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Iran and the US have been at war for 40 years - so what is different this time?

For months, tension between the US and Iran has been simmering – with Washington urging allies not to do business in Tehran, and Iranian proxies or allies launching attacks at the US and its partners, including two ballistic missiles reportedly fired towards Jeddah and Mecca on Monday.

And the rhetoric is escalating. “In this face-off they are the ones who will be forced to retreat,” said Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, in a speech last week. “If Iran wants to fight,” US President Donald Trump wrote in a tweet after a rocket fell about a mile from the US embassy compound in Baghdad on Sunday, “that will be the official end of Iran.”

Fears of full-on war between the US and Iran have spiked in recent days. But the two countries and have been locked in a low-simmering conflict for decades.

It's not a very cheery relationship. More often than not they have managed their considerable disagreements through threats, hostage-taking, economic blackmail, bombings, and assassinations.

The conflict began shortly after Iran’s Islamic revolution, when students stormed the US embassy in Tehran in 1979, holding Americans hostage for 444 days, an expression of anger for Washington’s quarter-century of support for the dictatorial monarch it installed after a 1953 CIA-backed coup.

The animosity continued during the 1980s, when Tehran’s allies bombed US embassies and military barracks, and the US torpedoed Iranian ships in the Persian Gulf. In the 1990s, the US sought to strangle and isolate Iran with sanctions, and Tehran did its part to blow up the Israeli-Palestinian peace deal that was supposed to herald the start of a new Middle East.

In the 2000s, the administration of George W. Bush again ratcheted up the sanctions on Iran, threatening it with military action over its nuclear programme as it pursued its stillborn project to bring democracy to the Middle East, by way of Iraq.

Iran responded by handing out explosively formed penetrators to its proxies in Baghdad, where they devastated US armoured vehicles. Both sides launched cyberattacks against each other. Israelis, likely with US acquiescence, gunned down and blew up nuclear scientists in Tehran’s streets.

Accompanying the steady drumbeat of bombs, was shrill rhetoric, each side’s threats and outrageous antics strengthen hardline counterparts. President Barack Obama and his team sought to end the cycle with the nuclear deal, which was meant to serve as a cornerstone for improving relations.

Mr Trump withdrew from the deal a year ago, promising to pressure Iran into submitting to “a better deal” that would encompass Tehran’s missile programme and its support for militant groups.

Ripping up the nuclear deal and resuming sanctions, the two countries’ relations have returned to default settings.

As the US has increased pressure, attempting to strangle Iran’s economy, Tehran has begun to respond. US decisions to remove waivers on all international oil trades with Iran coupled with the designation of the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organisation “created the consensus within the Iranian leadership that they need to escalate or impose some costs for the US behaviour,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“The US has gone so far in cornering Iran that Iran is already in a state of war when it comes to the economic landscape,” she said.

Iran already perceives itself as under attack, surrounded by US military hardware and personnel in the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Caucasus and strangled by sanctions.

And the Trump administration has described Iran as the source of much of the world’s woes, describing it as the world’s number one backer of terrorism and blaming it for everything from backing the Taliban to strengthening Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.

Both Ayatollah Khamenei and Mr Trump have said they don’t want to push for an all-out war. But the US has begun positioning hardware and personnel in preparation for any attack.

Iranian officials, including Maj Gen Hussein Salami, the newly appointed chief of the Revolutionary Guards, have boasted in recent days that Iran too has set up networks, allies, infrastructure all over the region to exact costs on the US and its allies for Washington’s pressure campaign.

Sunday’s rocket attack towards the US embassy in Baghdad was seen as a message to the Americans, although there is no solid evidence it was necessarily directed at the outpost and it has as yet been unclaimed.

One European diplomat involved in Iranian affairs said they expected more “messages through proxies increasing in the coming weeks.”

European officials have assured themselves that Mr Trump will restrain the more hardline players in his orbit, including his hawkish National Security Adviser John Bolton, who has long sought regime change in Iran and has publicly advocated for a campaign of airstrikes against the country.

Asked about Mr Trump’s latest tweet, threatening to destroy the entire Iranian nation, the European official quipped, “Which one? There are 10 a day.”

Others are less convinced of distance between the Trump and Bolton and other hardliners’ positions on Iran, or that it even matters what either thinks. Once the US scuttled the nuclear deal and chose the path of pressure, the longstanding dangerous state of affairs – the one Obama sought to dismantle – was inevitable .

“What is taking place now was all too predictable,” US Democratic Party lawmaker Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told CBS News on Sunday, citing administration’s decisions to pull out of the nuclear deal, label the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organisation, and up the rhetoric.

“All of these policy decisions have led us to a state where confrontation is far more likely. When you take a series of steps that ratchet up tensions,you shouldn’t be surprised when the intelligence tells you, hey, tensions have been ratcheted up.”