The Iran hostage crisis is my first memory of international politics. When the U.S. Embassy was seized in Tehran in 1979, I was in third grade; I would probably not have really been aware of it until it had stretched on for months. My parents watched news of it on Nightline, after my bedtime. The Iran hostage crisis gets fewer mentions now than it seems to merit. Maybe that’s because Sept. 11 was the greater national trauma, but the hostage crisis was the greater national humiliation.
For more than a year, Iranian revolutionaries kept 52 Americans captive and the U.S. could do nothing. So, it’s a memory that the country flinches from. In retrospect, though, that crisis may have reshaped the world even more than Sept. 11. It was the seizure of the U.S. Embassy that set Iran and its brand of religious expansion on a collision course with the United States. The project of toppling American power and replacing it with Islamic fundamentalism continues today.
Seen in this light, it’s not really a coincidence that hostages are at the center of the Oct. 7 massacre and the war in Gaza and Lebanon. Hamas and Hezbollah are proxies for Iran, devoted far less to any individual interests than to prosecuting the vision of world revolution that has animated the Iranian regime from the start. Like other messianic ideologies, that vision has gathered both junior allies who see political advantage and fellow travelers who see salvation.
At home, Iran’s government is out of touch with its populace and stumbling under the weight of its thorough corruption, yet among backers flooding the streets and campuses of the West, Iran’s banner has never flown higher.
And so, a year after Oct. 7, the Middle East is on the verge of an even greater inferno, as the campaign that the Iranian revolutionaries initiated 45 years ago takes its course. It seems almost miraculous now that America’s post-WWII conflict with the Soviet Union — played out over just about the same length of time — never led to a more direct confrontation. I fear that this time we will not be so lucky.
This is the editor’s letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.