As the Trump administration has continued its massive military buildup in the Persian Gulf region to compel Iran’s leaders to the negotiating table, a forceful debate has broken out as to how Americans ought to understand the impending(?) U.S. attack on the Iranian regime. Like many foreign policy debates, this one revolves around the analogies commentators have deployed to make sense of the situation. For some, this round of confrontation is merely a continuation of the “12-Day War” of last summer, where Israel pummeled Iranian military infrastructure from the sky and the United States irreparably damaged Iran’s nuclear facilities in Operation Midnight Hammer. Yet the specter of a larger war of regime change in Tehran has led others to adopt two analogies that are poorly understood and, in general, misleading as guides to this situation.
The first and most obvious analogy is to Operation Iraqi Freedom, the 2003 invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush to topple Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime. Bush argued that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction—a case first made by George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton—which represented an intolerable national security danger in a post-9/11 world. After the initially successful campaign to remove Hussein, the U.S. military fought a costly decade-long war against insurgents and never found the nuclear or chemical weapon stockpiles that served as the legal basis for the war.
Yet there are several key differences that those who compare Iran today to Iraq then miss. Most importantly, Iran actually has a nuclear weapons program, whereas Iraq did not. Bush and his team based their judgment on a willful overinterpretation of intelligence provided by a single source, who, as it turned out, was not as trustworthy as they had hoped. Removing Hussein from power was arguably a personal fixation of the president. Moreover, as I show in my recent book Securing the Prize: Presidential Metaphor and US Intervention in the Persian Gulf, a majority of Americans supported going to war to remove Hussein from power within a week of September 11, 2001, months before Bush started making the case for war with Iraq. These conditions gave rise to a context of overreach and overestimation in U.S. foreign policy deliberation, and these conditions are almost wholly absent in the present situation. Americans by and large do not want war, Trump seemingly does not want war, and there are ample sources indicating that Iran is seeking to reconstitute its nuclear program.
Second, many commentators apparently cannot resist reaching back to the Eisenhower era to compare today’s situation to Operation Ajax, a combined American, British, and Iranian effort which removed Mohammed Mossadegh from power and restored the Shah. There are many contextual differences that make this a poor comparison. Mossadegh’s flirtation with the Soviet-aligned Iranian Tudeh Party, the atomic tensions of the early Cold War, the lack of public awareness over the geopolitical importance of Persian Gulf oil to Allied defense, the importance of Britain (then the world’s third-largest economy) to U.S. Middle East strategy, and Eisenhower’s military strategy of asymmetric response all mark significant divergences between Iran in 1953 and in 2026. It is not as if Eisenhower pressed a button and replaced an antagonistic government with a wholly pliant puppet.
Beyond the challenges these discrete factors pose to any attempted analogy to today, the larger reason why this is a poor point of comparison is that Operation Ajax was a covert operation. This detail matters immensely. Eisenhower was confronted by a situation in which he believed (1) the Iranians were drifting into Soviet orbit under Mossadegh, (2) the British would be critically weakened if nothing was done to redress Mossadegh’s seizure of Anglo-Iranian Oil Company facilities at Abadan, and (3) that any overt military action on the part of the United States would risk war with the Soviet Union, alienate potential U.S. allies worldwide, and panic the American public. Secrecy—or at least plausible deniability—was the point of Operation Ajax. That pivotal factor is irrelevant to Trump and Iran in 2026.
Rather than Iraq in 2003 or Iran a half century before that, a better point of comparison to today would be the final years of the Iran-Iraq War. As that conflict ground into a stalemate, Iraq and Iran began targeting oil tankers transiting through the Gulf. This action, in addition to the risk that Iran might finally overwhelm Iraq before turning its sights on Saudi Arabia, led the Reagan administration to progressively “tilt” toward Baghdad. Reagan shared intelligence, offered economic aid, and authorized weapons transfers via Jordan to Iraq. All of these actions were indirect ways of pressuring the Iranian regime to accept a ceasefire with Iraq.
But after the crisis of credibility brought about by the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan took much more forceful steps to bring the ayatollah to heel. He ordered the U.S. Navy to escort reflagged Kuwaiti oil tankers through the Gulf. He expanded the rules of engagement to allow U.S. naval and air power to target Iranian oil platforms used as bases to raid civilian shipping. He authorized a global crackdown on weapons transfers to Iran. Finally, he approved Operation Praying Mantis to destroy the Iranian navy, which still ranks as the U.S. Navy’s largest surface battle since World War II. These pressures, combined with the Iraqi army’s steady strengthening via U.S. assistance, finally compelled Ayatollah Khomeini to sign the ceasefire—but only when, in the words of historian Mark Gasiorowski, the administration engineered a “huge crescendo of pressures” to force Iran to the table.
Like Reagan, Trump wants Iran to agree to a deal that has been on the table for months, if not years, an agreement that does not necessarily demand a new government in Tehran but that does require the Iranian regime to seriously alter its regional conduct. And as with the Great Communicator, Trump has tried to generate pressure on Ayatollah Khamenei to come to the table to negotiate such a deal. Right now, it appears, Trump is finding out just how difficult that can be. If history is any guide, it will take much more than a naval armada lurking offshore to push Iran’s leaders to relent from the destructive path they have chosen.
