Every president since Jimmy Carter has confronted Iran through some combination of sanctions, diplomacy, covert operations, or limited military action. Donald Trump is the first to launch a full-scale military campaign explicitly aimed at regime change. Operation Epic Fury, launched on February 28, 2026, struck targets across 24 Iranian provinces, killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and targeted military installations, missile production sites, and remaining nuclear infrastructure — all without congressional authorization. This represents a dramatic break from nearly five decades of American foreign policy toward Iran. Carter tried a rescue mission. Reagan sold arms secretly.
Clinton imposed trade sanctions. George W. Bush called Iran part of the “Axis of Evil” but never fired a shot at Tehran. Obama negotiated a nuclear deal. Biden tried to revive it. None of them attempted what Trump has now done twice in less than a year — direct, large-scale military strikes on Iranian soil designed to dismantle the regime itself. This article traces the full history of U.S.-Iran relations from the 1979 hostage crisis through Operation Epic Fury, examines what each president actually did versus what they promised, and looks at the constitutional questions raised by launching a war without congressional approval.
Table of Contents
- How Has Every President Since Carter Dealt With Iran?
- What Changed Under Trump’s Maximum Pressure Campaign?
- Operation Midnight Hammer — The First Direct Strike on Iranian Soil
- Operation Epic Fury and the Shift to Regime Change
- The Constitutional Crisis — War Without Congressional Approval
- Iran’s Retaliation and the Risk of Wider War
- What Comes Next — The Precedent and the Consequences
- Conclusion
- Frequently Asked Questions
How Has Every President Since Carter Dealt With Iran?
The modern U.S.-Iran crisis began on November 4, 1979, when Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. President Carter responded with economic sanctions and a failed rescue mission — Operation Eagle Claw in April 1980 — that killed eight American servicemembers when helicopters collided in the Iranian desert. The hostages were released on January 20, 1981, the exact day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, in what remains one of the most politically symbolic moments in American diplomatic history. Reagan designated Iran a “state sponsor of terrorism” in 1984 and imposed strict military sanctions, but his administration secretly sold arms to Iran in the Iran-Contra affair, funneling the proceeds to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua. The scandal nearly brought down his presidency. In 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing 290 civilians — an event that hardened Iranian public opinion against the United States for a generation. George H.W.
Bush and Bill Clinton pursued a policy of “dual containment,” sanctioning both Iran and Iraq simultaneously. Clinton imposed comprehensive trade sanctions via executive orders in 1995 and 1996, effectively cutting off most legal commerce between the two countries. George W. Bush escalated the rhetoric dramatically, naming Iran part of the “Axis of Evil” in his January 2002 State of the Union address and accusing Iran of pursuing weapons of mass destruction. However, Bush directed the actual military firepower at Iraq and Afghanistan, never launching strikes against Iran itself. Barack Obama took the opposite approach, negotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed on July 14, 2015, by Iran, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China. The deal limited Iran’s uranium enrichment in exchange for sanctions relief and increased international inspections. Joe Biden held indirect talks with Iran to revive the JCPOA after Trump withdrew from it, but never reached a new agreement.
What Changed Under Trump’s Maximum Pressure Campaign?
Trump broke from the established pattern in his first term. In May 2018, he unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA, calling it “the worst deal ever negotiated,” and launched the original “Maximum Pressure” campaign of escalating sanctions designed to strangle Iran’s economy. On January 3, 2020, Trump ordered a drone strike in Baghdad that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force. It was the most aggressive direct military action any U.S. president had taken against Iran since the USS Vincennes incident — and unlike that incident, it was deliberate and targeted. When Trump returned to office for his second term, he reinstated the Maximum Pressure campaign on February 4, 2025, via executive order, this time aiming to reduce Iran’s oil exports to zero. However, he also pursued diplomacy — at least initially. The first round of U.S.-Iran negotiations began on April 12, 2025, in Muscat, Oman, mediated by the Omani government, with U.S.
envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in separate rooms conducting indirect talks. Trump set a 60-day deadline for a nuclear deal. Four rounds of talks were held — on April 12, April 19, and April 26 in Oman and Rome — before the process collapsed. Iran cited ongoing U.S. sanctions, Houthi strikes, and what it called “contradictory behavior” as reasons for walking away. The failure of diplomacy matters because it became the stated justification for what came next. However, critics have argued that Trump’s 60-day deadline and continued sanctions during negotiations created conditions designed to fail — that the diplomatic track was never given a genuine chance. Whether the talks were a sincere effort or a pretext for military action remains one of the central debates around this escalation.
Operation Midnight Hammer — The First Direct Strike on Iranian Soil
On June 22, 2025, after negotiations collapsed, the United States launched Operation Midnight Hammer, striking three Iranian nuclear facilities: Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. The operation involved more than 125 U.S. aircraft, including seven B-2 Spirit stealth bombers. Approximately 75 precision-guided weapons were deployed, including 14 GBU-57 “bunker buster” bombs — massive 30,000-pound munitions designed to penetrate deeply buried and hardened targets.
The entire operation lasted roughly 25 minutes. Midnight Hammer was part of the broader Twelve-Day War, which ran from June 13 to June 24, 2025, and began with Israeli strikes on Iranian targets. The White House declared that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been “obliterated.” This was already unprecedented — no previous president had ordered direct strikes on Iranian territory. But what made it a limited action, rather than a full campaign, was its narrow objective: destroy nuclear infrastructure, not topple the government. That distinction collapsed eight months later.
Operation Epic Fury and the Shift to Regime Change
On Saturday, February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury — known by Israel’s codename, Operation Roaring Lion. Unlike Midnight Hammer, which targeted three nuclear sites, Epic Fury struck targets across 24 Iranian provinces. The target list expanded far beyond nuclear infrastructure to include leadership targets, military installations, missile production sites, and remaining nuclear facilities. The operation explicitly aimed at regime change — a first for any U.S. president dealing with Iran. The most consequential result was the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, age 86, confirmed by Iranian state television, which declared a 40-day mourning period.
According to CBS News, citing intelligence and military sources, 40 Iranian officials were reported killed. The Iranian Red Crescent reported 201 civilians killed and 747 injured on the first day alone. The scale of the operation dwarfed Midnight Hammer, which had been designed as a surgical strike. Epic Fury was a comprehensive military campaign targeting the foundations of the Iranian state. The tradeoff is stark. Midnight Hammer achieved its narrow objective of destroying nuclear sites with no reported civilian casualties on the American side and a limited international backlash. Epic Fury is a fundamentally different kind of operation — one that opens questions about occupation, governance, regional stability, and the consequences of decapitating a government without a plan for what replaces it.
The Constitutional Crisis — War Without Congressional Approval
The strikes were launched without congressional authorization. Congress was informed but had no approval role — a distinction that immediately triggered bipartisan pushback. Senator Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, and Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, authored a war powers resolution on Iran. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called for a war powers vote, warning against “a forever war in the Middle East.” Democrats forced a vote to limit Trump’s authority, and some Republicans joined them. This is not a new constitutional tension. Presidents have been stretching their war-making authority since Korea.
But the scale of Epic Fury — strikes across 24 provinces of a sovereign nation with the explicit goal of regime change — pushes this debate into new territory. A limited strike on a specific military target, like the Soleimani killing, can be plausibly justified under existing authorizations for the use of military force. A campaign to overthrow a government cannot, at least not under any legal framework that Congress has previously authorized. The limitation of congressional war powers resolutions is enforcement. Even if passed, they rely on the executive branch to comply. The broader warning here is historical: every major U.S. military engagement since World War II that lacked clear congressional authorization — Vietnam, Libya, the expansion of operations in Syria — has produced long-term consequences that outlasted the original justification.
Iran’s Retaliation and the Risk of Wider War
Iran responded to Operation Epic Fury by launching drones and ballistic missiles at Israel and U.S. military bases across the Middle East — in Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. The breadth of targets reflects Iran’s strategy of threatening the entire network of American military presence in the region, not just the forces that carried out the strikes. Trump warned of larger strikes if retaliation continued, setting up a cycle of escalation with no obvious off-ramp.
The eight countries hosting U.S. bases that were targeted now face their own political crises. Governments in the Gulf that quietly cooperated with American military presence for decades are now absorbing missile fire as a direct consequence of that cooperation. This is the kind of second-order effect that limited strikes are designed to avoid — and that full campaigns inevitably produce.
What Comes Next — The Precedent and the Consequences
What makes this moment historically distinct is not just the scale of military action but the precedent it sets. For 47 years, from Carter through Biden, every president found ways to confront Iran — sometimes aggressively, sometimes through back channels — without launching a sustained military campaign aimed at toppling the government. That constraint is now gone. Future presidents will inherit a world in which a unilateral, congressionally unauthorized regime-change operation against a major regional power is an established option in the American playbook.
The immediate question is what fills the vacuum in Iran. The killing of Khamenei, 40 senior officials, and the destruction of military infrastructure across 24 provinces does not, by itself, produce a successor government. The history of U.S. regime-change operations — in Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere — suggests that destroying a government is far easier than building what comes after. The longer-term question is whether this campaign makes Americans safer or whether it generates the kind of sustained regional instability that produces threats for decades to come.
Conclusion
Every president since Carter has dealt with Iran, but none before Trump chose full-scale military confrontation aimed at regime change. The progression from the 1979 hostage crisis through decades of sanctions, the Iran-Contra scandal, the Axis of Evil rhetoric, the JCPOA nuclear deal, and the Maximum Pressure campaigns represents a steady escalation that nonetheless stayed within certain boundaries. Operations Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury broke through those boundaries entirely.
The consequences of this shift will unfold over years, not weeks. The constitutional questions about war powers, the humanitarian toll, the risk of wider regional conflict, and the challenge of what follows regime decapitation are now live issues — not hypotheticals. For readers tracking government accountability, the core question is straightforward: should any president have the unilateral authority to launch a regime-change war, and what mechanisms exist to check that power when it is exercised?.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Trump get congressional approval before striking Iran?
No. Both Operation Midnight Hammer (June 2025) and Operation Epic Fury (February 2026) were launched without congressional authorization. Congress was informed but did not vote to approve the strikes. Bipartisan war powers resolutions were introduced in response.
Has any previous president launched military strikes on Iranian soil?
No. While Reagan-era forces shot down Iran Air Flight 655 and Trump ordered the killing of General Soleimani in Iraq during his first term, no president before Trump ordered direct strikes on Iranian territory. Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025 was the first.
Was there an attempt at diplomacy before the strikes?
Yes. Four rounds of U.S.-Iran negotiations were held in April 2025 in Oman and Rome, with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Trump set a 60-day deadline for a nuclear deal. Talks collapsed after Iran cited U.S. sanctions, Houthi strikes, and “contradictory behavior.”
What was the JCPOA and why did Trump leave it?
The JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) was a nuclear deal signed on July 14, 2015, by Iran, the U.S., UK, France, Germany, Russia, and China. It limited Iran’s uranium enrichment in exchange for sanctions relief. Trump withdrew in May 2018, calling it “the worst deal ever negotiated.”
Was Supreme Leader Khamenei killed in the strikes?
Yes. Iranian state television confirmed the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, age 86, during Operation Epic Fury on February 28, 2026, and declared a 40-day mourning period.
What has been the civilian toll?
The Iranian Red Crescent reported 201 civilians killed and 747 injured on the first day of Operation Epic Fury. CBS News, citing intelligence and military sources, reported 40 Iranian officials killed.