ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -- To wrap your head around the United States’ relationship with Iran, you need to go all the way back to 1953 when the CIA helped stage a coup to overthrow Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. They bribed newspaper editors and hired thugs and even created a fake communist party to help fuel the unrest.
Almost fifteen years later, in 1967, the U.S. gave Iran a nuclear reactor and weapons-grade nuclear fuel.
Fast forward to 1979: there’s a revolution in Iran, the government that the CIA helped install is overthrown and -- amid the transition -- the U.S. embassy in Tehran is overtaken and staff there is held hostage for more than a year.
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter cuts off diplomatic ties with Iran and authorizes a rescue mission to get the American hostages out. The mission failed badly and eight U.S. service members were killed.
The following year (1981): Iran releases our hostages minutes after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration.
In 1986 President Reagan, in his second term, would admit to a secret arms deal with Iran. It became a huge scandal known as “The Iran Contra affair."
Then, in 1988, one of our Navy ships shot down an Iranian passenger plane, killing 290 people who were onboard.
From there, things got pretty frosty between the two countries over the next 15 years or so.
Then, in 2002, President George W. Bush names Iran as part of an “Axis of Evil” along with North Korea and Iraq.
In 2008, President Bush sends an official to start nuclear negotiations with Iran, which was a start. But, talks between the two countries basically fell silent and stayed that way through President Barack Obama’s first term in office.
In 2012, the Obama administration enacted a law that put the squeeze on Iran financially. Lots of countries cut back on buying Iranian oil. And, as a result, the Iranian economy took a big hit.
The following year, Hassan Rouhani was elected president in Iran. Later that year, an agreement, the beginnings of what most of us would come to know as the “Iran Nuclear Deal," was reached.
In May of 2018, President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the deal, and that did not go over well in Tehran. Iran lawmakers burned a U.S. flag in their Parliament and chanted “Death to America," a popular chant in Iran ever since the 1979 revolution. (SIDE NOTE: They even have a “Death to America” emoji in Iran now).
Which brings us up to present day.
Over the weekend, President Rouhani told President Trump to stop threatening Iran “or else you’ll regret it," which prompted President Trump’s “all-caps” tweet just as the United States gets ready to re-impose sanctions over its nuclear program and its support of militant groups in the Middle East.
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