Two hundred and fifty years ago, as America’s Founding Fathers were working to establish a new country, they looked to the distant past, to ancient Persia. “They were particularly impressed by the legendary emperors Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, whose exemplary leadership abilities they saw as a potential model for the new republic,” writes John Ghazvinian in America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present (Knopf, 2021). “It would be a huge exaggeration to say that Americans somehow ‘modeled’ their new republic on Persian ideals. But…this first generation of Americans—citizens of an independent United States—was prepared to cast its net far and wide in search of lessons and examples. And that even, occasionally, meant looking to Iran.”
What a difference a quarter of a millennium makes. Today, few American politicians would dare speak reverentially about the nation of Iran or its history. The same goes, of course, for the authoritarian leadership of Iran, which has long encouraged its citizens to embrace the ritual chant of “Death to America.”
How did we get to this impasse? And how is it that the two countries are now at the heart of a war that has expanded into a greater regional conflict? Several recent books shed crucial light on the subject. I’d encourage anyone who wants to understand the context of the crisis to read Scott Anderson’s King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation (Doubleday, 2025). Anderson is a former war correspondent, and he does a masterful job of chronicling the complex set of circumstances that led to the disastrous collapse of U.S.-Iran relations in 1979. The book is also riveting, full of characters who wouldn’t be out of place in a thrilling novel. It won last year’s Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction.
President Trump is only the latest American leader to get caught up in Mideast crises, aptly captured in the title of Daniel E. Zoughbie’s book Kicking the Hornet’s Nest: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East From Truman to Trump (Simon & Schuster, 2025). As Zoughbie reminds readers, “Donald J. Trump claimed in 2012 that Barack Obama was going to start a war with Iran in order to get reelected.” That prediction has not aged especially well.
In America’s Middle East: The Ruination of a Region (Oxford Univ., 2025), Marc Lynch writes of the dangers of Trump being “utterly uninterested in the views of ordinary Arabs” and of not seeing them “as real human beings.” He also warns of “the costs of Trump’s relative ignorance of regional affairs, his highly distorted flow of information and his impulsive decisionmaking style.”
For decades, everyday Iranians have been simply trying to survive in a repressive, murderous regime. Iranian journalists Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy capture the struggles of feminist activists in For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising (Pantheon, 2025). “The authors,” wrote our critic, “bear witness to atrocities that have been pitifully underreported, oversimplified, and misunderstood by international media.” One wonders what will become of these brave women in wartime.
John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.
