If war with Iran becomes the issue that breaks up the MAGA alliance, the historical irony will be great.
Iran’s central role in Republican politics is not new. The modern Republican coalition—created by Ronald Reagan and the 1980 presidential election, when he defeated President Jimmy Carter—was defined by anti-Iranianism and coincided mainly with the rise of the current regime in Tehran.
What followed were decades that shaped the political outlook of millions of Americans, including Donald Trump. Now they are in their senior years, watching to see if the government that held sway during that era will finally fall, and at what cost to the United States and its allies.
Strange, the war against Iran that every president since Reagan avoided it it could be what breaks the MAGA coalition—and opens the door to a Democratic resurgence.
The 1970s were a difficult decade for Americans. The shadow of Vietnam lingered long after the last soldiers returned home. Deep suspicion of the elected leaders took hold and there was no desire for another ground war, not even a small one. The world’s most formidable military force, the same one that defeated world fascism in the 1940s, failed to prevent the unification of Vietnam under communist rule, and the United States’ sense of its place on the world stage changed accordingly. At home, the nation was being divided along social and cultural lines. And deflation—a punishing combination of high unemployment and inflation—had shattered the economic prospects that postwar prosperity had made seem permanent.
As if all that wasn’t enough, the energy crisis that escalated twice, in 1973 and again in 1979, made the country feel like an economic hostage to the smallest and weakest government in the Middle East, while OPEC cut prices and US supplies.
The modern conservative movement that gained strength during this period, a coalition of evangelical Christians, New Right intellectuals, Wall Street and business interests, conservative Democrats, and traditional anti-government Republicans, put the blame for all of this squarely on the Democratic Party. Democrats had controlled Congress since 1955, and conservatives claimed that Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter—along with middle-of-the-road Republicans Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford—had driven the nation into the ground by overmanaging the economy; taxation and consumption without restriction; and refused to support a strong defense against communism.
Then came the Iran hostage crisis. In January and February 1979, a revolution overthrew the monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and ushered in a new era of Islamic rule under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As historian David Farber he writes in Taken Hostage: The Iran Kidnapping Crisis and America’s First Struggle with Radical Islam, many high-level US policymakers, accustomed to seeing the world through a Cold War lens, missed the growing power of Islamic fundamentalism.
When Carter allowed the shah, whose repressive secret police had terrorized Iranians for decades, to enter the United States in October of that year to receive cancer treatment in New York, the situation exploded. On November 4, a group of Iranian students stormed the US Embassy in Tehran, taking 66 Americans, including diplomats, hostage. (The captors released the women and Black hostages later in November, and another hostage who became seriously ill in July 1980.) They saw Carter’s decision as another example of US meddling in Iranian affairs. Many had learned how the CIA, under President Dwight Eisenhower, supported the 1953 coup that overthrew the Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq. Carter’s chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, on the spot predicted that hostages would be an important issue in the election.
The hostage crisis lasted 444 days, and 52 Americans were held captive, and spent the Carter administration. The president spent much of his time trying to negotiate the release of the hostages, working through third parties and freezing Iranian assets held in American banks. He abandoned the campaign, and adopted a “Rose Garden strategy” where he remained on the job in the White House to show that he kept control over politics, hoping that this posture would be enough to overcome a major challenge from Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy before taking him to the general election. He hesitated to use military force. As he told State Department staff: “I will not take any military action that might lead to bloodshed or provoke abductors who are not in a position to attack or punish them. I will be very moderate, very cautious.”
The media continued to remind the country about the crisis. ABC television broadcast the nightly updates via Iran Crisis: America Held Hostagewhich became a permanent late night news program called Night call in 1980, organized by Ted Koppel. Many communities hung yellow ribbons on trees, gates, and streetlights to show their support. Cars were decorated with bumper stickers and local rallies called for revenge. The World Wrestling Federation introduced the Iron Sheik, a heel whose persona hated the United States; he had little trouble inciting live audiences to hate him.
Carter was already struggling with a depressed economy when the hostage crisis began. Each night, ABC aired its updates and reminded viewers how long the tension continued—and its approval ratings continued to decline. With most of the negotiations taking place in secret, it appeared to many Americans as if Carter was doing nothing. The hostages came to symbolize something larger: the inability of the United States and the Democratic Party’s permanent inability to project force against its opponents. First, the small oil producing countries had held the country economically. Now they were holding the Americans literally. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, opening the second phase of the crisis, Carter realized how foreign policy was destroying his presidency.
Reagan, who had emerged as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, used the Iran crisis as leverage against Carter. He emphasized the failure of the president to release the hostages and said that it is the inevitable result of a weak administration to stand firm against its opponents. This was a line of attack that Reagan had honed during his 1976 primary challenge against Ford, when he criticized the Republican establishment on détente, a policy of reducing tensions with the Soviet Union through arms, diplomacy, and trade agreements. He now had the Democrat in his extreme ways, and any hesitation about making the attack was lost. During a speech on January 24, 1980, in South Carolina, Reagan said: “The Iranians bet that Mr. Carter would be weak in response to an act of war. They were right.” He stick together Iran to the Soviets in Afghanistan, saying, “I have no doubt that our failure to act decisively when this happened gave the Russians the final incentive to invade Afghanistan.”
Public confidence in Carter further declined after Carter’s effort to launch a military rescue in April 1980, Operation Eagle Claw, ended in disaster, leaving eight American soldiers dead and others wounded.
In a campaign announcement paid for by a group called Democrats for Reagan, viewers saw images of Iranians in the US embassy as the narrator warned: “Ayatollah Khomeini and his people prefer a weak, controllable American president, and are determined to do everything in their power to determine the outcome of our election.” The ad quoted a New York Times column and William Safire, who claimed that Iranian officials were on American television urging voters to oppose Reagan. By the end of his term, the initial “circling the flag” campaign to promote Carter had disappeared. By September 1980, his approval rating was it has fallen to about 37 percent.
Knowing how important the issue was, Reagan’s advisers feared an “October surprise” – a last-minute hostage release that, according to local polls, would give Carter the election. It didn’t happen. Whether Reagan’s advisers contacted Iranian officials to delay the release remains historically disputed; What is even more controversial is how the conflict had already hurt Carter.
Donald Trump, then a real estate developer in New York, agreed. October 8, Trump he told it TV interviewer: “The situation in Iran is a real example. That they are holding our hostages is completely and utterly ridiculous. That this country sits back and allows a country like Iran to hold our hostages is, in my way of thinking, appalling. I really don’t think they would do that to any other country.”
Shortly before the election, Carter noted in his diary, “The anniversary of their capture completely filled the press. Time, Newsweek and US news they all had front cover stories about hostages… Almost all the undecideds moved to Reagan. On Election Day morning, Carter’s constituent, Pat Caddell, told Hamilton Jordan: “The sky has fallen. We’re being killed … it’s a hostage thing.”
Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in a landslide victory for the Republican Party, winning 489 Electoral College votes and more than 50 percent of the popular vote. Many factors contributed to the outcome, but most observers agreed that Iran was dominant. Even after Carter negotiated the release of the hostages, the Iranians delivered the ultimate humiliation by delaying their release until Reagan’s inauguration. Reflecting on 2014, Carter he told it CNBC, “I think I would have been easily re-elected if I could have rescued our hostages from the Iranians.”
Hostage crisis it left a lasting impression on Trump. In 1990, Trump he told it Playboy: “We still face a loss of honor that goes back to the Carter Administration, when helicopters were crashing into Iran.” In 2011 interview with Steve Forbeshe said, “People forget Iran. They had our hostages, and Jimmy Carter was president, and it was sad. We would have those hostages today if Jimmy Carter was still president.”
Yet decades later, Trump has left his conservative coalition politically exposed by launching the kind of attacks that Carter avoided and that Reagan never did. (In fact, the Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages in Lebanon.)
Trump is learning the hard way that military action, especially if not carefully planned and coordinated by multiple allies, is rarely easy in this volatile region; it could quickly ignite widespread instability around the world and drag the United States further into the conflict. The shockwaves are being echoed back home—and this time, it’s Republicans under Trump who may bear the brunt of the political crisis.
