Hostility between the US and Iran: How we got here

An anti-Iranian protest in Washington, D.C., in 1979. Credit: Marion S. Trikosko/United States Library of Congress. 

The United States and Iran have been enemies since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. But our relationship with Iran is much more complicated. It goes back far longer than the fateful day the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile, or when Iranian students stormed the American embassy in Tehran.