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Iran has not, in fact, been at war for 3,000 years. But there’s a reason Trump says things like that
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Iran has not, in fact, been at war for 3,000 years. But there’s a reason Trump says things like that.
Edited by Zeteo
BEFORE WE GET to my latest Zeteo column, last night the U.S. and Iran reached a still-unreleased agreement, known as a memorandum of understanding, that signals an intention to end the war. Whether that intention yields the desired finality is unknown. Following a signing ceremony slated for Friday, the U.S. and Iran will enter a 60-day period of negotiations on the terms of a postwar status quo, to include all the hard work of some sort of nuclear accord. Nothing about any of this is certain, durable or even particularly clear. The actual terms under discussion have not been released. Both sides will be declaring victory, a lot, over this next week. We're in Propaganda Week, basically, and I want to be analytically cautious until we actually see what's agreed upon. All that's agreed to is to buy time. Which, as far as wars are concerned, is not nothing.
But when Donald Trump begins by exclaiming "Let the oil flow!" it means he lost the war he initiated. Despite heavy leadership losses and unfathomable civilian deaths, Iran leveraged its geography to control the Strait of Hormuz, a globally pivotal waterway, and transformed a war it did not seek into one that exposed Washington's inability to win.
Iran's position is materially stronger than it was on February 28, and the reason why Israel and the United States attacked it is because bellicose elements in both countries thought Iran was weak after the 2024 Israeli campaign of assassinations against the Iranian coalition. They thought they would collapse the Islamic Republic and transform the region into one of U.S.-backed Israeli hegemony. Instead, Iran is stronger than it has been since Trump killed Qassem Soleimani, the architect of Iranian influence in post-invasion Iraq, Assadist Syria and weakened Lebanon. It isolated the core strategic differences between the U.S. and Israel and drove a wedge between them. Although it's easy to overstate how material those differences will become, right now Israel, not Iran, is widely understood as the potential spoiler for a deal desired not only in Washington, but globally.
Trump can only hope to recover at the negotiating table what he could not win on the battlefield. Yet his negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, have zero successes with Iran. There was a moment in early 2025 when it looked like Witkoff had real flexibility to pursue a real negotiation. Then Witkoff, seemingly unaware of how a decade of right-wing hostility to the 2015 Iran Deal had boxed him in, announced that the U.S. would accept Iranian uranium enrichment to 3.67 percent. He had to spend a month walking that back. The 2015 Iran Deal, known as the JCPOA, required many arduous months of highly technical negotiation. The U.S. Energy Secretary at that time was a nuclear physicist who was deeply involved in shaping the specifications necessary to verifiably impede access to weaponization. In his place are dipshits from the mirror world of real estate valuations. Iran, to keep the peace, will require a payout a literal order of magnitude greater than the sanctions relief under the JCPOA that drove a right-wing and Zionist freakout. And they still expect to throttle access to the Strait of Hormuz—which I, probably like many, was previously unaware was not actually international waters. At the risk of stating the obvious, it will be much harder in 60 days to lock in a durable regional status quo than it was to negotiate the far more limited accord of the JCPOA.
The U.S.-aligned Gulf autocracies of the Middle East have now seen that the United States will not be able to come to their defense. For the past two decades, those autocracies have resisted U.S. disengagement and rapprochement with Iran for fear of being unprotected. Now they have watched the U.S. become as engaged as ever and still not protect them. The logic of missile defense is unforgiving: If an attack is 90 percent unsuccessful, it's devastating for the country under bombardment—and Iran showed it knows what to target. No leader in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, nor in less-aligned Qatar and Oman, will ever forget how parsimonious the U.S. was with its necessarily-limited interceptor magazine.
Anyway, that's where things will stand until we can see the text up for discussion.
THE IRAN WAR, supposed to last a mere four weeks, is about halfway through its fourth month. To Donald Trump, the war might be in its third millennium.
Trump reached far back into history last weekend as he vocally – and futilely – urged Israel to forestall retaliation against Iranian missiles launched on Tel Aviv to avenge the Israeli bombing of Beirut. In doing so, he backdated the war to long, long before the establishment of the State of Israel, or even the United States of America.
Iran’s missiles “were attacks that did not kick at all,” he told the Financial Times’s Edward Luce. “It’s one of those things that’s been going for 3,000 years, or 47 years, depending on how you count.” To Axios’s Barak Ravid, Trump forecasted that “If Bibi strikes them back it’s just gonna keep going like the last 47 years, or the last 3,000 years.”
We’ll come back to “47 years” in a moment. But claiming Iran has a track record of 3,000 years of aggression is not a statement about history.
It’s a way to square the circle of Trump’s new forever war with his base’s supposed antipathy to them. His formula is to make it a war of civilizational dominance. Trump isn’t really starting new wars, according to this line of thinking. He’s resolving intractable problems, challenges that only a great man of history would dare cut through. This line of thinking seeks to awe you into not noticing that it costs way more to fill up your car, your paycheck doesn’t stretch as far as it did in February, and no one knows what will come of this latest promise of diplomatic resolution.
It’s beside the point to fact-check Trump’s history, but this is what columns are for. The people who speak ancient Iranian, known as the Medes and the Persians, are first mentioned in an Assyrian document from the 9th century BCE that describes them as not aggressors but tributaries. The historian Michael Axworthy records that by the 8th century BCE, they were “fighting back, attacking Assyrian territories.” Then as now, the progenitors of what would become Persian civilization were defending themselves against a more powerful foe.
In the 6th century BCE, Cyrus the Great, who subordinated the Medes to Persia and declared himself king, made Persia a great power. Trump’s formulation, in the context of Israel, implies eternal hostility between Persians and Jews. That’s almost the exact opposite of the true history between both peoples. There have been Jewish communities in Iran for 2,500 years. The era known as the Babylonian Exile, which brought Jews to Iran, was enormously influential on Jewish history, to the point of adopting the local script into what became Hebrew. And in any event, it was Cyrus who ended the Babylonian Exile and permitted the return of the Jews to Palestine – not that we should conflate the modern State of Israel with the ancient Kingdom of Judea, the Second Temple Period, or the Jewish people more broadly. I suspect what Trump is after is to conjure in the minds of his supporters the Persian Empire depicted in the Zach Snyder movie ‘300,’ the one where Gerard Butler’s Leonidas yells “This is Sparta” and kicks a weird-looking Persian envoy down a well.
Portraying a war as the latest flare-up of an ancient conflict is an old trick, especially for Westerners in the Middle East. It obscures the material origins of the war and the perfidies of its aggressors. Palestinians are well accustomed to this sort of thing. The Christian Zionist senator, Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), in a word salad of manipulated history dressed in neoconservative fantasy, told Fox in March that the war represented “the best chance in 2,000 years, when Iran is neutralized, for Saudi [Arabia] and Israel to recognize each other, end the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
Leave aside Graham’s nonsensical causal connection between the Iran war and regional harmony. Neither Israel nor Saudi Arabia – nor, for that matter, Islam – existed 2,000 years ago. There was no “Arab-Israeli” – by which Graham means, risibly, Arab-Jewish – conflict until Zionist settlement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries stole Palestinian land and cleansed it of Palestinians to ultimately create the State of Israel in 1948. Obscuring the material basis of a war permits perfidious actors, like Graham and Trump, to refuse to redress the material basis of the so-called “Arab-Israeli conflict,” in the hope of substituting U.S. and Israeli regional domination as its outcome. This is the objective of the Abraham Accords that Trump recently floated as a postwar status quo.
It’s also why Trump often prefers to talk about the U.S.-Iran war beginning “47 years” ago, a talking point of many right-wing war supporters shortly after the U.S. and Israel started bombing Iran in late February. Treating the war as 47 years old locates its origins in the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Its logic is that the war began when the Islamic Republic began – and quickly seized U.S. diplomats and their staff as hostages – and will only end with regime change. There is another purpose to starting the clock in 1979. It obscures that the 1979 revolution resulted from popular fury at 25 years of U.S.-backed oppression that began in 1953, when a CIA coup installed a puppet, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and ousted the Iranian prime minister who had nationalized Iran’s oil. If Iran has been at war with the United States for 47 years, then the United States has been at war with Iran for 73. But in the sepia-toned, Reagan-filled memories of older conservatives, Iran is eternally unfinished business. Trump hopes to draw on that sentiment to make his war as politically frictionless as possible.
There is an enormous difference between saying the war is 47 years old and saying it is 3,000 years old. It is not principally a difference that concerns time. If the war is 47 years old, the Islamic Republic is the enemy. If the war is 3,000 years old, Iranian civilization is the enemy. And more often than not, Trump has treated it that way. After assassinating Iranian external-security architect Qassem Soleimani in 2020, Trump posted that he had a list of 52 Iranian heritage sites, “important to Iran & the Iranian culture,” that he would bomb if Iran’s reprisal was more than symbolic. Trump set that destruction into motion this year. U.S. bombs didn’t just incinerate more than 100 children at the girls’ school in Minab, they damaged the centuries-old Golestan Palace in Tehran, and this week struck two reservoirs that left 20,000 people briefly without water. Even the Iranian exiles who urged Trump and Netanyahu to end the Islamic Republic were shocked to hear Trump threaten in April that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” They learned what collaborators with imperialism often do: their supposed liberators see them as the useful idiots of an inferior civilization, easily sacrificed, along with everything they cherish.
Trump lost his war early. He lost it once the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz, exposing the U.S.’s unexpected lack of coercive power to reopen a globally vital energy and commercial waterway. Trump has flailed ever since. The president careens between empty assurances of diplomatic settlement intended to manipulate markets; boasts about having already bested Iran, no matter how conspicuous Iran’s potency is; and naked bloodthirst posted from the safety of the Oval Office. All the while, energy prices have spiked and dragged inflation up with it. His influencer and journalist defenders are disillusioned by the war – though they have only themselves to blame for their credulity in believing Trump anything but a man of blood. On June 3, sufficient Republican defections permitted the House of Representatives to finally pass a resolution demanding to put the war to a vote.
Trump’s civilizational rhetoric is no less a ploy than his attempts to fool the stock market into thinking peace is on the horizon and all this pain will be over soon. To sustain his war, he is gambling on an instinct among his base that he shares and amplifies. It’s the one that portrays nonwhite immigration as an “invasion.” It’s on display with every ICE raid through marginalized neighborhoods, with every unhinged declaration of dominion over “our hemisphere,“ and with every Department of Homeland Security post containing white supremacist messaging. When a regime metes out violence and humiliation against those considered foreign and inferior, it need never provide for the material improvement of its people.
“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” Trump said last month when asked about the financial impact of his war. Whatever comes of the latest assurance that an interim deal is imminent, Trump seeks to make his base not think of it either. When some people have a cultivated hate in their hearts, they can ignore the pain in their stomachs. Those stomachs can even seem full when told that an adversary’s stomach is emptier. Trump is betting that’s the most powerful characteristic of American civilization.
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