I don't think this needs much "teaching." We overthrew their secular democracy in 1953 and installed an extremely unpopular autocratic monarchy. They were then overthrown in a "real" revolution in 1979 which is when they became an Islamic Republic. Since then we've spent decades trying to overthrow their government, actively assassinating their leaders and scientists, bombing their country, providing material support to Israel to regularly go batshit over there and so on. And I haven't even touched on sanctions. We're not exactly coming off as the good guys here.
Beyond this, it's a very poor analogy because the overwhelming majority of sanctions would be a war crime as they intentionally target civilians with no military value.
I am fully aware of the US' history in the middle east, as well Europe's role and my own country within Europe. But that doesn't mean we should accept this kind of rhetoric from enemy states.
If you go down this rabbit hole of "historical rights", where does it end? The truth it it never ends. You go far enough back and we're all the assholes.
So all we can do is move forward and respond to threats like these the best we can.
This doesn't require any lengthy history. We're still killing Iranians regularly and pretty much arbitrarily, as well as backing Israel doing the same in a borderline psychotic fashion. And you're here fear mongering about them saying 'Death to America' which is pretty much the equivalent of waving a stick at somebody after they just burnt down your house with your family in it.
And Iran has waged proxy wars on Americans, civilians and military personnel alike, for four decades.
The countries are at war. It's just not kinetic, ie. with troops on the battlefield. That is reality. I know it sucks, but you can't expect the US to just let the threat be. It's not like US is alone in wanting to suppress Iran's threat anyway; you can blame most European countries for aiding in that suppression.
I won't get into the religious underpinnings but they are significant. This isn't resolved by the US just letting Iran be.
Iran has not been attacking US civilians. This is nonsense. The best you're going to come up with there is the Iran hostage crisis. And what was that? That was when Iranian students stormed and occupied the US embassy, almost 50 years ago, demanding that the US extradite Mohammed Reza Pahlavi - the tyrant that the US had installed in Iran after overthrowing their government, who was then granted asylum after he was overthrown and fled to the US following events like the Jaleh Square massacre. [1]
In the end 0 civilians were harmed and it led to the Algiers Accords [1] under which its chief provision is that the US would not intervene politically or militarily in Iranian internal affairs. Besides the US obviously endlessly violating that, we also violated another section of the treaty (related to the settlement of litigation) almost immediately after it was signed.
No they haven't. A proxy war is what we have going on between the US and Russia in Ukraine. You instead have autonomous groups, largely affiliated primarily by religion (like Hezbollah), that receive support from Iran. It's more akin to the situation with Saudi Arabia where extremists of their flavor of Islam, including Al Qaeda, often find material and personnel support. For instance 15 of the 19 attackers from 9/11 were Saudi.
And I doubt you'd call Al Qaeda a 'Saudi proxy' or 9/11 a Saudi-US proxy war. It's nonsensical.
Beyond this, it's a very poor analogy because the overwhelming majority of sanctions would be a war crime as they intentionally target civilians with no military value.