The hard question at the center of today’s Iran debate is not whether Tehran dislikes Washington, but why the hostility endures: ideology and regime incentives make anti-Americanism durable in Iran, yet U.S. choices—alliances, wars, and arms transfers—supply the fuel and framing that keep the fire burning.
The Short Version
- Iran’s hostility toward the United States is multi-causal: revolutionary ideology and regime preservation needs intersect with responses to U.S. policy.
- Newly elected Rep. Adam Hamawy’s critique focuses on American policy tools—military operations and arms transfers—arguing they breed regional backlash; his case is testimonial, not causal-proof research.
- Substantial scholarship anchors an opposing view: anti-Americanism is a core pillar of Iran’s Islamic Republic and a strategic instrument of rule, not merely a reaction to Washington.
- The history is a reciprocal escalation cycle; neither “all ideology” nor “all America’s fault” explains it, and policy that ignores either driver tends to fail.
What Hamawy argues, and what his evidence is—and is not
Adam Hamawy, a surgeon-turned-congressman who volunteered in Gaza, has argued against U.S. military operations targeting Iran and against continued American arms transfers to Israel in the midst of devastating conflict. He frames U.S. choices—funding, weapons, and diplomatic cover—as mechanisms that inflame regional resentment and widen war. In interviews, he condemns “endless wars,” urges halting arms to states committing gross human-rights abuses, and describes the spread of conflict to Lebanon and Iran as a “Gazafication of the entire region.” In separate coverage, he characterizes Gaza’s destruction in terms so severe he calls it genocide and labels a war with Iran “illegal and immoral,” grounding his critique in what he witnessed on the ground.
That evidence does two things well. First, it identifies concrete levers—security assistance, operations, authorization politics—through which U.S. behavior shapes how others respond. Second, it explains why certain policies look self-defeating if one’s goal is to reduce anti-American mobilization. But by its nature it is testimonial and normative: it does not quantify, across time, the extent to which these policies drive Iranian hostility relative to ideology, leadership incentives, or national strategy. There is no polling series, internal Iranian document set, or event-study analysis in the cited material that isolates effect size. That is a limit a careful reader should recognize.
The counter-case: anti-Americanism as regime identity and instrument
The strongest body of published analysis cuts the other way: anti-Americanism is not incidental in Iran; it is foundational to the Islamic Republic’s identity and a tool for preserving power. Multiple research programs—think-tank studies, peer-reviewed work, and official syntheses—trace the centrality of this posture to the 1979 revolution, the constitution that entrenched the Supreme Leader’s role, and the political economy of hardline control. In this view, Tehran’s leaders prioritize opposition to Washington to sustain a revolutionary order, manage elite competition, and justify coercive governance at home.
Several points stand out. First, analyses tie the intensity of anti-Americanism to choices by the Supreme Leader—making the animus adjustable but persistent. Second, they argue the hostility is strategic: it organizes domestic legitimacy, deters rivals, and anchors Iran’s proxy networks, even as tactical engagement with Washington rises and falls. Third, these accounts do not absolve the United States; they concede U.S. actions shape Tehran’s rhetoric and risk calculus—but insist the core animus transcends policy episodes. This is not a semantic quibble; it is a claim about causation and durability that any practical strategy must absorb.
History’s mechanism: reciprocal escalation, not a single “original sin”
History supplies the connective tissue between the two frames. U.S.–Iran relations have moved through a reciprocal escalation cycle: the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mossadeq, the Shah’s alignment with Washington, the 1979 hostage crisis, the Iran–Iraq War, decades of sanctions, the collapse of the nuclear deal, and targeted killings such as that of Qassem Soleimani. Each episode became a narrative anchor for one side and a justificatory resource for the other. Strategies that treat the conflict as purely ideological miss how events regenerate grievance; strategies that treat it as purely reactive miss why grievance remains politically useful in Tehran even when U.S. pressure abates. The Congressional Research Service captures this balance by describing Iranian policy as the product of overlapping revolutionary ideology, regime-threat perceptions, and national interests.
If you are designing policy, that duality matters. It tells you why attempts at pure coercion can entrench the very behaviors they aim to curb—by feeding the regime’s legitimation script—and why attempts at pure reassurance can fail—because the regime requires an external antagonist regardless of U.S. restraint. The field experience Hamawy emphasizes illuminates the grievance pathway; the institutional analyses detail the regime incentive pathway. Both act at once.
Where the real disagreement lies
The substantive disagreement is not over whether U.S. policies influence Iranian behavior; they do. The argument is over primacy and permanence. Hamawy’s critique implies that changing American inputs—arms, operations, impunity—will materially reduce hostility and risk. The counter-literature contends that, while de-escalatory policy can change the temperature, it cannot change the climate so long as Iran’s ruling system draws identity and control from anti-Americanism. Both claims find support at different levels: micro-level event responses often track policy shifts, while macro-level hostility persists across administrations and tactics. An expert synthesis therefore resists monocausal explanations and looks for strategies that work across both layers.
Another line of dispute concerns evidence standards. Hamawy’s position relies on eyewitness testimony and moral argument; critics marshal institutional analysis and historical-structural claims. Neither automatically falsifies the other, but they answer different questions. Testimony says “this policy breeds backlash now”; structure says “this regime needs an adversary regardless.” The policy task is to minimize the avoidable backlash without assuming structural incentives have disappeared.
🚨🚨LISTEN: Newly elected far-left New Jersey congressman Adam Hamawy struggled to answer whether Israel poses a bigger threat to the U.S. than Iran.👇👇👇👇 pic.twitter.com/DxARIkHyEQ
— America Reports (@AmericaRpts) November 10, 2026
Implications for U.S. policy design
Four practical implications follow. First, align means and ends: if the objective is to reduce Iranian proxy attacks and anti-U.S. mobilization, scrutinize whether specific arms transfers and operational choices produce short-term tactical gains but long-term strategic losses via grievance activation. That is the mechanism Hamawy targets.
Second, plan for regime incentives that persist independent of U.S. behavior: even optimally calibrated policies will confront a leadership that instrumentalizes hostility. Risk management—deterrence credibility, alliance assurance, and escalation-control channels—must be built with that permanence in mind.
Third, separate audiences. Iranian public opinion can diverge from elite incentives; policies that mitigate civilian harm and communicate credible off-ramps can matter even if leadership signals remain hostile. That is where humanitarian conditionality on aid and strict law-of-war compliance can pay strategic dividends beyond ethics.
Fourth, measure rather than assume. Event-based analysis—tracking rhetoric, proxy activity, and public sentiment relative to discrete U.S. policy moves—can test which levers raise or lower risk in practice. Hamawy’s moral critique and the ideological-structure critique are both hypotheses about causation; policy should adjudicate them with data over time.
Bottom line
Anti-Americanism in Iran is both a regime feature and a policy-reactive phenomenon. Treat it as only one or the other and you misread the problem. Hamawy is right to interrogate how American tools can multiply adversaries faster than they deter them; the scholarly counter-case is right that Tehran’s rulers have their own reasons to keep the United States as a foil even when Washington steps back. Sustainable strategy accepts the paradox, narrows avoidable grievances, and hedges against ideologically driven hostility that no single policy change will dissolve.
Sources:
twitchy.com, newarab.com, theatlantic.com, washingtoninstitute.org, carnegieendowment.org, wsps.ut.ac.ir, link.springer.com, congress.gov
