The United States and Iran: Why Neither Side Lowers Its Guard

At the mouth of the Persian Gulf, the sea squeezes down to a channel barely twenty miles wide at its tightest point. Tankers as long as skyscrapers move through it one behind the other, kept to shipping lanes only two miles across in each direction. Roughly a fifth of all the oil traded in the world leaves through that gap on its way to everyone else. The Strait of Hormuz is one of the few places on earth where a single country, just by closing a door, could push up the price of petrol on every continent. That country is Iran, which sits along the whole northern shore of the strait. In 2026, after decades of talking and threatening, the United States and Iran started trading open military strikes there.

For more than forty years the two have treated each other as enemies. There have been talks, signed agreements, and warm spells that raised real hopes. The hostility always comes back, and now it has turned into gunfire. The puzzle is not that Washington and Tehran disagree. Countries disagree all the time. The puzzle is that neither will lower its guard even when the fight is expensive, dangerous, and bad for both of them.

The usual explanations are true enough as far as they go. Iran's nuclear programme. America's sanctions. But those are what the argument is about, not the reason it never ends. The staying power comes from a colder question. What does each side actually get out of the fight? Both, in their own way, get something. That is why they keep it going.

First, the history that neither forgets

The mistrust is old, and it is specific. In 1953, a coup backed by the United States and Britain removed Iran's elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, after he moved to take the country's oil into national hands. It had been controlled by foreign companies. In his place the West put the Shah, the monarch, back in charge. Iranians did not forget who had reached into their politics and rearranged it. In 1979, a revolution swept the Shah away, and revolutionaries stormed the US embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. Washington did not forget that either.

Those two events sit at opposite ends of the same grievance. To many Iranians, 1953 shows that the United States will topple their government whenever it suits American interests. To many Americans, 1979 and the hostage crisis show that the Islamic Republic grabs innocent people and tears up the rules. Each side carries a deep injury from the start, and each blames the other for it.

From there the relationship settled into a pattern that has barely changed. Sanctions. Blame going both ways. The language of enemies, "the Great Satan" from Tehran's pulpits, "the Axis of Evil" from Washington's podiums. Now and then some diplomacy, and then, reliably, collapse. The 2015 nuclear deal, the JCPOA, was the closest the two ever came to a settlement. It traded strict limits on Iran's nuclear work for relief from sanctions. When the United States walked away from it in 2018 and put those sanctions back, the slow slide toward open conflict began. Every new crisis lands on top of this history, which is why each government reads the other's every move in the worst possible light.

What the standoff does for Iran

For the Islamic Republic, the fight with the United States is not only a threat to manage. It is also something the government can use.

The government was born in 1979 out of resistance to foreign control, and standing up to America and its allies is built into who it says it is. A clear outside enemy is politically handy. It justifies tight control at home and lets the leadership paint any dissent as foreign meddling. It stirs national feeling in the hard economic moments when the government needs it most. A regime that defines itself by resistance cannot simply stop resisting without asking why it exists at all.

Under the ideology sits a colder logic of survival. Iran's leaders have watched what happened to rulers who gave up their deterrents and trusted the West to be kind, and they have drawn a blunt lesson from it. They treat a nuclear threshold capability, the ability to build a bomb quickly without having actually built one, along with a large stock of missiles and drones and a network of allied armed groups across the region, as insurance against the kind of regime change the United States has pushed elsewhere. From Tehran's point of view, backing down does not buy safety. It signals weakness, and weakness invites more pressure.

The fight is also leverage, and Iran does not have much else. The nuclear programme and the power to threaten shipping through the Strait of Hormuz are its strongest bargaining chips. They are what forces powerful countries to pay attention to a nation living under heavy sanctions. To give them up cheaply would mean folding the only hand that brings the rest of the world to the table.

What the standoff does for the United States

Washington's stake is a different kind, though just as real. Stopping the spread of nuclear weapons comes first. The United States and its allies see an Iranian bomb as an unacceptable shift in the balance of the Middle East. It could set off a regional arms race and give Tehran a shield to act behind without fear of consequences. Then there is the machinery of the global economy. The Strait of Hormuz is not some regional detail. It is one of the channels the world's energy runs through, and keeping it open is treated in Washington as a core national interest a superpower cannot be seen to walk away from.

Alliances make a third claim. American policy toward Iran is tied up with decades of commitment to Israel and to the Gulf monarchies, whose own fear of Iran pulls Washington toward a hard line. Any sudden softening would look to them like betraying a friend. The fourth is credibility, the thing great powers guard most closely. The worry in Washington is that if the United States blinks against Iran, rivals watching elsewhere, in Beijing and Moscow, will decide that American threats are just for show. Under all four sits domestic politics, where looking tough on Iran has long been the safer, cheaper stance for any president.

The trap they are both in

Put those two sets of interests side by side and you get what scholars of international relations call a security dilemma. The steps one country takes to feel safer are the exact steps that make its rival feel less safe. Iran builds up its defences because it feels threatened. The United States and its allies see that build-up as the threat, and answer it. Each defensive move looks, from the other side of the water, like getting ready to attack. The spiral needs nobody to act in bad faith. It only needs both sides to be afraid, and both are.

What makes the trap so hard to escape is that the reasons to stay hard are not only about the other country. They are baked into domestic politics on every side. In Tehran, in Washington, in allied capitals, firmness gets rewarded and compromise gets punished as surrender. A leader who might quietly prefer a deal still has to face a home crowd for whom giving ground looks like losing. Even sensible people, acting rationally inside their own systems, get pushed toward the confrontational choice.

And over all of it hangs the mistrust. After 1953, after 1979, after the collapse of the 2015 accord and the failure of the 2025-2026 talks, neither side believes the other will keep a bargain. So even when a deal is signed, each keeps its guard up in case the other cheats, and that hedging is read across the water as proof of bad faith. Once distrust takes hold, it starts producing the very evidence that seems to justify it.

Why it does not resolve

This is why the fight outlives every attempt to end it. The nuclear question offers no comfortable middle ground. Iran wants the leverage and the insurance that a threshold capability gives it. The United States and Israel treat an actual weapon as intolerable. The two goals do not meet somewhere in the middle. They rule each other out. Around that hard core, the region has no shared security system, nothing like the arrangements that eventually steadied Cold War Europe, where disputes could be contained and grievances aired without violence. And the weight of history makes sure no gesture is ever taken at face value.

The deals that failed did not fail because they were badly written. The 2015 accord was one of the most detailed arms-control agreements ever drafted. They failed because the structure underneath them never changed. The documents rearranged the surface. The fear, the mistrust and the domestic incentives underneath stayed exactly where they were. The moment pressure came back, both governments reached again for the postures that serve them, and the paper gave way.

The machine beneath the strikes

Strip the standoff back to its frame and it is not really an argument about one bomb or one waterway. It is two political systems whose sense of safety each depends on the other's fear, locked together by a history neither will let go of and by domestic politics that pay off, on both sides, for keeping the fight alive. The nuclear programme and the strait are where the pressure shows up. They are not where it comes from.

So the strikes of 2026 are less a sudden break than the same machine running hotter. Until the structure underneath shifts, the crisis will keep changing shape, from sanctions to negotiations to open fire and back, while the basic posture stays put. The danger now is that a confrontation both sides think they can control does not always stay controlled. Near a channel as narrow and as vital as Hormuz, a single miscalculation reaches far past the two countries involved, into the price of fuel and food on the other side of the world.

Neither side lowers its guard because, for now, neither believes it can afford to, and each has quietly built a politics that runs on not doing so. The sad part is not that peace is impossible. It is that, as things stand, both sides get more out of the standoff than they expect to get from ending it.

Sources

• Council on Foreign Relations, "Iran's War With Israel and the United States" (Global Conflict Tracker).
• The Conversation, "47 years of deep mistrust and misperception paved the way to war between Iran and the US".
• Center for Strategic and International Studies, "U.S. and Iranian Strategic Competition".
• Wikipedia, "2025-2026 Iran-United States negotiations".