The calculation on the US and Israeli part was that if they attacked Iran, people would immediately rise up and overthrow the government. The opposite happened. The government actually gained a lot of credibility because they’ve been saying for decades, “You can’t trust Americans. You can’t trust Israelis. They are not trustworthy partners in any kind of negotiation.” And three times in a row, the Americans proved that to be true. But I don’t think this is a permanent situation. Whenever the bombs stop, then people’s focus is going to go back to their conditions of life.

LG: Share more about the revolution. What was it a reaction to? In what ways, if any, is it misperceived in the West?

BGT: I think the revolution, for the most part, was a response to the 1953 coup, which happened because the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh followed a program of oil nationalization. At the time, the British, for all practical purposes, owned the Iranian oil industry. They created a corporation called the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which later changed its name to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Iran’s share of oil profits was around 18 percent, and the British took 82 percent.

The Iranians tried to renegotiate. Instead, the British imposed an economic embargo on Iran and threatened them militarily. But the Iranians said, “No, we are going to do this nationalization.”

So the US and the British conspired to organize this coup, which was one of the most consequential and successful the CIA ever organized. The shah of Iran was reinstalled by the coup.

In the 25 years that he ruled, he became increasingly authoritarian. Meanwhile, Iran emerged as one of the most powerful military forces in the region. By the time of the revolution, Iran had the fifth-largest military in the world—all provided by American military hardware. The US had basically built the new Iranian banking system, its development projects, loans, and investments. The Americans built the Iranian secret service, Savak. And Iranians were trained by the CIA and Mossad in techniques of torture.

For that reason, resentment towards the shah’s regime always had an underlying anti-imperialist tone in it. And when the revolution happened, it was in the context of anti-colonial wars. We have all these liberation movements in Africa. We have Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba—Lumumba in the Congo—this was all part of the political consciousness of a generation of Iranians who were growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. People like myself and the generation before me.

The Iranian Revolution was the most populous revolution in world history by far. When you ask students what the major revolutions in the world are, people say the French Revolution, American Revolution, and Russian Revolution. But you look into the French Revolution, and only 2.5 percent of the entire French population actively participated in the revolution, like marching in rallies or engaging in street protest. The Russian Revolution was more abysmal: 1.5 percent of the population. The Iranian Revolution was around 13 percent. If you just focus on the urban areas, that would go up to 20 to 25 percent. I remember I participated in that rally in Tehran in the summer of 1978. One million people participated in the rally in a city of 4 million. This was totally unprecedented in world history.

The revolution was led by the clergy, by Ayatollah Khomeini, and featured a rearticulation of an Islamic political thought, which was very much influenced by anti-colonial liberation movements. It was Islamic in the sense that they wanted to connect the philosophy and culture of those liberation movements to Islamic sources. So when people talk about Islamic fundamentalism, this is not what it was. It wasn’t that they were going back and trying to be literal about Islamic teachings. It’s actually the other way around. They were trying to reread textual Islamic teaching through the window of what was happening at the time—framed by ideas of egalitarianism, social justice, and democratic impulse. All these things were part of this Islamic political philosophy.

The fact that it was defined by its leadership as an Islamic revolution created a sense of safe space for people to participate. Also, the language of revolution was spoken with a great degree of ambiguity. People would say, “We want justice.” And everyone has their own sense of what justice is.

It might be very strange for people, almost half a century later, to conceive of Iranian communists and socialists sharing the same front as the Islamists. But it’s because substantively they were talking about the same thing.

So after this revolution—like all other revolutions—there is another revolution. When a revolutionary movement happens, everyone talks in symbolic language, and once a revolution is successful, that symbolic language needs to be translated into institutional and political policies, and that’s where the power struggle begins. Since Khomeini and the Islamists behind him were so much more powerful than the rest of these groups that participated in the revolution, they defined the terms.

LG: Lay out the US-Iranian relationship following the revolution. When were there glimmers of cooperation? How has it resulted in the current crisis?

BGT: The first government that was formed after the revolution was very liberal. There was an understanding that the post-revolutionary state would renegotiate its relations with the US. For the first few months after the revolution, there was no intention to sever ties with the US. They wanted to expel all the US military advisers and renegotiate investments. They wanted to nationalize the main industries and the banking system. But they were not a sort of a militant government that wanted to burn all the bridges between the US and Iran.

The US actually had conversations with the leadership of the revolution when Khomeini was in Paris. The Americans had two fundamental demands of Khomeini. One was that after the revolution, Iran would keep the flow of oil going. The second was to not allow the disintegration of the Iranian military. Khomeini agreed with both principles. With that, the US was sort of willing to lift its support of the shah, and the shah left Iran and allowed Khomeini to return to Iran for a new government.

These two elements eventually became controversial. The key inflection point was the invasion of the American embassy. As I said, this revolution always had this anti-imperialist undertone, and a lot of people, particularly the younger generation, felt somehow that the revolution is not going to achieve its demands, its desired goals, if it abandons its anti-imperialist agenda. There was a lot of dissatisfaction with the provisional government, which was a kind of pro-West liberal government. So the taking over of the American embassy, while it was an attempt to throw a wrench into possible plans for a coup, was also an attempt to pressure the provisional government to resign. The provisional government didn’t want to be associated with a radical gesture like that, and a week after taking over the American embassy, the provisional government was sacked.

A whole new direction happens after that. Before the embassy takeover, the US was actually planning to share intelligence with the Iranians that Iraqis were massing on the border, planning to invade Iran. After, the US switched and actually provided intelligence to the Iraqis.

We can talk forever about who started what, but the underlying question is sovereignty. That’s why I call my book “New Events, Old Questions.” The old question is a question of sovereignty.

The Iranian Revolution created a new reality in the region. That new reality did not sit well with American interests and with Israeli interests. So that’s why it’s so difficult to think about a solution to this war.

Unless somebody addresses the realities of this remapping of the Middle East, we can’t resolve these hostilities on the ground because Iran is not willing to compromise its own sovereignty. Issues like the Strait of Hormuz and nuclear enrichment programs—all these are questions of Iranian sovereignty, and they are not up for negotiation for them.

It’s not quite clear how the US is going to reach a point to recognize the reality of this new map, and until that moment, I don’t believe that we can reach a point of sustainable peace in the region.

LG: You’ve said the Iran war represents a crisis of the old international order. Can you explain, and do you see the current war as tied to the genocide in Gaza?

BGT: The Iranians knew there were many obstacles that would make it very difficult for the US to start a war with them. They are a formidable military power. Iran is also a vast, mountainous country. It’s five times bigger than France, with almost 90 million people. They knew that there was no possibility for an American invasion. So the Iranians knew that it would be highly unlikely for the US to attack Iran directly without indiscriminate attacks on cities, infrastructure, and civilians. For that reason, I think that the war in Iran is an extension of genocide in Gaza.

The genocide in Gaza was carried out with a deep sense of impunity. To carry out a genocide that vast, that brutal, while it was broadcast around the world couldn’t have been possible without that sense of impunity. That opened up the possibility for a different kind of war, one like the US attack on Iran.

We now live in a coercion-based world order wherein laws basically become meaningless. You have the president of the United States openly advocating for war crimes by saying that “we are going to annihilate the entire country, we are going to destroy their infrastructure, we are going to destroy their bridges.” Ten years ago no one could say something like that.

I think it’s important for people first in the US and then in Europe—countries that are the so-called “guardians” of the rules-based order—and people in other parts of the world too, to find a way to generate a new political discourse. You watch the evening news, there’s fires everywhere, new floods. The planet is imploding, and then it’s quite grotesque to think that we have a war over control of oil.

We need to think in civilizational terms. This is no longer a kind of mystical, New Age kind of question. This is a very urgent, practical question in response to crises that are consuming all of us.