Interesting how your history conveniently starts in 1979.
That’s a very useful place to begin if you want Iran to look like the origin of everything.
But history didn’t start in 1979.
It didn’t even start with the Iranian Revolution. It started decades earlier when the United States and the UK overthrew Iran’s elected government in the Operation Ajax, removing Mohammad Mossadegh after he nationalized oil from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
That coup installed the rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, backed by the secret police SAVAK, whose repression lasted until the Iranian Revolution.
Once you remove that part of history, the rest of the narrative suddenly looks very clean.
But geopolitics doesn’t work that way.
Yes, Iran has built proxy networks like Hezbollah and others. That’s real.
But presenting forty years of Middle Eastern geopolitics as a simple battle of “good versus evil” is not analysis. It’s mobilization rhetoric.
States don’t act because they are evil or righteous.
They act because they pursue power, security, and leverage.
The United States does it.
Iran does it.
Russia does it.
China does it.
Israel does it.
And here is the part people underestimate.
Conflicts like this rarely stay contained.
They spread through alliances, proxies, ideology, economics and retaliation.
What begins as a regional confrontation can easily merge into something much larger.
Not a clean coalition. Not a clear battlefield.
But a fragmented, unstable front that rises above borders.
And once that kind of front forms, you no longer have a regional crisis.
You have a geopolitical fault line capable of sending shockwaves through the entire world.
So when history is reduced to simple moral clarity, people should be careful.
Because the world rarely breaks along the lines of good and evil.
It breaks along the lines of power.
