Before his death, Iran Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had served as Iran’s supreme leader since 1989. (Photo courtesy of The Caspian Post)

It’s been nearly three weeks since the war between the United States and Iran began.

On Feb. 28, the United States and Israel launched air strikes on Iran, allegedly targeting military infrastructure, resulting in the death of Iran’s supreme leader. Iran retaliated with strikes against Israel and U.S. military bases in the region; the countries continue to trade attacks. The closing of key shipping lanes in the region has skyrocketed international oil and gas prices; the internet has been severely limited in Iran since the start of the year.

As of Tuesday, over 1,800 people have died in Iran and elsewhere, according to the New York Times, including 175 after an elementary school was hit in a strike that the U.S. government has denied responsibility for despite video evidence. Seven U.S. military service members have been killed in the war, according to the Pentagon, with 140 wounded and eight severely injured.

Public motivation for the attacks from the U.S. federal government has largely focused on security reasons, including preventing Iranian missile and nuclear weapon programs. The war follows protests against the Iranian government at the turn of the new year, with a reported over 30,000 civilians massacred, and several conflicts between Israel and Iran-backed militias in the past few years.

Iran is “pretty much at the end of the line,” U.S. President Donald Trump told USA Today on Wednesday, and he is not worried about attacks on U.S. soil. He has offered contradicting responses about how long the war will continue, but said in a Wednesday statement that it will end “soon.” Critics of the conflict have pointed to Trump’s presidential platform, in which he campaigned on avoiding wars and ending conflicts straightforwardly.

Lafayette College professors provided some context for the conflict.

History professor Rachel Goshgarian pointed to a long history of fraught U.S.-Iran relations, starting with the 1953 coup of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, which was backed by American and British intelligence services.  

“In Iran, that episode is widely remembered as a moment of foreign intervention in the country’s political life, and it continues to influence how many Iranians interpret later tensions with the United States,” Goshgarian wrote in an email. “For many Americans, however, this history is far less familiar. That asymmetry — what is remembered in one place but largely forgotten in another — is itself part of the story historians try to explain.”

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 continued these rising tensions, according to Goshgarian. She wrote that the revolution “fundamentally transformed Iran’s political system and ended the close alliance that had existed between the United States and the Shah’s government.” The revolution was followed by the 1980 hostage crisis, which was cited by Trump in his initial statement on U.S. strikes.

Religious studies professor Youshaa Patel, who studies Islam, the dominant religion in Iran, said that he’s heard many argue that the crux of the conflict is political.

“A compelling argument could be made for the opposite view, that you actually have folks that are driven by religion, by religious fanaticism,” he said. He explained that many federal leaders in the United States rely on “Christian nationalism” to justify the attacks. 

“We would like to think that we passed this, but we haven’t,” Patel said about the role religion is playing in American policy. “What does it say about the blurring of the line between religion and state that we are not only seeing in America, but in other places of the world as well?”

“In moments of geopolitical crisis, people often reach for simple narratives to explain complex events,” Goshgarian wrote, pushing back against notions of Middle Eastern conflicts as “essentially struggles between Christianity and Islam.”

“Historically, that framing is deeply misleading,” she added. “It collapses political, social, and historical realities into a single religious binary that does not reflect how these conflicts have actually unfolded.”

Trump can legally deploy and station troops for 60 days without congressional approval; no congressional declaration of war has been made. Lehigh Valley Rep. Ryan Mackenzie was among the 215 Republicans who voted down a March 5 war powers resolution, which would have halted Trump’s attacks and required congressional approval for further action. Mackenzie drafted and passed a 2025 bill in the House that eliminated the expiration date of Iranian sanctions put in place by the Iran Sanctions Act of 1996.