Great nations — and perhaps great empires especially — have a curious relationship with history. We invoke it readily when it flatters us and set it aside when it complicates our arguments.
Americans speak comfortably about the victory in world wars, the export of democratic ideals, and the reconstruction of Europe through the Marshall Plan. Israel understandably recalls the Holocaust when explaining the vigilance that shapes its security policies. These memories are not wrong; they are foundational.
But history rarely offers only the chapters we prefer.
Where the past complicates our self-image, the instinct is often to move past it quickly. The excesses of the British Empire are frequently emphasized today, sometimes at the expense of recognizing the institutions it also helped shape. In the United States, discussions of Black history are occasionally treated as criticisms of American greatness rather than as part of the story that defines it. And in international affairs, arguments can become selective. One moment we cite Ukraine’s decision to relinquish nuclear weapons in 1994 as evidence of responsible statecraft; the next we dismiss that same history when it proves inconvenient to current strategic debates.
The present conflict with Iran offers another example of how memory shapes politics.
In Washington, the year 1979 is often treated as the starting point of Iranian hostility toward the United States — the revolution, the hostage crisis, the birth of a bitter rivalry. Yet for many Iranians, the timeline begins earlier. In 1953, Mohammad Mossadegh — elected and widely popular — was overthrown in a coup supported in part by the CIA and British intelligence. At the time it was justified as Cold War necessity. The Soviet Union loomed, and American policymakers feared instability in a strategically vital region.
Such calculations were not unusual in that era, and they were not made lightly. But the consequences of those decisions did not disappear when the Cold War ended; they became part of Iran’s political memory. Nor was that the last twist in the region’s relationship with American power — Washington later tilted toward Iraq during its long war with Iran, only to invade Iraq itself a generation later. More recently, Iran remembers the United States withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear agreement.
This is why calls today for the Iranian people to “rise up” against their government can sound different in Tehran than they do in Washington. History shapes how such appeals are heard. It is difficult to ask a nation to forget episodes that helped shape its modern identity — especially when those episodes involved foreign intervention.
The difficulty in diplomacy is often not disagreement about the present, but disagreement about which parts of the past still matter.
None of this absolves the Iranian regime of responsibility for its own actions. Nor does it require abandoning legitimate security concerns. States must sometimes act in defense of their interests and those of their allies. Diplomacy is rarely sentimental.
But successful diplomacy does require a certain awareness — an understanding that other nations remember their histories as clearly as we remember ours.
The problem arises when we assume our historical narratives are universal while treating others as selective or self-serving. That imbalance does not make negotiation impossible, but it does make persuasion harder.
Nations, like people, carry their past with them. The question is not whether history matters, but whether we acknowledge that it matters to others as much as it does to us.
Without that awareness, foreign policy risks sounding less like strategy and more like forgetfulness.