Betrayal is the word that comes to mind.

In the early hours of February 28, the United States and Israel launched a ferocious strike on Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and several senior security officials at his residence in Tehran.

The attack came in the middle of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, a dispute that has long divided Tehran and the West.

Washington and Tel Aviv allege that Iran has sought to develop a nuclear weapon. Tehran rejects the accusation, insisting that its program is peaceful and meant only for civilian purposes.

The dispute has turned Iran’s nuclear program into one of the most volatile flashpoints between Tehran and Washington.

Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran has been in the crosshairs of the United States. The U.S. does not recognize the Islamic Republic as a legitimate entity that represents the Iranians. It perceives it as a “regime” of “mad mullahs,” which confronts and resists Western hegemony in the region. 

The U.S. and Israel have used Iran’s nuclear programme as a pretext to topple the Islamic government in Tehran for decades. They have tried every coercion strategy: sanctions, assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientists, cyberwarfare, industrial sabotage and espionage, so on and so forth to roll back Iran’s nuclear programme, but they failed to do so. 

The U.S. and Israel see regime change as a viable strategy to dismantle Iran’s nuclear programme. Since the 1990s, these two countries have used the nuclear issue as a casus belli for military strikes on Iran. 

To analyze the broad contours of the current U.S.-Iran conflict, one must understand its trajectory: how the U.S. and Iran have reached this cycle of violence. 

Before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran was a key ally of the U.S. 

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During the Cold War, a period characterized by a ‘bipolar’ world order dominated by the U.S. and the USSR, Iran was the lynchpin in the U.S.’s ‘Twin Pillars’ strategy, which aimed to prevent Soviet influence in the Persian Gulf. 

This context is essential for understanding why the United States backed Mohammad Reza Shah’s ambitious nuclear program. 

In December 1953, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower........

© Kashmir Observer