What It’s Really Like to Deal with Iran

We’ve been doing this same dance for decades.

Chris J. Krisinger | August 3, 2026

Ever since the 1979 Iranian Revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah to usher in the Islamic Republic, Iran has presented the United States a difficult and very often frustrating foreign policy challenge.  Successive U.S. administrations — both Democrat and Republican — have deemed Iran, and more specifically its radical militant Islamist leadership, a threat to the United States and its interests.

Despite this longstanding adversarial relationship, often marked by violent, subversive, terroristic episodes — and now war over whether Iran will possess nuclear weapons — both Republican and Democrat administrations have, in good faith, reached out to Iran over the years with substantive deeds and diplomacy with hopes to restore and normalize relations.

There are precedents in U.S.-Iran relations for “disaster diplomacy,” with the intention that providing humanitarian assistance during calamities might be the impetus for cooperation, conflict resolution, and international relations.  In June 1990, a private American relief airplane landed in Iran after the Manjil-Rudbar earthquake in the north and then again in June 2002 during another earthquake in northwest Iran.  As U.S. aid arrived indirectly in early July 2002, President George Bush would publicly declare, “Human suffering knows no political boundaries.”

Earlier, in 1991, thousands of Kurdish refugees who fled Saddam Hussein’s Iraq after the Gulf War were camped along the Iran-Iraq border.  This exodus prompted a large-scale military humanitarian operation, dubbed PROVIDE COMFORT, that included an Air Force transport flying the first government mission to Iran since the embassy hostages’ release in January 1981.  On April 27, 1991, that military transport landed in Iran with more than 15 tons of blankets for Kurdish refugees.  Iran watchers thought that humanitarian flight might be a catalyst to thaw relations; however, Iran’s leaders expressed no appreciation for the relief supplies and rejected........

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