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 to deter 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.

A significant shift occurred in January 2002 when then-US President George W Bush designated Iran as part of the “axis of evil”. His speechwriter David Frum later recalled drafting “axis of hatred”, but Bush insisted on using “evil” instead. This choice was unsurprising, as Bush’s was widely seen as a faith-based presidency, influenced by deeply internalised evangelical Christianity.

By February 2026, the vocabulary had reached its most extreme register. US President Donald Trump described Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as “one of the most evil people in history”, killed along with “his gang of bloodthirsty THUGS”. In a video posted on his
Truth Social platform, Trump explained the collapse of negotiations by stating that Iran’s leaders “just wanted to practise evil”. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, invoked the Book of Esther, equating the Iranian leadership with Haman — the inherently evil villain of Jewish scripture. He framed the operation as the fulfilment of a 2,500-year moral obligation.

Iran had its own vocabulary, with roots that were theological before becoming political. The designation of America by the Islamic Republic’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, as the “Great Satan” drew on the Quranic figure of shaitan ar-rajim (accursed one/outcast devil). It eventually became a category through which American actions — the 1953 coup and decades of support for the deposed shah — were interpreted. The term also served a domestic purpose: The Great Satan depicted any Iranian advocate of rapprochement as a collaborator with Satan. This made moderation seem less like a policy dispute and more like a form of moral treason.

When Bush named Iran in his axis of evil, a parallel mechanism emerged on the other side. Political analysts found Iranian elites overwhelmingly viewed the designation as a boon for conservative factions in Iran — the metaphor appearing to reinforce the intransigence it claimed to criticise. Over the following two decades, Tehran increasingly framed its regional alignment as an axis of resistance: a loosely connected network of allied movements presented not as acts of aggression but as heroic solidarity against a cosmic aggressor.

To each side, the identity judgements of nearly half a century have become almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. Each side will interpret what follows as confirmation of what it has always believed. That is what 47 years of presupposed moral condemnation can become: a frame so absolute and impenetrable that the violence it accompanies becomes a vindication.

What stands out across this arc is a pattern of accumulation. Each new label — great Satan, mad mullahs, rogue State, axis of evil, axis of resistance — added another layer to the adversary’s story, making it progressively more resistant to revision. Both sides converged on the same device, each attributing a corrupted moral nature to the other, an entity whose soul was the central issue.

From left: US President Donald Trump, now deceased Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Photo: AFP/HO/KHAMENEI.IR

A soul to condemn

National anthropomorphism — the metaphorical attribution of human traits to a nation-State — is a common feature of political language. “Mother Russia”, “Uncle Sam”, and “Homeland-Mother China” each give the country a face, a will, and a singular identity that can be addressed, celebrated, or defended. Such figures allow citizens to experience attachment, obligation, and hurt as if directed towards a single person.

However, labels such as “great Satan”, “global arrogance”, “mad mullahs”, and “gang of bloodthirsty thugs” serve a fundamentally different purpose. They moralise and condemn a nation’s soul. The moment a nation is characterised as evil rather than as an adversary, it drifts out of the realm of diplomacy altogether.

The framings were not just hostile but asymmetrical, with clear geopolitical implications. Iran’s language depicted the US as untrustworthy yet highly capable — powerful, calculating, world-devouring. This portrays an adversary whose strengths you resent and feel compelled to match. It carries an emotional logic of envy in the technical sense — a rivalrous resentment towards an opponent you tacitly admit is formidable. Seen through such a lens, Iran’s nuclear ambitions appear less as pure aggression and more as an effort to close a capability gap with an opponent whose strength its own rhetoric acknowledges.

The US framing attributes untrustworthiness and malevolent incompetence to Iran. They are a country of mad mullahs, a rogue State, a gang of bloodthirsty thugs whose leaders just wanted to practise evil. This does not sketch a formidable rival, it conjures something menacing in intent yet incapable of reason, operating below the threshold of rational calculation. Groups framed in this manner tend to elicit contempt. An enemy framed as contemptuous is less likely to register as an adversary that can be deterred and more likely to appear as a problem to be removed.

Its members cease to exist as reasoning agents: their stated aims are no longer believed, their experiences no longer imagined, and their inner life no longer granted as grounds for negotiation.

When that perception becomes embedded within political leadership, the arguments for engagement with the adversary start to disintegrate.

What the words have led to

The US-Israeli strikes happened in the middle of active diplomacy, not after its failure. Iran had proposed a pause on enrichment and zero stockpiling. But within a framework that had spent 47 years defining Iran’s nature rather than its behaviour as the key issue, no such proposal could be seen as genuine by Washington. When a nation’s nature is repeatedly portrayed as irredeemably evil, what it does at the negotiating table becomes insignificant. The nature precedes the behaviour, and no behaviour can change it.

Trang Chul

Trang Chu is an associate fellow at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

Tim Morris

Tim Morris is professor emeritus at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

Reprinted from The Conversation