Ask any historian, which was the last country Iran (or Persia) ever invaded? The Iranians have been on the defensive against the US and Israel since the fall of the Shah. When Iraq invaded Iran at the behest of Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, Saddam Hussein unleashed poison gases on the Iranian soldiers. The Iranian military suffered appalling losses, but the Ayatollahs forbade their army from counter-attacking with CBRN weapons. IDF atrocities against Shias in south Lebanon during their 1982 re-invasion caused Iran to support their fellow co-religionists and thus formed Lebanese Hezbollah (the previous Shia Amal militia was too weak and ineffective).

Theocratic Iran is brutal on their people, but Shia Iran helped the US military in the initial stages of OEF against the Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan 23 years ago. And the Iranians are the only ones standing up to Israeli war crimes against the Palestinians or the Lebanese. They and the UN are helping their fellow Shias, the starving Houthis, against Muhammad Bin Salman's (MBS) inhumane blockade of Yemen.

Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Israel did not. And since the US isolated Iran, of course Tehran allied itself with the Kremlin. Dance with those who will dance with you, right?