democratic and Republican administrations alike since the mid-20th century.

The genealogy of the conflict: Mosaddegh and the Islamic Republic

To grasp the present, it is necessary to move beyond an obsession with personalities and turn instead to the genealogy of the conflict. US interventions in Iran did not begin with the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. The first decisive moment came in 1953, with the overthrow of the democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in a coup organized by the CIA and MI6. In that episode, the central motivations were geopolitical and energy-related: securing access to oil resources and preserving strategic influence in the region. This was not a Cold War aberration or a one-off deviation, but the crystallization of an operational principle: Iranian sovereignty could be curtailed when it conflicted with Western interests deemed essential.
With the establishment of the Islamic Republic, this logic of intervention did not disappear. On the contrary, it intensified and diversified. From 1979 onwards, pressure on Iran became more systematic and recurrent, combining economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation and military threats aimed at containing a political order perceived as disruptive to the prevailing regional and global balance. The rationale was no longer confined to immediate strategic or energy concerns. An ideological dimension was added, in which Iran’s insistence on political independence and its discourse of resistance were framed as sufficient justification for the continuation and multiplication of external pressure. In this sense, the United States consolidated a pattern of permanent constraint, one in which successive administrations, despite differences in style, repeatedly returned to the same repertoire of policies designed to limit Iranian sovereignty.

The roots of the US discourse

The US approach to Iran was not founded solely on opposition to an Islamic revolution, but on the assertion of an imperial prerogative to shape the internal order of other states. The restoration of the Shah after the 1953 coup inaugurated a quarter century of what were described as “excellent” relations, grounded in Tehran’s submission to an authoritarian modernizing project aligned with Western priorities. This period, still nostalgically invoked in some Western circles, laid the psychological and ideological foundations of the 1979 revolution. That revolution was not an irrational eruption of fanaticism, but a visceral response, articulated through an Islamic grammar, to decades of humiliation and external domination. Iran’s revolutionary discourse of “resistance” and “independence” emerged largely as the antithesis of US interventionism, framing an Islamic response that sought to consolidate autonomy and project a model of sovereignty resilient to external hegemony.

The seizure of the US embassy in 1979 froze this antagonism into a simplified and binary frame. Even then, the American narrative revealed a deep strategic inconsistency. During the 1980s, while Washington designated Iran a “sponsor of terrorism”, it simultaneously provided material and diplomatic support to Saddam Hussein during his war of aggression against Iran, including silence in the face of the use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and civilians. These episodes underscored a recurring reality: ethical categories such as “rogue state” or “axis of evil” function less as moral absolutes than as instruments of convenience, invoked or suspended according to strategic need. The downing of Iran Air Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes in 1988, and the refusal to issue a full apology, was interpreted in Tehran not as an isolated tragedy, but as the logical continuation of a broader pattern of disregard for Iranian lives, a bloody coda to years of hostility and pressure.

From the Cold War to the JCPOA

The post-Cold War period saw this discourse consolidated within a new framework: nuclear non-proliferation as the central justification for sustained political and economic pressure. The sanctions regime of the 1990s under the Clinton administration, followed by Iran’s inclusion in the so-called “axis of evil” by George W. Bush in 2002, institutionalized a form of pressure that transcended party lines and electoral cycles. Paradoxically, policies designed to isolate and weaken Tehran also helped, indirectly, to open a path to nuclear diplomacy. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq removed the principal regional actors that might have constrained Iranian influence, propelling Tehran into a position of unprecedented strategic weight. The deployment of US forces along Iran’s borders sharpened perceptions of threat and made diplomatic containment appear, even in Washington, the least risky option available. These conditions ultimately facilitated the negotiations that culminated in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015. Rather than a rupture with the historical logic of pressure, the agreement represented a temporary rationalization of the same underlying structural discourse.

The discourse laid bare

Trump, in this context, is not an anomaly but the most unvarnished expression of an existing worldview. The unilateral US withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018 was not an aberration, but the triumph of a persistent current in American thinking that rejects any accommodation with Iran over a more pragmatic alternative. The policy of “maximum pressure” followed directly from that conviction. If the problem is defined as the very nature of the Islamic Republic, diplomacy can only ever be insufficient. Only intense economic coercion and the credible threat of force are deemed capable of producing regime change or unconditional capitulation. What Trump did was strip US policy of its diplomatic veneer, exposing the confrontational core that had long existed beneath the surface.

Recent events, including the killing of General Qassem Soleimani in 2020, the intermittent negotiations of 2025, Israeli strikes and US bombardments of nuclear facilities, follow the predictable logic of this script. They are not the product of one individual’s will, but of a discursive framework that has normalized the military option as a tool of deterrence, privileging displays of strength and credibility over regional stability. Trump merely delivered the lines with greater intensity in a play written long before his arrival.

A naïve reading that personalizes the crisis around Trump commits a double error. First, it deceives itself into believing that an electoral change in Washington could restore the conditions of 2015. This overlooks the extent to which a bipartisan consensus against Iran has hardened, ensuring that any future president, whether a moderate Democrat or Republican, will inherit a landscape shaped by deep mistrust and prior unilateral decisions. Second, and more significantly, it absolves Europe and the wider West of their own historical responsibility. European complicity in the 1953 coup, tacit support for Saddam Hussein’s war, and the uncritical enforcement of US extraterritorial sanctions are all integral components of the wall of misunderstanding that endures today.

Towards a rational policy

A rational approach to Iran therefore requires far more than waiting for the departure of a particular leader. It demands a critical deconstruction of the Western discourse on the country, and an acknowledgement of how the fixation on the nuclear issue has often served to deflect attention from the deeper structural causes of regional insecurity, including the security architecture of the Persian Gulf and the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It also requires recognizing that the “Iranian threat” has become, in part, a self-fulfilling prophecy, sustained by decades of isolation and existential pressure.

The current escalation is not a Trump drama. It is the latest episode in a seventy-year story defined by the collision between the principle of sovereignty and independence that underpins the Islamic Republic’s political outlook and the principle of hegemony and intervention that has shaped US policy in its global “backyard”. Unless this discursive collision is confronted directly, and unless Western capitals move beyond lamenting the tone of each new episode to questioning the strategic direction itself, the journey towards the cliff edge will continue, with or without Trump. The real recklessness lies not only in his rhetoric, but in the belief that a structural, long-term conflict can hinge on a single actor.