Sasanian relief of boar-hunting on domestic elephants, Taq-e Bostan, Iran. Photo by Alieh Saadatpour/Flickr.

“I found myself wondering why we cannot regard another country, in this case Iran, as just that, as one more country which we regard as neither friend or foe, with whom we are prepared to deal on a day-to-day basis, neither idealizing it nor running it down, keeping to ourselves… our views about its domestic political institutions and practices, which touched our interests—maintaining, in other words, a relationship with it of mutual respect and courtesy, but distant.” —George F. Kennan, March 8, 1998

History is destiny. Full stop.

If we ignore history, there is little reason why the United States and Iran should not be allies or at least trading partners. Iran has oil and the US has an oil-based economy—what’s not to love? Well, to borrow a line from Joseph Heller, there is only one catch: in the world of geopolitics, history is destiny. Reason, less so, and in most cases, it cannot overcome events and the passions they inspire until they fade from cultural memory. And the Middle East is a region of long memory. Reason is “the slave of the passions,” and as much as anything, malice and error drive the interactions of nations.

In 1953, US and British intelligence helped engineer the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, in a clandestine operation called Ajax. In the logic of the Cold War and subsequent US foreign policy, support for the coup falls under the burgeoning category of “Seemed like a Good Idea at the Time.” It has been paying dividends of ill will for more than seven decades, most notably when the US embassy was captured by militant students in November 1979. The two nations have been enemies ever since. The larger lesson is that much of the world runs on bad decisions and subsequent grudges, righteous anger, ideology, and other forms of irrationality. These things may even take precedence over the realistic pursuit of national interests as a basis for policy. History is thus destiny driven by bad blood.

But now, after 46 years of repressed neoconservative fantasies—dreams stymied by the strategic conundrum of what to do if Iran were to shut down the Strait of Hormuz following a hypothetical American attack—the US finally has its war with the Shiite state. How did Iran respond to the joint Israeli-American attacks? Well, they shut down the strait through which 20 percent of the world’s oil and one third of its fertilizer passes. Perfect. It was their most obvious strategic card to play, and—like an ace in the hole that everybody knew was there—they played it. And so, in the Great Game of the Middle East, an opponent beat us with a strait. Talk about destiny.

And the result? Never before has an underestimated nation defeated the US so decisively, so quickly, and so predictably. Sure, there were the helicopters hastily departing from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon in the spring of 1975, but that loss came after years of hard fighting. The departure of C-17s from Hamid........

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