Why The U.S.-Iran History Just Hit A Violent New Chapter

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Wednesday, March 4th, 2026, I'm Jessica Grozenthal.

Reaction from around the world pours in as the U.S. and Israel strike targets in Iran.

What questions remain about the downstream effects of this war on other hot spots around the world?

You're going to see the president define conventional wisdom and resetting the global chess board

in a profoundly impactful way.

I'm Dave Anthony.

As the war rages in the Middle East, did you know, before the U.S. and Iran were foes,

we were friends.

My greatest hope is that we could develop a situation again where the U.S. and Iran

are allies, but again, was the real history of U.S. and Iran until this unfortunate detour

that the terrorist enhancing mullahs have been taking us on for 47 years.

And I'm Michael Duncan.

I've got the final word on The Fox News rundown.

Thousands of flights have been canceled across the Middle East and beyond as rattled

markets react to higher oil prices.

And we have a little high oil prices for a little while.

But as soon as this ends, those prices are going to drop, I believe lower than even before.

President Trump knocked back reports from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the U.S.

attacked Iran because Israel was going to attack anyway, and they wanted to strike first

to keep Iran from going after U.S. bases in the region.

So if anything, I might have forced Israel's hand, but Israel was ready and we were ready

and we've had a very, very powerful impact.

He said he believed Iran would strike first.

U.S. envoy Steve Wittkov, who conducted negotiations with Iran ahead of the strikes,

told Foxes Sean Hannity, the Iranians bracked him.

They had enough uranium to begin creating 11 bombs.

The president was asked Tuesday, what is the worst case scenario?

I guess the worst case would be we do this and then somebody takes over who's as bad as

the previous person, right? That could happen.

But the president also said he hoped Iranian military and police would lay down their guns

and ask for immunity. The president reflected on lessons learned from the recent past,

like in Venezuela, but also in Iraq, making all of these statements in the Oval Office

dexter German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

We are on the same page in terms of getting this terrible regime in Tehran away.

Merz said he wanted to talk about Ukraine and Russia, as Iran strikes neighboring

Gulf nations, insisting that hits to Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait,

are attacks on U.S. assets and not the host countries.

Questions remain about the downstream effects of the war on other regions,

including Russia and China, as some reflect on exactly how we got to this point.

I think it really started with the strike on Kossum Soleimani.

Alex Gray was chief of staff to the National Security Council during President Trump's first term.

When I had really the privilege of being with the president during that strike and watching

his leadership and what at the time was a pretty historic strike at Iran's

air-sponsoring regime and someone who had really been the mastermind of the murder and the

maiming of thousands of American soldiers in Iraq. The president at the time made a very strategic

calculation that contrary to the conventional wisdom in Washington, striking Kossum Soleimani,

the head of the Kud's force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps would actually be stabilizing

for the Middle East. It would not be destabilizing. It would actually send the right message to Iran

and deter future bad behavior. That was obviously something, even people within his own

administration argued vehemently against. The president really chose to take the decision that

that was the right thing for the country and it worked out. It was a very important move

for reestablishing deterrence in the region. Now fast forward to today, the president's essentially

doing that, but on steroids. The president is saying that we're going after the entire apparatus

of terror that the Iranian regime has propagated for 45 plus years. I think the same effect is going

to apply as what we saw with the Soleimani strike in 2019, where you're going to see the president

find conventional wisdom and resetting the global chess board in a profoundly impactful way.

Before this operation, the president said about negotiations that Iran just wouldn't utter the

words, we will not develop a nuclear weapon. I know some of the democratic side of the aisle say,

well, Iran did say those words when they signed that nuclear deal under President Obama,

right? The JCPOA. What do you say to that? I would say that the JCPOA was a deal that was basically

designed to look the other way when Iran ultimately violated that agreement. I mean, the JCPOA,

if you have to understand and go back to 2014-2015, what was the strategic thinking by the Obama

administration? The strategic thinking was that Iran getting a nuclear weapon eventually really

wasn't that big of a deal. That's why they paid them these pallets of cash. That's why the

verification mechanisms were so loose. That's why they were able to have civil nuclear programs that

could very easily turn into militarized nuclear programs. Essentially, they were making a strategic

gamble that a nuclear Iran actually wouldn't be that destabilizing for the region. Otherwise,

the JCPOA would have been done in such a way as to be much tougher and more difficult on Iran.

I would say to anyone who argues that the JCPOA was containing Iran's nuclear ambitions,

they obviously never looked at the same intelligence that President Trump and his team looked at

in the first term when we made the decision to get out of that agreement. There's just no, in my view,

there's no arguing that that that JCPOA did anything to restrain Iran's march toward a nuclear

weapon. Now, some of the commentary here, and I know you're seeing it, is this is about China.

The China relies on Iran for oil, and so this undercuts them as we, you know, in this race for AI,

was this about China or is the impact to China secondary?

Well, as someone who spent my whole career arguing that China is the paramount threat to the United

States, it pains me to say, you know, I do think this is probably secondarily about China.

At the same time, I think that ultimately what the President's doing here, which is based on Iran

as a threat in its own right, is going to allow us to divert our attention to the paramount

threat of China in the long run, by changing the strategic chessboard and taking the Iranian

theocracy off the table. I mean, this is the thing I think we have to remember. Hillary Clinton

in 2010, Secretary of State, said we're pivoting to Asia. And 16 years later, we still have not

moved the preponderance of America's focus to Asia. Why? I would argue because of Iran. Iran,

in various forms, through its proxies, through its missile program, through its nuclear program,

has managed to ensnare us in the Middle East in various forms for 15-plus years.

And now that the President is rewriting this strategic makeup in the Middle East,

we will finally, if this plays out the way I hope it does and the President hopes it does,

we will finally have the bandwidth and the ability to move away from the Middle East

and to focus on the threat from China. Alex, what if it doesn't go the way you hope? What if

the Iranian people, it's up to them, as the President says, what if this doesn't go the way

the administration hopes? Well, look, that's always the risk. And the President

was given the best military advice about the risk and reward. And he chose, I think, very

courageously, to take the gamble. The good news here is the President, I would call it now the

Venezuela model. The President is not trying to be a nation-built. He's not trying to do a rock

2.0. He's not trying to go around and do the rock thing where you hold up your purple finger to

show that you voted. It's very admirable that we should want ultimately the Iranians get a

liberal democracy. But the reality is, that's not the interest of the United States.

The interest of the United States is to get rid of the theocracy that was spreading terror

and killing Americans and destabilizing the region and whatever, as in Venezuela, whatever

follows. Assuming that it's not the clerics, the red lines that we have about the type of people

that would follow the clerics, as long as that's not crossed, I think the President's relatively

agnostic about what type of regime comes next. And this is what the President is doing that I think

is so remarkable. He's redefining the use of American military power. He's not, you know, all the

people who said he's an isolationist. Donald Trump's the farthest thing from an isolationist.

But what he's doing is he's fixing the mistakes of the Iraq war where we overextended ourselves.

We were focused on this very aggressive and ambitious agenda for democracy. Instead,

he's focused very narrowly on what are the core national interests of the United States.

No nooks, no missiles, no proxies. And as long as he keeps that very narrow focus,

I think this will work out the way the President's hoping.

I asked you about China. Let's go to Russia. Vladimir Putin has praised the Iatola now to cease

to Iatola Hominay as being a personal force in improving Iranian-Russian relations.

What does this situation mean for Russia's abilities in Ukraine, especially their drone capabilities

if anything? Well, that's only a slightly less faunting tribute than the New York Times

gave them. But you know, look, I think that there's obviously a number of, you know, the Russians,

the Chinese, the Iranians, the North Koreans have made common cause for a long time. And

the Iranians were certainly enabling Russia's war against the Ukrainians. They've been enabling

North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapon. There's been a tremendous, you know, the axis of authoritarianism,

I think is a good term. Having the destruction of the theocracy benefits stability globally.

It benefits all who want peace and freedom. And I think that, you know, Russia is finding itself

increasingly isolated. And the collapse of the Iranian theocracy is just another example of that.

When the President says, and he said it Monday, everyone was behind us. They just didn't have the

courage to say so. Given your role in international affairs and your your interest in geopolitics and

the contacts you've made, what did you make of that comment? What what sort of reaction do you think

he may be getting privately? Well, it's often the case that when the United States does things,

whether it's against ISIS, whether it's against the Iranian theocracy, whether it's against the

Houthis, you will get broad support, whether it's in Western Europe, whether it's in East Asia,

whether it's in the Gulf Arab states, privately, I can tell you from my personal experience in

government, you will privately have senior officials from those types of countries calling and

congratulating their American counterparts on a job well done. The reality is most of the people

who operate at the elite level of foreign policy in these countries share a similar worldview to

the United States. They want stability. They don't want this type of bad actors like Iran,

like North Korea. And so, you know, whatever they may need to say in public for their domestic

consumption, privately, they're very much in most ways aligned with the United States.

And finally, France's President says they're increasing nuclear warheads, their stockpile. This

was apparently decided before the operation in Iran, but he also announced this week that he will

allow temporary deployment of nuclear armed aircraft to allied countries. What is the

impact of all of this on Europe? I know that's a big question, but it's just I'm asking especially

in light of the President saying that Iran already has long range missiles that can reach Europe.

Look, I think that Europe is very conflicted on this. And you look at Spain, which denied America

the right to use the bases that that we've jointly operated on Spanish soil to conduct this

operation. You look at Britain, which has been all over the map on this. You look at France,

again, which has been all over the map. Western Europe is in an identity crisis domestically,

and they are in a strategic abyss. They don't know where their loyalties lie. They don't know where

their future is headed. They have extraordinary domestic and social problems. The reality is Donald

Trump and his national security strategy explained our relationship with Europe exactly right.

Europe is in many ways Western Europe, particularly not Central Europe, not Hungary,

not Poland, but Western Europe is in many ways in significant cultural, political, and economic

decline. And while we have great historic relations with those countries, they are increasingly

moving in a direction that is not an alignment with American interests. And I hope that changes.

I hope they all get governments that are more aligned with US interests and the US way of thinking

about the world. But right now we need to accept the fact that the current governments at least in

countries like Spain, like France, like Germany, like the United Kingdom are in so many ways. They

just don't look at the world and see what we see. Alex Gray, former National Security Council Chief

of Staff, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me.

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This is Michael Duncan with your Fox News commentary coming up.

This US conflict with Iran is just the latest chapter in a long saga. A decade ago,

President Obama took a much different approach. America must lead not just with our might,

but with our principles. It shows we are stronger, not when we are alone, but when we bring

the world together. He hailed a joint comprehensive agreement between the US and our allies,

and Iran aimed at curbing Iran's nuclear program, but President Trump called it a terrible deal

and he ended it in his first term. The Iran, as we know it, dates back to 1979. When I had

total come any, led a revolution and Americans were kidnapped at the US Embassy in Tehran.

President Carter called that terrorism in a unifying moment for the US.

We stand today as one people. We are dedicated to the principles and the honor of our nation.

But the Iran hostage crisis kept going and going, and Carter lost the 1980 election to

Ronald Reagan. Hours after being sworn in, January 20, 1981, the new president announced that

at an inaugural ball, the plans have landed now, cheers, announcing that 52 hostages Reagan called

prisoners of war had been set free. You can imagine their happiness. They're preparing to

board the American planes for the last leg of the trip. But the first US clash with Iran

took place way before that. 102 years ago, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the first US president to

visit what is now called Iran. Tevi Troy is a presidential historian who worked for a president.

As a senior White House aide, the George W Bush, he's also a senior fellow at the Ronald Reagan

Institute. He went not necessarily for Iran itself, but for a meeting with the so-called Big

Three of World War Two, Roosevelt Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, the Allied powers.

And Roosevelt was very gracious. He met with the now the young Shah, the son of Reza Shah,

and he thanked him for his hospitality. There's even a letter in the archives of very gracious note

that he sent him. And there was a sense that the US and Iran were friendly nations. And so that

was a good thing. And Truman followed up, met with him as well, even hosted Reza Shah Pilevi,

so the young Shah in Washington, the first president to host an Iranian later in Washington.

And then Eisenhower, he had up and down relationship with Iran?

Well, Eisenhower, I would say, has positive relations with Iran, but there was a coup

where a guy named Muhammad Musadah was the anti-Western prime minister. And he tried to nationalize

the oil industry, which really angered the British. The British wanted to take military action

against this. Eisenhower was against the idea, but Musadah didn't play his hand very well.

They were large anti-Musad demonstrations. And he might have fallen anyway, but there is a sense,

and there's some historical dispute over this that the CIA gave him a push. And he was out and

still to this day, people who don't like America grumble about America's role in that 1953 coup.

But it's not clear that it was all the US's fault or that the US actually made it happen.

Then Eisenhower does still have good relations with the Shah, who returns to Iran after those

troubles of 1953. And he visits Iran in 1959 and highlights the friendly relationship we have with him.

All right, President Kennedy, he didn't go to Iran, did he?

He didn't, but the Shah's best years, I think, were the 1960s. He was seen as a close American ally,

and he visited America five times during the Kennedy and Johnson years. And he went to see the US

space program at Cape Canaveral. He got a ticker tape parade in New York City. He had a

steak dinner and a ticker tape parade. A ticker tape parade for the leader of Iran.

He didn't do that anymore. Yeah, that was a thought.

Right. So Mueller certainly haven't gotten a ticker tape parade in New York City.

Nor will they anytime soon. No. And then we get into the 70s. President Nixon, he was a,

he was a big Shah backer, wasn't he?

Oh, huge Shah backer. In fact, dating back to the 1950s when he was vice president under Eisenhower.

So he's very positive about the Shah, his famous national security advisor and his later secretary

state Henry Kissinger. He calls the Shah an unconditional ally. And he really sees the Shah

as the linchpin for US efforts in the Middle East. So what happens? You get into the Jimmy Carter

years. Then you have a rising up of the Islamic radicals in Iran. Where does the US

Iran relationship and with the Shah go from there? Carter visits Tehran on New Year's Eve

right before the revolution. And he calls Iran an island of stability in one of the more troubled

areas of the world. Those words did not hold up well. The Carter administration just wasn't aware

of all the problems that were happening. There's this guy, Ayatollah Khomeini, who's exiled to France.

And he has some enablers who are falsely telling the world that he's going to be friendly to the West.

He's not going to be a problem. All not true. The Carter administration, the CIA had tapes of

this guy, Khomeini, and all the radical things he was saying. They were in Farsi and the CIA put

the tapes in a drawer and they never opened the drawer or translated the tapes. So they didn't know

how bad Khomeini was, even though they could have had they just opened that drawer and looked at

the tapes. Did they welcome Khomeini? Did they think he was going to be good somehow?

The Carter administration, I guess, thought he was going to be okay. Obviously not as close

a relationship with the Shah, but they thought they could work with him. And they were just wrong.

And obviously just a few months into this Khomeini takeover, they take over the U.S. Embassy and

U.S. diplomats are held there for 444 days. And that's really the thing more than anything else

that destroyed the Carter presidency. So either way, when Reagan takes over, the hostages are released,

but that does not necessarily improve U.S. relations with Iran.

When do the terror tentacles spread for the Iranians? I mean, getting into Hezbollah and then of

course Hamas and Gaza and all that? How does that happen? Yeah, it's really important to highlight

this that Iran is the sponsor, the supporter, the advisor of organizations that hate America,

try to destroy America like Hezbollah and Hamas. And this really starts in 1983 in the Beirut bombing

when Hezbollah, which is again an Iranian supported organization, murders 241 U.S. service

members in a terrible truck bombing. But that wasn't the only thing that they were doing. They

hijacked a commercial plane where they murdered a U.S. Navy diver. They took multiple Americans hostage

in Iran. And that was actually what set in motion the Iran-Katra affair, which was the biggest

scandal of Ronald Reagan's presidency. So from the minute they get into power, they have this idea

that they want to destabilize things using proxies. And the advantage of proxies, like Hezbollah and

later Hamas, is that Iranians don't suffer when the Hezbollah people are killed or when the

Hamas terrorists are killed. The Iranians have this level of insulation. And right now what's going

on with the attack against Iran is after 47 years of this strategy that's attacking the U.S.

through proxies. Finally, the U.S. is saying, you know what, we're going to hit you back directly

not just through the proxies. Now a lot of focus after that was put on Iraq

with the first President Bush in the Gulf War. And then after the Clinton presidency came the 9-11

terror attacks. In his 2002 state of the Union address, President George W. Bush famously

singled out Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. States like these and their terrorist allies constitute

an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world by seeking weapons of mass destruction.

These regimes pose a grave and growing danger. That was a few months into the U.S. war on terror.

Well, first of all, it called it what it was. I mean, Iran was a very problematic nation.

Still is, hopefully, where things are going to change more positively. He tried to get the

Iranians to the nuclear negotiating table in his second term. But the real problem was that

the Iranians were fomenting trouble against U.S. troops in Iraq. 600 Americans died because of

roadside bombs that the Iranians had provided for Iraqi terror networks. Through Kasim Soleimani,

who Trump took out the Iranian al-Quds force was a constant irritant to the American efforts in

Iraq. But the Bush administration had other things on its mind. It was bogged down by the

words in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it did little to address the Iranian problem because they just

didn't have the bandwidth for it. President Obama did enter into a nuclear agreement with Iran in

his presidency. It was undone by President Trump in his first term, but Democrats have said

that's a mistake. I think the mistake was the Obama approach, which was this kind of balance of

power approach, where you kind of prop up the Iranians as one axis against the Sunni states and

Israel on the other side. The truth is, if you have allies, you should support your allies,

and that is not what Obama was doing. He was trying to work with the Iranians, even called

the Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, which was the first contact between an American president

and any Iranian head of state. It didn't do much good. They had this so-called nuclear

agreement that didn't really stop them from developing nuclear weapons. Certainly didn't stop

their missile program and did not stop their use of proxies. So it was really an ineffectual deal

that President Trump pulled out of. But the problem is you pull out of the deal and you still don't

have a way to stop them from developing nuclear weapons. So it was a bad deal, but we still needed

to do something else to stop them from getting nuclear weapons and attaching them to ballistic

missiles. We already see that their ballistic missiles can wreak havoc across the entire region.

As we go through this conflict now, nobody knows how it's going to end. The exiled crown prince,

Reza Polavi, he wants to go back and lead a democracy push in Iran. Can there be leadership like the

Shah again in that country? I don't think you can have leadership exactly like the Shah. The

Shah was the head of state and actually kind of ran the mechanism of government. I don't think

Polavi could do that. He hasn't been in the country in almost 50 years. He really doesn't have

the kind of leadership experience. But to see him as a ceremonial head while some other government

takes place, hopefully a democracy, that is potentially workable and it's one of the options

that I heard is on the table. But we're still not there yet and there's a long way to go between

now where the head of the snake has been cut off. What's going to happen next? We can't know that.

But I do hope, my greatest hope is that we could develop a situation again where the U.S. and

Iran are allies, which again was the real history of U.S. and Iran until this unfortunate detour

that the terrorist enhancing mullahs have been taking us on for 47 years. It is hard to believe for

a lot of people listening to this. Iran has been an adversary led by Islamic radicals for decades

to think that we had such good relations with a Middle Eastern country like that.

Yeah, and it's a shame when you see a really problematic tyranny take over. We saw this in the

Soviet Union. We have no beef against the Russian people, but the Soviet leadership really

fomented trouble against the U.S. for a long time. Something similar has happened here with

the Iranians, but again, my fondest hope is that we can get back to a situation where the

great alliance between the U.S. and the Iranian people can return to what it once was.

You think it's possible that Donald Trump could be the next president to visit Iran?

I think that would be spectacular to see a U.S. president visit Iran in the near future

in a safe and welcoming environment because that would signal that things have gone right.

Tevi Troy is a presidential historian. The author of five books on the presidency,

former senior White House aide in the George W. Bush presidency senior fellow with the

Ronald Reagan Institute. Great to have you on the show. Thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for having me.

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see how you did. Thank you for taking the quiz. Read and review the Fox News run down on Apple podcasts

or wherever you listen. It's time for your Fox News commentary. Michael Duncan.

What's on your mind? The war with Iran has prompted the liberal media to declare another war.

A magascism on Donald Trump's foreign policy. And it's not without its merits. Trump rose to

power in 2016 opposing the Iraq war and the failures of nation building. The world is ripping us off

and it's time to put America first. But the libertarians within the Republican coalition

took this opening, jumping to the front of Trump's parade, and declaring themselves as the ones who

started it. The problem? It's at odds with President Trump's own record. He eliminated

Kassam Soleimani. He made NATO pay for their defense. He broker the Abraham Accords. He didn't do

this by withdrawing from the world. He did it by leveraging our leadership in it. He didn't do it

by nation building. He did it by negotiating. President Trump's foreign policy is a sober,

rational doctrine that eliminates foreign threats and strengthens America. It's more sophisticated

in the false choice of isolation or forever war. But too many influencers and pundits have

exploited the specter of Iraq to cast any foreign policy action as neo-conservative meddling.

It's a convenient way to impose their view on the movement. But I would suggest it's less about

America first and more about me first. This is Michael Duncan.

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