By Jonathan S. Tobin
The strongest argument that President Donald Trump’s political opponents can muster to decry his decision to order American forces to join with Israel to act against Iran is that he is launching a “war of choice,” rather than seeking to avert an imminent threat to American interests or security. Even his sternest critics, such as the editorial page of The New York Times, acknowledged that the government of Iran is not merely a brutal oppressor and a constant threat to the rest of the Middle East as well as to the West, but also combines a “murderous ideology with nuclear ambitions.”
Every U.S. president for the last quarter-century has asserted that America will never let Iran get a nuclear weapon and was prepared to use force to prevent that from happening. But only Trump seems to have fully grasped the stark nature of the threat that Tehran poses to the United States—and the world.
Halfway measures won’t work
And now, after last year’s U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran’s nuclear program, followed by a renewed effort at diplomacy that predictably failed due to the Islamists’ intransigence, he has faced up to the choice that the West has always confronted with respect to Iran. The Iranian threat cannot be ignored, reasoned with or appeased. It cannot be pressured through sanctions or bribed, as former President Barack Obama once put it, “to get right with the world.” Halfway measures that combine threats of force with elements of other approaches also won’t work.
Since they seized power 47 years ago, leaders of the Islamic Republic have been animated by one big idea—a religious war to the death against the non-Islamic world. Their slogans of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” are not talking points or empty rhetoric. They are the essential purpose of the regime’s existence. Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. It is responsible for numerous attacks on Western and American attack, as well as for helping to foment and organize the genocidal war waged against Israel by its main terrorist auxiliaries and allies: Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.
And that is why Trump’s willingness to declare his intention to topple the Islamist regime is not so much a “war of choice” as one of necessity. It has been put off for decades by his predecessors, who lacked the vision or the will to see that the West simply cannot allow a government whose aim is to spread terror and intimidate America and its allies to continue to carry out those threats.
In the end, it will be up to the Iranian people, who have in recent months taken to the streets to protest their oppressors and been slaughtered by them in the tens of thousands, to seize control in Tehran. Neither the United States nor Israel seeks to occupy Iran or impose a government on it. It is hoped that some regime elements will conclude that Iran must change and work with protesters to end the long Islamist reign of terror there. But both nations are entirely in the right in acting to strip this murderous regime of its military hardware and facilities that would fulfill its ambitions for weapons of mass destruction, as well as to take out its criminal leaders.
Undoing the mistakes of his predecessors
Seen in that context, Trump’s bold move is neither reckless nor an invitation to another “forever” war to bog down American forces and drain them of their ability to resist aggression elsewhere in the world. It is, instead, a long-put-off and entirely necessary action designed to prevent the Islamic regime from continuing its destructive and bloody war on the West.
If there is anything the world should have come to understand in the last 47 years, it is that there is no living with a regime wedded to a generational jihad against all those who do not share its medieval religious fanaticism, including Western nations, Israel and Arab nations who want no part of this mad quest. Nothing short of its overthrow will be enough to stop its long-running campaign first to destroy Israel and then the West.
That is a stark truth that the Western and American foreign-policy establishment has spent the last few decades trying to ignore.
Former President George W. Bush, distracted by his unsuccessful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, prevaricated on Iran, leaving the problem to his successors. Obama sought to appease Tehran. His 2015 nuclear pact actually guaranteed that the regime would get a nuclear weapon rather than preventing it. That empowered and enriched the mullahs, thus increasing the Islamist regime’s ability to inflict terror and instability throughout the Middle East, and to advance its quest for regional hegemony. Former President Joe Biden ineffectively sought to revive that same failed policy.
In his first term, Trump correctly understood that sooner or later, an American leader was going to have to face up to the disaster that Obama had created. He abandoned the nuclear deal in May 2018 and sought, via a “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions, to force Tehran to understand that it must not only abandon its nuclear quest but its war on the West and Israel as well. The religious fanatics who run Iran might never have surrendered their ambitions, and we will never know if that approach would have succeeded had Trump been re-elected in 2020. Biden’s decision to return to Obama’s disastrous policies and effectively end sanctions ensured that diplomacy would never succeed in dealing with the threat. And then, the spectacle of America’s disastrous and rapid retreat from Afghanistan in August 2021 helped convince Tehran that the United States was too weak and feckless to resist it.
Those colossal blunders led directly to Iran’s renewed push to dominate the Middle East and eliminate all obstacles to that goal. The Hamas-led, Palestinian-Arab terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, were the most obvious result of Biden’s retreat.
The subsequent war, however, didn’t work out as Iran’s “supreme leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei thought it would.
Israel was unprepared and badly damaged on Oct. 7. But despite the efforts of the Biden administration to hamstring its war of self-defense against Hamas in Gaza and Iran’s Hezbollah auxiliaries in Lebanon, which started attacking from the north on Oct. 8, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the IDF persevered, and the terrorists weren’t granted impunity for their crimes. That happened amid an international propaganda campaign on social media, in city streets and on college campuses aimed at demonizing the Jewish state. Though Hamas was allowed to survive in part of the Strip and should not be left in place, it is badly weakened. Just as important, Hezbollah and its arsenal, which was long thought to be too strong for Israel to challenge, suffered devastating defeats in 2024.
That, in turn, led to the fall of the Syrian government—led by longtime dictator and Iran ally Bashar Assad—in December of that same year.
A historic opportunity
These catastrophic reversals of fortune also had the effect of reviving efforts by the majority of the Iranian people, who oppose its repressive regime, to take to the streets these past two months and seek an end to the mullahs’ tyranny. The subsequent mass murder of civilians again illustrated to the world the necessity of no longer tolerating or enabling these Islamist oppressors. The weakness of its rulers, along with the 12-day joint U.S.-Israel military offensive that degraded three nuclear sites last June, gave Washington the chance to make history and change the direction of the Middle East from one dominated by Iranian terror to one where reason can prevail.
Still, Trump gave diplomacy another try, sending his Mideast envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to meet with Iran’s representatives and attempt to work out a deal that would, unlike Obama’s pact, actually end the nuclear threat and avoid more fighting.
But rather than choosing to take advantage of this offer, the regime behaved as it has always done—refusing to seriously negotiate while clinging to its “right” to have a nuclear program and refusing to discuss its missiles or terrorism. While their delaying tactics worked like a charm on Obama and his envoys, who eventually bowed to all of Iran’s major demands, Trump was having none of it.
As with so much of what Trump has done with respect to Israel, this again proves that it is the president—and not his liberal and left-wing critics—who grasps the hardcore realities of the region. Putting off a confrontation that strips the Islamist regime of its ability to go on threatening the world hasn’t worked. Drastic action that will topple the mullahs can no longer be put off.
Trump’s opponents and those who have been cheering on the war Tehran was waging on Israel and the West speak of the unintended consequences of this conflict and how they may undermine American interests. But what he is doing is merely a long-postponed push to cope with the consequences of past efforts to appease Iran that led to so much spilled blood. That was the result of Washington following the establishment thinking that Trump has rightly rejected.
A fight to defend American interests
This is no rerun of Bush’s Iraq war. Nor has Trump failed to make the case for dealing with the Islamist regime. Like those who pushed for ceasefires after Oct. 7, the failure to finish off the government that has been waging war on the West and Israel throughout its existence has brought continued war rather than peace.
Nor, despite the claims of the conspiracy theorists and antisemites that increasingly dominate the conversation on both the left and the far right, is this a war that Jerusalem has pushed Washington into waging. Iran’s efforts to annihilate the State of Israel and aid global entities intent on slaughtering Jews are reason enough to make the regime’s end a desirable goal. But in confronting a government that has never wavered from its pursuit of a war on the West, Trump is defending the interests of the United States and its citizens. An evil terrorist regime armed with nukes and missiles is a direct threat to Americans and the civilized world. Throughout its history, it has never hesitated to kill innocents or to seek to harm allies of the United States.
Apologists for Iran and its genocidal goals—on both the left and the right, whether motivated by hatred for Trump or Israel—are outraged by Washington’s decision. It is possible, as some fear, that failure in Iran will boost these destructive forces. But defeat is not an option for the United States, Israel or the West. One way or another, the Iranian regime cannot be allowed to go on terrorizing the world. It must be defeated, and then hopefully replaced, with one that will forsake the nukes, missiles and terror that far too long rendered it an outlaw rogue state.
Trump has shown that he dares to defy the conventional wisdom that the Washington liberal establishment has used to justify inaction or appeasement of Iran. As he did when he moved the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, pulled out of the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran, brokered the Abraham Accords and then joined with Israel to inflict grave damage last summer on Tehran’s nuclear program, the president is again correct to refuse to listen to his critics. Though the path ahead will present grave challenges and dangers the administration and its Israeli allies must successfully navigate, the decision to strike—and to topple the mullahs—was both wise and necessary. JNS
{Matzav.com}
