Source: Radio New Zealand
A man makes his way through debris littering a street following airstrikes in central Tehran, on March 4, 2026. AFP
A look at the history, the players, and the early stages of global fallout from the war in Iran
Acclaimed New Zealand foreign correspondent Anna Fifield was on the ground in Iran across two years as the Financial Times’ Tehran correspondent, allowing her to gain a deep understanding of the country’s history and political complexities.
So, she’s not surprised the long-simmering stand-off between Iran, the United States, and Israel has exploded into open war or that the ripple effects are being felt far beyond the Middle East.
She talks to The Detail about the war, which began over the weekend, when the US and Israel targeted Iranian military and strategic sites with coordinated strikes, after tensions over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and regional militia support reached a breaking point.
Iran immediately retaliated with missile and drone attacks, and since Sunday, civilian casualties have mounted, global markets have wobbled, and disruption around the vital Strait of Hormuz has raised concerns about fuel prices and supply chains worldwide.
The impact is being felt in New Zealand.
So, with growing military, political, and economic fallout, The Detail looks at what led to the war in the first place.
“This is not the first time that the United States has intervened in Iran to try to bring about regime change, and it was not successful the first time round either,” says Fifield.
“In 1953, there was a democratically elected Prime Minister, [Mohammad] Mosaddegh, who the US and the UK actually overthrew because he was trying to nationalise the oil company at the time … and the US and the UK didn’t like the idea.”
That oil company is now known as BP.
“As in so many conflicts, this all comes back to the oil, so they overthrew him and reinstalled the Shah of Iran, who was a monarch who had been unseated there. He was very unpopular … he was very corrupt, and this directly led to the Iranian revolution in 1979 and the overthrow of the Shah, of the monarchy, and the installation of the Islamic State.
“So in many ways, the very existence of the Islamic State of Iran is a direct result of the US.”
She says this time around, there are three main players – Iran, Israel, and the US, which “Iran continues to call ‘the great Satan’”.
“Over the intervening decades and especially under the leadership of the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on Saturday, they have become more and more hardline in terms of developing a nuclear programme, supporting other groups aimed at destabilising the regions, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, and the Houthis in Yemen, and really trying to assert themselves in the Middle East.
“Iran does not agree with the right of the state of Israel to exist, so Iran and Israel have been at loggerheads ever since as well.”
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu AFP
This, she says, does not sit well with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“So the tensions between Iran and Israel are very long-standing and have been simmering for decades; both of them see the other as an illegitimate regime.”
Then, she says, there is the US, whose relationship with Iran remains equally volatile.
“There has been ongoing burbling animosity there. Last year, we saw the limited strikes and 12-day war in June when Israel and the US went in together and took out a lot of Iran’s nuclear material, buried a lot of it under the rubble and really neutralised it as that threat. So this has been going on for a long time.”
Then, in January this year, thousands of Iranian anti-government protestors were killed by security forces during nationwide protests. That, in part, gave Trump a window to strike last weekend.
Back here, in New Zealand, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has taken a cautious line, calling for de-escalation while reiterating New Zealand’s opposition to nuclear proliferation. He has ruled out any military involvement and focused on the safety of Kiwis in the region.
But that response has drawn criticism, with opponents arguing the government should take a clearer stand on the legality and morality of the strikes.
“I think trying to strike a balance between condemning what is happening in Iran and saying ‘we have no love for that regime and what it stood for, but there are still rules and laws that have to be applied’, I think that’s where the government, and other governments, have struggled,” says Newsroom associate editor Sam Sachdeva.
For now, New Zealand is watching from afar – but in a globalised world, wars rarely stay contained. If oil prices spike, markets tumble, or the conflict spreads further, the impact will be felt here too.
And as missiles fly in the Middle East, the diplomatic balancing act in Wellington is only just beginning.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
