The estrangement between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran did not start in 1979, and this film traces the relationship back further to find the roots of the rupture. It moves through the 1953 coup that removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, the decades of the Shah's rule with American backing, and the revolution that installed the Islamic Republic and turned Washington from ally into 'the Great Satan.' Archival footage covers the hostage crisis at the US embassy in Tehran, the Iran-Iraq War years, and the sanctions regimes that followed, with the nuclear program emerging as the dispute's modern flashpoint. The film uses newsreel and news footage rather than dramatic reenactment, letting the sequence of coups, revolutions, and broken negotiations make its own case for why trust between the two governments collapsed and never recovered. It is a plain historical account of one of the twentieth century's longer-running geopolitical grudges, built to explain how each side arrived at its current position.