How the Empire’s Long Hatred of Iran Found Its Arsonist in Donald Trump
Forty-Seven Years of Resentment
There is a perverse comfort, among the citizens of the empire, in imagining that the wars their nation wages spring suddenly from the soil, as if a particular madman in the Oval Office had, on his own initiative, conjured a conflict out of nothing. This is, of course, a lie, and like most of the lies the empire tells itself, it serves a purpose. It allows the citizenry to disclaim responsibility. It allows the political opposition to mourn the war while continuing to fund it. It allows the pulpits to remain silent because, after all, “this is just what he did.” They absolve themselves by personalizing the evil, and in absolving themselves they ensure that the next war, and the one after it, will find them just as unprepared to resist.
The truth is harder, and the truth must be told. The war that the United States is now waging against the Islamic Republic of Iran did not begin with Donald J. Trump. The kindling for that fire was gathered, dried, and stacked in the woodpile of the American imperial project for 47 years, by Democrats and Republicans alike, by neoconservatives and liberal hawks, by Christian Zionists and secular realists, by every president from Jimmy Carter to Joe Biden. What Trump did, what only Trump could have been ignorant enough to have done, was to strike the match. He is the sui generis spark to a tinder long-prepared. To understand the fire that now consumes lives in Iran we must understand both.
The Gathering of the Kindling: 1979 and After
In November of 1979, a group of Iranian students seized the United States embassy in Tehran and held its personnel hostage for four hundred and forty-four days. The American national memory has frozen at this moment, as if history began here, as if the Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK, had not for twenty-six years tortured Iranian dissidents in basements equipped and trained by the Central Intelligence Agency. As if the elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh had not been overthrown by an American-British coup in 1953 because he dared to nationalize (foolishly) his own country’s oil. As if the Shah, that pliant tyrant beloved of Washington, had not been imposed upon a people who had not chosen him.
The Islamic Revolution, whatever its theology and its very real cruelties, was not an inexplicable eruption of fanaticism. It was, in significant part, the reaping of a harvest that imperial policy had sown. And the response of the empire was not repentance, nor even reflection, but resentment. The hostages were freed in 1981 and the resentment endured. It hardened. It became doctrine.
From that day forward, every American administration, regardless of party, regardless of stated philosophy, has treated the Islamic Republic as the eternal enemy. Ronald Reagan armed Saddam Hussein in the eight-year war that killed perhaps a million Iranians, providing intelligence and chemical weapon precursors even as Iraqi nerve agents fell on Iranian conscripts. George H. W. Bush continued the policy. Bill Clinton signed the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act in 1996, beginning the long economic strangulation that would, by stages, deny ordinary Iranian families medicine, currency, and hope. George W. Bush placed Iran in his “Axis of Evil” in 2002, a phrase that, however casually uttered, marked a nation of seventy million human beings for eventual destruction. Barack Obama, the supposed dove, oversaw the most sophisticated cyber-attack in history against Iranian nuclear infrastructure, the Stuxnet worm, an act of war by any honest reckoning. Even the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), that single fragile achievement of diplomacy, was undertaken not from love of the Iranian people but as a calculated maneuver to manage them, to bind them, to keep them within an imperial cage that had simply been redesigned.
This is the tinder. And it has three distinct components, which the radical Christian conscience is obliged to name plainly.
The First Component: The Lust for Empire
The United States does not pursue policies in the Middle East because the Middle East has, in some natural way, threatened the people of Iowa or Pennsylvania. The United States pursues policies in the Middle East because the United States is an empire, and an empire by its nature must dominate the territories where the commodities of the global economy are produced. The oil of the Persian Gulf is the lifeblood of the dollar system. The petrodollar arrangement, by which oil is denominated in U.S. currency, is what permits the empire to run perpetual trade deficits, to print money without consequence, to maintain a military larger than the next ten nations combined. Any state that threatens this arrangement, that seeks to trade oil in other currencies, that establishes its own banking system outside the SWIFT network, that pursues an independent foreign policy, threatens not merely an American “interest” but the entire architecture of American imperial finance.
Iran, since 1979, has refused the cage. This is its unforgivable sin in the eyes of Washington. Not its theology, not its human rights record, not its support for proxies, all of these are pretexts. The actual offense is the refusal of vassalage. The empire cannot tolerate refusal. The empire must, by its inner logic, punish the refuser, and if punishment fails to produce submission, the empire must destroy.
The Second Component: The Hunger for Regional Hegemony
Adjacent to the imperial lust, and partly identical with it, is the project of Middle Eastern hegemony coordinated between Washington and Jerusalem. The state of Israel, whose military and economy are sustained by an annual American subsidy of nearly four billion dollars and whose every diplomatic embarrassment is shielded by the American veto at the Security Council, has long identified the Islamic Republic as its primary regional rival. The 1996 “Clean Break” memorandum, authored by men who would become senior officials in the Bush administration, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, laid out a blueprint for the systematic destruction of every regional state that might constrain Israeli power. Iraq was on the list. Syria was on the list. Iran was on the list. The list has been worked, year by year, war by war, with American treasure and American blood paying the costs.
To name this is not to traffic in conspiracy. It is to read the memoranda these men published under their own names, to listen to the speeches they gave at the American Enterprise Institute and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and to take them at their word. The plan was not hidden. The plan was the explicit subject of academic conferences and policy journals for thirty years. The plan required Iran’s destruction. And much of the American church, mistaking the modern nation-state of Israel for the people of God, blessed the plan and prayed for its success.
The Third Component: The Contempt for Muslims
The third strand of the tinder is the oldest and the ugliest. It is the contempt in which the American imperial imagination has held the Muslim world for the entirety of my lifetime and yours. From the cartoonish “Ali Baba” caricatures of the Iran hostage era to the Islamophobic fervor that followed September 11, to the “Muslim ban” of 2017, to the casual cruelty with which American policy treats Yemeni children, Palestinian women, and Iranian grandfathers as fungible quantities of acceptable collateral, the empire has cultivated a steady, low-grade dehumanization of the followers of Islam.
The Christian who reads this and nods along must stop and examine his own heart. Have we, the people of the Lamb, been complicit in this? Have we cheered the bombings? Have we voted for the bombers? Have we listened, week by week, in our sanctuaries, to ministers who could not bring themselves to name Muslim suffering even once? “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8). The God of the Gospel does not divide humanity into the deserving and the disposable. The empire does. And we, if we remain silent, ratify the empire’s division.
The Spark: The Sui Generis Person of Donald Trump
A tinder pile, however well-prepared, does not ignite itself. For all forty-seven years of the resentment I have catalogued, the United States stopped short of full war with Iran. Reagan flinched in the 1980s. Bush the elder declined. Clinton sanctioned. Bush the younger threatened but did not strike. Obama dealt. Even Biden, in his dotage and his weakness, did not finally cross the line. The tinder was always there. The flame was withheld.
What was needed, and what the U.S. voters in their mysterious permission allowed, was a man uniquely suited to ignition. Donald Trump is that man. He is not the inevitable product of the imperial system. He is something stranger and worse: a vessel through whom the system’s deepest impulses have been given the freedom to act without the customary restraints. He combines, in one person, several attributes that no previous president possessed simultaneously. He has the vanity of a man who must always win and who experiences any constraint as a personal humiliation. He has the ignorance of a man who has never read deeply enough to fear consequence. He has the boundless suggestibility, in matters where his own ego is flattered, of a man who can be manipulated by any foreign leader who knows how to praise him. He has surrounded himself with men, especially in this second term, who hold the most maximalist views of American power and the most undisguised contempt for the Muslim world. He has, above all, the deep and abiding conviction that he is owed deference by the entire planet.
The first Trump administration tore up the Iran nuclear agreement in 2018 for no reason other than that Obama had made it. It assassinated General Qasem Soleimani in 2020, an act of war that any earlier president, however hawkish, would have shrunk from undertaking, and it did so with the casual lawlessness that has become his signature. These were the dress rehearsals.
The second Trump administration has now consummated what the first prefigured. The strikes upon Iranian nuclear facilities, the inevitable Iranian response, the cascading regional escalation that any sober analyst predicted and that the administration has greeted with theatrical surprise, all of this was foreseeable, was foreseen, and was avoided by every previous occupant of the office. It required Trump, specifically, to be set in motion. The tinder was Carter’s, Reagan’s, Clinton’s, Bush’s, Obama’s, and Biden’s. The match is Trump’s alone.
The Word Beneath the Word
What does the church do at such a moment? The temptation is to retreat to partisanship: to blame Trump and absolve his predecessors, or to defend Trump and blame his predecessors. Both temptations are escapes from the Gospel.
The Christian witness in this hour must speak the harder word: that the empire was preparing this war for 47 years, and that the empire is what must be repudiated, not merely the particular emperor through whom its violence has finally broken forth. To oppose Trump while making peace with the imperial machine that produced him is to weed the garden while watering the roots.
We are called to refuse it whole. To refuse the lust for hegemony. To refuse the contempt for Muslims, who are our neighbors and bear the image of God no less than we do. To refuse the financing, by every lawful means available to us, of the war machine that drops these bombs. To refuse the silence of the churches, which have for too long blessed what Christ would have wept over.
The Prince of Peace did not die so that we might cheer the bombing of Tehran. He died so that we might be set free from the love of the sword, in every administration, of every party, in every age. The blood of Iranian children cries out from the ground. The empire stops its ears. The Kingdom calls us to listen, and to repent, and to walk a different way.
May we have the courage to walk it.
Praise Be to God.
