3 key moments that led to the U.S.-Iran war

Throughline

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History, Documentary, Society & Culture

4.6 • 16.4K Ratings

🗓️ 12 March 2026

⏱️ 48 minutes

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Summary

Military confrontations, early-morning attacks, and digital warfare: the story of Iran and the U.S. from the 1979 Iranian revolution to the fraught moment we're in today. This episode originally ran in 2019 as Rules of Engagement. You can find more of Throughline's coverage into the origins of the conflict in the Middle East here.

Guests:
Karim Sadjadpour, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Michael Eisenstadt, director of the Washington Institute's military and security studies program

Kim Zetter, writer for WIRED magazine and author of Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's runned.
0:02.3	The current war launched by the United States and Israel against Iran has been decades in the making,
0:08.4	and through line has been covering the tension between the U.S. and Iran for years.
0:13.7	So today, we're bringing you an episode from a past series we made.
0:18.1	Part one of this series took us inside the CIA-backed overthrow of Iran's
0:22.9	democratically elected prime minister in 1953. That episode is called Four Days in August. And if you
0:30.2	haven't heard it yet, check it out in our archives. Today, we picked the story back up in 1979.
0:43.5	Music Today, we picked the story back up in 1979. The secular shah the U.S. put in place after the coup in 1953 was suddenly facing a major crisis, an Islamic revolution.
0:54.1	For the last seven days, Tehran and other cities have seen violent clashes between troops
0:59.5	and demonstrators demanding soldiers with rocks and homemade petrol bombs.
1:04.3	Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets.
1:07.2	Inevitably, the result is massacre.
1:10.7	The Shah was forced to flee Iran, and a new leader, a Muslim clerk named Ayatollah Khomeini
1:16.4	took power.
1:18.1	Returns to a country teetering on the brink of civil war.
1:21.3	The crowd chanted Allah al-Hu Akbar, God is great that raced along with the motorcade trying to get a glimpse of the Ayatollah.
1:29.3	And this began a new era in U.S.-Iran relations.
1:32.3	In an obvious reference to the United States, he said foreign advisors have ruined our culture
1:37.3	and have taken our oil.
1:39.3	And so in the course of months, Iran went from one of America's best allies to one of America's
1:45.6	worst adversaries.
1:48.0	Not long after the revolution, Iran did something that solidified its new place as an American
	...

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