The conflict between the US – and its partner Israel – and Iran was nearly half a century in the making. Many explanations have been offered: strategic miscalculation, nuclear brinkmanship, regional rivalry and the failure of deterrence of Iran’s nuclear programme. But there is also the nature of the language through which each side has come to perceive the other.
Over 47 years, the language on each side has progressively hardened from assessments of behaviour into verdicts about the moral nature of each side’s adversary. It not only describes the enemy, but actively participates in creating it.
The language of American enmity towards Iran did not begin as a full moral verdict. In the 1980s and 1990s, Iran’s clerical leadership appeared in western media and policy discourse as the “mad mullahs”. It was a label that personalised the conflict and cast Iranian leaders as irrational rather than simply hostile. By the 1990s, the “rogue state” frame took hold, still defining Iran by its behaviour rather than its nature: a rogue, in principle, could change course.
