Donning a white cap that reads in capital letters U S A, President Donald Trump announced the launch of “major combat operations in Iran” in the late morning of February 28, 2026. His objectives were clear: Iran can and will never have a nuclear weapon; to “raze its missile industry to the ground”; to “annihilate their navy” and to ensure that “region’s terrorist proxies” no longer destabilize the region or the world at large.
Skip to June 17, 2026, both countries’ presidents sat down remotely to sign a Memorandum of Understanding that extended a ceasefire announced in April by another 60 days, paving way for both sides to negotiate a final truce. Interestingly, this 14 point US-Iran pact reversed one of the stated and oft-repeated rationales for attacking Iran in the first place i.e., to obliterate Tehran’s missiles (ballistic). Trump argued that it would be “unfair” for Tehran not to have it, hoping in the same breath that Iran honors the agreement or the United States will “bomb the hell out of them”.
The reversal in its earlier position raises a question: how can something once considered a threat grave enough to be “obliterated” now be considered an “unfair” expectation? An obvious explanation is that it’s an inherent part of war-time deal negotiations. Another, and the one mainly discussed here, is that security threats are not naturally given nor fixed once declared. They’re constructed and re-constructed through narratives built around an issue. In other words, saying something is a threat, loudly, repeatedly and with legitimate authority is intrinsic to what makes it one. The public’s acceptance of these narratives matters as much as the narrative itself.
Consider an analogy. When a doctor declares an emergency, it allows for actions that aren’t usually allowed on a regular visit like rushing someone into surgery without the usual paperwork. Declaring something a security threat works the same way. It allows the political actors to take actions that normal, usually rule-bound politics doesn’t permit. This is the basic idea behind Securitisation theory, developed by a group of scholars known as the Copenhagen School. It argued that security is what states make of it. It’s built through language and it works only if it succeeds in convincing people to believe it. Just like the doctor needs the patient’s family to accept the diagnosis, the political actor also needs the public to accept that an issue or an actor is an existential threat, justifying the actions that later follow or validate the ones already taken.
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This essay traces how the narratives were constructed in this war, starting way before Feb 28 2026, through the official X posts and press conferences of the key political actors on both sides: the White House, President Trump, occasionally Vice-President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio for the US, and on the Iranian side, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, later Mojataba Khamenei and Iranian Mission to UN. By tracking how each side talked about the other before, during and after the war, it attempts to show how the causes of this war were not simply reported but translated into a narrative both governments needed their public to accept.
Iran-as-threat had existed in the American political discourse for decades as a politicised, sporadically securitised issue. But it had not, during that time, successfully secured audience acceptance for full-scale war. What we’ve witnessed in the past few months is a shift from a partially-securitised threat which was mostly manageable through sanctions, deals and occasional strikes into a fully securitised existential threat, justifying major combat operations.
On December 28, 2025, protests in Tehran broke out, with shopkeepers in the capital’s Grand Bazaar closing their shops and going on strikes in response to a severe economic crisis. Within days, Trump warned Iran that if it violently kills peaceful protesters, USA will “come to their rescue”, expressing its military readiness to do so. This is where we catch a glimpse of what happened later. On the Iranian side, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei described the protests as “soft warfare” orchestrated by the “enemy” to create “doubt within society”, to make them “lose their motivation…to give up their hope.” It was a “satanic plot” to be “neutralised through the national solidarity of the government and the people of Iran.” In this phase, the Iranian side was mostly involved in counterframing the narrative it thought was being constructed by the U.S. i.e., Iran’s government violently killing the peaceful protestors.
With time, Iran’s discourse hardened towards protesters. They were no longer simply foreign-influenced; they became “foreign-funded terrorists and professional rioters, agitators and insurrectionists,” not at all to be negotiated with. Here, the protest narrative was being actively delegitimised. By late January, a shift in threatened object was visible from internal cohesion to national survival.
This is securitisation in its earliest and most diagnostic form. A political issue i.e., domestic protests, got lifted out of the realm of ordinary politics and redefined as an existential threat to national solidarity, security and stability of the government. It was also a counterframing move arguing that these protests could be a pretext for the military intervention by the U.S., invoking in the same breath sacrifice and spiritual strength of the Iranian people. In attempts to deflate the military threats posed by the U.S., Iran, in this phase, repeatedly emphasised that it will “defend itself and respond like never before”.
On the American side, there is no extensive December discourse available to this analysis labelling Iran as an explicit threat-– a mere limitation of access to official sources. What had begun though, visible in the domestic politics of the U.S., was something very related. An alarmist and urgent tone had already entered the political grammar way before Iran entered the frame. The White House’s early-term posts described crimes committed by undocumented immigrants as “the most preventable crime in the US” with “illegal aliens” named as a driver of this surge in crimes and foreign countries frequently accused of ripping them off for years. The USA was already being portrayed as a victim of the world. Simultaneously, President Trump was assuring Iranian protestors that “help is on its way”, without clarifying what help might entail, triggering the counterframing by Iran described above.
Pre-war Escalation (February 1–27)
Karoline Leavitt, White House Press Secretary, on February 19, talking about President Trump said that “diplomacy is always his first option,” and that “Iran would be very wise to make a deal”. On its face, this language reads as diplomatic yet the undertone was threatening and urgent. The diplomatic language here was performing dual tasks, claiming to avoid the very alternative it was leaving open.
Later, at the inaugural session of the Board of Peace, Trump claimed board members were providing “a model for how responsible sovereign nations can cooperate to take responsibility for confronting problems in their own regions” achieving “lasting harmony to regions tortured by centuries of war”. At his State of the Union Address on February 25, he declared that “when the world needs courage, daring, vision, and inspiration, it still turns to America—and when God needs a nation to work His miracles, He knows exactly who to ask.” Three days after this declaration, the military operation began.
Supreme leader Ali Khamenei’s language in this phase does something similar but from another direction. He warned of “a regional war”, insisted that the U.S. would be its “initiator” and argued that Iran’s national power is derived more from its “determination…and the steadfastness of people than to missiles and aircraft”. It was significant mainly because the public needed to be convinced that resistance, in face of an aggressive intervention, not ignominious surrender, was the more honourable response. Iran’s firmly resolved defiance coexisted with an implicit acknowledgement of asymmetry in military capabilities. Both messages were simultaneously doing two things, stating a position and an underlying calculation pointing in different directions. However, neither side had yet reached a stage of full securitisation. Both were involved in the speech acts that would later result in it.
War Outbreak (February 28)
Trump’s February 28 address named the threat explicitly, framing itself as a victim of Iran: its “menacing activities directly endanger our troops, our bases and our allies overseas,” its government a “vicious group of very hard terrible people” continuing “47 years” of “an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder.” The threatened object was directly named: troops, bases, allies, the American people back at home. This “noble mission” was for the future. Iran’s Mission to the UN would later name the consequences of this noble mission, with Trump’s explicit threat to “bomb Iran back to the Stone Age” cited as an “evidence of intent to commit war crimes under international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute.” Here, securitisation was completed. An issue was moved entirely outside the boundaries of normal, rule-bound politics, necessitating war-time measures.
Active Conflict (Post–February 28)
What followed February 28 was less a single securitising act than its continual maintenance through repetition and escalation. American discourse shifted into a dehumanising tone. Iran’s government became “a group of very hard, terrible people”, “a gang of bloodthirsty thugs,” & “religious fanatic lunatics”. When the narrative is constructed in a way that portrays the rival in a dehumanised manner, a possibility of legitimate grievance and rational agency from the latter is negated. The Trump administration was clear that there was no scope for a deal with Iran without “unconditional surrender”.
In the initial phase of the conflict, American discourse was marked by a celebratory tone. There were declarations as early as March 12, where Iran was deemed to be “virtually destroyed”, having “no power to defend anything” that Trump wanted. By April 2, it was declared to be “essentially decimated”, and the only reason for it to be alive was “to negotiate”. The language, used here, was not simply stating victorious updates but reassuring the domestic audience that the emergency measures had been worth taking after all.
On the Iranian side, Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei invoked the dead, insisting their “martyrdom… demands revenge,” naming the enemy “enemies of religion”, “the Great Satan” “devils & demons” and “leading armies of disbelief & arrogance”. This is also dehumanisation of the rival operating from a sacred position. The threatened object shifted once more. It was no longer limited to the territory and sovereignty, rather inflated into something very hard to negotiate with–- sacred obligation. The Iranian Mission to the UN extended the rhetoric outward, invoking the legal obligations of international agencies and other States to prevent “such atrocious acts of war crimes”, arguing that states co-sponsoring the UNSC’s draft resolution for freedom of navigation were “facilitating, enabling, and legitimizing U.S. aggression. Responsibility of “any global economic crisis” and “theatres of conflict” resulting from this war, it argued, rested entirely upon the “initiators of war.” The public being addressed here was no longer domestic– it was an international community, a move aiming at a second audience whose acceptance would further enhance legitimacy of its cause.
As early as March 9, Iran had declared itself the “definite victors of the battlefield”, with the enemy defeated and facing “profound, significant humiliation” – a claim that, regardless of military reality, served the function of convincing the domestic audience that resistance had been worth it.
The clearest collision point during the active phase of the conflict was the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump claimed credit for its reopening, “I am doing it for them, also…and the world”, inflating the benefits of his “noble mission” to a global scale. Iran’s Mission to the UN called the entire premise “baseless and absurd,” insisting it was the United States, not Iran, that had “endangered maritime security.” Both sides were constructing and deconstructing a narrative in which the rival bore sole responsibility for the consequences of this war on the global community.
By late March, the tone in American discourse shifted toward de-escalatory. “We’ve very, very strong talks… major points of agreement,” Trump said, making a noticeable retreat from the celebratory triumphalism only weeks earlier. The threat was being downgraded from existential to something manageable and negotiable.
Two patterns ran through this phase that are worth noting. First, the theaters for narrative construction went beyond political executives and second, when the audience whose acceptance was being sought pushed back. Unlike the conventional focus on the political executive, this war witnessed a rise in the use of social media as a theatre for narrative construction. The USA used popular media like Seinfeld, The Office, Star Wars, DJ Khaled references, to make the objectives of the war accessible to the audience. Similarly, Iran used slopaganda to deflate military threats posed by the US and project its resilience. The authority over the narrative construction is no longer just limited to traditional media posts and press conferences. How accessible a narrative is, and how digitally native it is, matters as much as the underlying content of the narrative.
However, a successful securitisation move doesn’t always reflect unanimous agreement among the audience. There was public questioning of the United States’ war objectives and the utility of the war itself, leading to Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, on April 1, explaining why the US attacked Iran now. One of the reasons for this pushback by the public was the failure to clearly articulate exit strategies, constantly shifting and vaguely defined objectives of the war.
Peaceful, Maybe Temporary
The Memorandum of Understanding, signed on June 17, resulted in contradictory victory claims. President Trump described it as an agreement that had “achieved everything they set out to accomplish and much more.” Iran’s framing, weeks earlier, had already bypassed any narrative of defeat, “the Iranian people have proven that dignity is not negotiable and independence is not for sale… the Persian Gulf stands as a testament to resistance.” Both governments needed their public to read the same outcome as victory.
It is here that we also witness Iran’s securitising language briefly transcend the state-centric view of security that the rest of the narrative had dominated. On World Environment Day, the Iranian Mission to the UN wrote that “armed conflicts remain among the most destructive drivers of environmental degradation,” and that the war’s “consequences may endure for decades” – a tone that was more alarmist than anything resembling celebration, and the threatened object was no longer the state or its survival, but the environment itself.
What must have become obvious by now is that across all these phases the threatened object continued to shift– from internal cohesion, to national solidarity, to sacred obligation, to finally, the environment. Recall the doctor’s analogy mentioned earlier. An emergency, once declared, doesn’t stay an emergency forever. A point arrives when the patient gets stable enough to leave the hospital, and the surgeon has to explain why the surgery was even necessary. That is the position both governments found themselves in by mid-June. They needed their own public to accept that not only the emergency had occurred, but that it had also resulted in something worth calling successful.
So, the next time you see a threat being constructed, ask yourself how the language was used before, during and after the conflict. This war began with a missile industry that, in President Trump’s own words, was grave enough to be obliterated and later, ended with it being called an unfair expectation from the enemy. The missile industry didn’t change but the narrative built around it did. Security, as we know it, is never neutral, never naturally given, nor born out of thin air. It is always being made, remade and it can very well be unmade, word by word, in fact, post by post, in the same way we saw it being built in this war.
Scope note: This analysis covers official public communications from December 2025 to 17 June 2026 only. Any asymmetry in the analysis results from limited access to official communications, not from any analytical preference.
