Donald Trump is just the latest U.S. president to suffer the curse of Iran - National Post

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Copy URL Facebook Linked In X (Twitter) Loading account options Sign In Manage Account Close account menu Sign Out Recent polls suggest that U.S. President Donald Trump’s war with Iran and the resulting disruption to world oil supplies are deeply unpopular among Americans. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images) By Tom Blackwell November 3, 2026 at 7:24 p.m. In an escalating conflict, Iran threatens to kill Americans, a U.S. military mission in the region fails and a once-popular president sees his ratings plummet.

Within months, the president suffers a disastrous defeat at the polls.

As familiar is it sounds, the scenario had nothing to do with current American President Donald Trump, whose deeply unpopular Iran war and related inflation have battered his party on the eve of Tuesday’s midterm elections.

The victim of Iranian turmoil in this case was Jimmy Carter, a Democratic president who lost re-election almost 50 years ago amid agonizing scenes of U.S. diplomatic hostages and a tragic military crash in the Iranian dessert.

His replacement in the White House, Ronald Reagan, couldn’t escape an Iran stain, either. His administration’s secret scheme to sell arms to Tehran led to criminal charges against many of the Republican’s top aides – and calls for impeachment of the president.

It all points to an intriguing trend. In the 47 years since the Iranian revolution, one Middle East power has proven to be a surprising Achilles’ heel for some U.S. presidents, turning distant foreign policy into domestic political peril.

Trump is just the latest to suffer the curse.

There is a “long and sordid history that the United States has with the Islamic republic,” said Mona Yacoubian, director of the Middle East Program at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The tensions that we’re seeing … that didn’t just come up overnight.”

The two countries’ fraught past dates back to a CIA-led coup that toppled Iran’s only democratically elected prime minister in 1953, continued with the revolution and 1979 hostage crisis, the Islamic Republic’s oppression of its own people, its existential threats against Israel and its sponsoring of regional terrorist groups and anti-West regimes.

Iran has remained a U.S. adversary like no other in the Middle East, posing unique challenges and risks for the president of the day.

“We repaired relations with Libya, for goodness’ sake, with Gaddafi. I mean, really bad guys in the world, we’ve dealt with,” international-relations expert Dalia Dassa Kaye, author of the book Enduring Hostility, said recently. “And yet with Iran, it’s this really, really difficult baggage.”

As well as that tortured history, Tehran’s acute understanding of U.S. domestic politics has helped give it outsized impact, says Yacoubian.

Just as Islamic Republic leaders knew images of the diplomats held hostage in Tehran’s American embassy in 1979 would strike a chord in the States, so they calculated accurately that strangling oil exports would cause headaches this year, she said.

“The Iranians are a potent adversary,” Yacoubian said in an interview Tuesday. “They have demonstrated this sophisticated ability to try to shape narrative and understand that what the U.S. does in the region can have blowback at home.”

He and Israel launched an air war on Iran in February, the president explaining at different times he wanted to overturn the fundamentalist Muslim regime, prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon or help anti-government protesters. Though the attacks devastated Iran’s armed forces and infrastructure, Tehran managed to choke off the crucial Strait of Hormuz and continue to rain down missiles and drones on neighbouring allies of the U.S.

Recent polls suggest that Trump’s war and the resulting disruption to world oil supplies are deeply unpopular among Americans. Meanwhile, the inflation driven by soaring fuel prices is a key factor in what polling indicates could be a wave of Democratic victories in Tuesday’s midterms.

Though the actors played similar roles, it was a very different Iranian drama that helped spell doom for Carter in 1979.

Months after Shah Reza Pahlavi was overthrown in the Iranian revolution and found refuge in the U.S., followers of fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini – who would eventually seize control of the revolutionary government – took dozens of U.S. embassy employees hostage. Six of the diplomats did manage to avoid capture, hiding out with Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor until they were spirited out of Iran by CIA operatives.

Carter ordered a daring attempt to rescue the hostages, but one of the helicopters carrying U.S. special forces toward Tehran crashed into a transport plane on the way, killing eight U.S. servicemen. Other issues – principally a moribund economy – also weighed on him, but the crisis in Iran was a major knock against Carter in the 1980 election he fought against Reagan.

The former Hollywood actor won in a landslide and a day after his inauguration, Iran finally freed the hostages.

“If they could deny (Carter) closure and frankly tarnish his reputation for eternity … they would do that,” said Yacoubian of Khomeini’s regime.

Allegations that Reagan’s team convinced the Iranians to delay the release until after the election have never been conclusively proven. But the new president would soon enough be sandbagged by another Iran controversy.

Investigations revealed the White House had secretly agreed to sell arms to Iran and use the proceeds to help fund the Contras, the right-wing guerillas trying to overthrow the fledgling, leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Congress had barred direct U.S. financing of the group. Reagan indicated the deal was struck in part to try to end another hostage affair – the capture of seven Americans in Lebanon by Iranian ally Hezbollah.

Several of Reagan’s top aides were convicted of perjury, obstruction of justice and other charges. His successor and former vice-president, George H.W. Bush, pardoned all of those who failed to win appeals, prompting allegations that Bush was trying to obscure his own role in the Iran-Contra affair.

Presidents until Trump in his second term have for the most part managed to avoid major Iran pitfalls, though Barack Obama faced fierce opposition from the Republicans and Israel over his nuclear deal with Tehran. Trump pulled America out of the accord in his first term.

The Islamic Republic regime remains in power.

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Turnout stood at 31.5% as of 12 p.m. on Tuesday, the highest level at this stage in the process since 1973