President Trump Is Bold, Brave, and Right on the Iran War
He defied almost all his advisors, including Vice President J.D. Vance, and has done all the right things on the Iran War.
Iran has been a mortal enemy of the United States in the 47 years since its Islamic Revolution of 1979. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini began his theocratic dictatorship by imprisoning 52 Americans including the U.S. Ambassador to Iran from November 4, 1979, until President Reagan took office at noon on January 20, 1981. The Ayatollah Khomeini repeatedly led crowds in chants of "Death to America," which he called the "Great Satan." Chants of "Death to America" and America is the "Great Satan" have been made repeatedly down to the present day by all of Khomeini's successors. Iran has financed proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis in Yemen who have attacked American allies in the Middle East and who are trying to export Iran's theocratic revolution to Saudi Arabia and Palestine, while closing both the Strait of Hormuz, in the Persian Gulf, and the Strait of Bab-El Mandeb, in the Red Sea, to international maritime oil and natural gas trading thus causing a global economic crisis.
There is an appreciable and unacceptable possibility that if Iran had a nuclear bomb, it would first use it on Israel and then on the United States. Although the atheistic Soviet Union and Red China have been deterred by fear of a U.S. nuclear counterstrike, the theocrats who rule Tehran might not be. They might think that all who die in a jihad holy war to spread Shiite Islam would go straight to heaven. If Iran lacked an intercontinental ballistic missile that could penetrate U.S. air defenses, it might put such bombs on boats, sail them to the harbors of New York City and San Francisco, and detonate them in those U.S. harbors, massacring millions of American civilians.
Six U.S. Presidents since 1979—Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden—have done nothing meaningful to curtail Iran's ambition to destroy what it sees as the U.S.'s atheistic and materialistic culture. None of them have treated Iran as the mortal and dangerous enemy that it is. Like the French democracy in the 1930's, which failed effectively to deal with Adolf Hitler building up the Nazi military that would crush the French army and conquer France in 1940, Americans for 47 years have ignored Iran's desire to bring death and destruction to our shores by building nuclear bombs.
Iran is zealously determined not just to wrest back control of neighboring countries, as Russia is with Ukraine, and China is with Taiwan (dangerous as both those countries' ambitions are): Iran also wants to destroy the United States and all that it stands for. While Iran is less powerful than China and Russia, with their nuclear missiles, it is more committed than those two powers to destroying completely the ideas of religious tolerance, the rights of women and gays and lesbians, and our national creed that "All human beings are born free and equal."
Iran is a revolutionary theocracy that wants to pave the way to an entirely Shiite Islamic World. China and Russia in 2026 do not have a moral program about how all people everywhere ought to live in the way that Iran has such a moral program. Iran's goal of Shiite Islam über alles is shown by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa calling on all Muslims everywhere to kill Salman Rushdie, the author of the book The Satanic Verses—a fatwa that the second Ayatollah of Iran, Ali Khamenei, reiterated in 2017. An attempted assassination in 2022 in Chautauqua, New York, on U.S. soil, left Rushdie blinded in one eye for writing a book that some jihadists saw as disrespectful of the Koran (though others thought its criticisms of Islam to be sound).
Some Americans naively think, as President Obama apparently did, that Iran can be bought off if we would just abandon our alliance with Israel. Other Americans like President George W. Bush's Secretary of State from 2005 to 2009, Condoleezza Rice, just thought at that time that fighting a war with Iran would be hard, dangerous, and unpopular. They followed the lead of non-interventionist isolationists. Happily, today Rice has supported President Trump's war against Iran.
Many Americans, including me, think that the U.S. has spent too much money, and killed too many people, in wars that we should never have fought like the foolish efforts to turn Islamic Afghanistan into a western democracy over 20 years. Others remain justifiably furious about George W. Bush's foolish bipartisan war, supported by Sen. Hillary Clinton, to overthrow Sadam Hussein's Iraq, a regime that was already crippled after Americans had won the Kuwait War in 1991. Older Americans still remember the foolish effort to win the Vietnam War when North Vietnam, like Iraq, posed no existential threat to the United States or to western democracy. 58,281 Americans were killed in the Vietnam War; 153,372 Americans were wounded.
But what President Trump knows, and what a 60% majority of the American people regrettably do not fully grasp, is that Iran is our mortal enemy—it is committed to regime change in the United States unlike Afghanistan, Iraq, or North Vietnam. When the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini established the Islamic Republic in 1979, his new constitution explicitly cited the goal of "exporting the revolution." Khomeini viewed the Iranian model as a universal blueprint for oppressed Muslims worldwide to overthrow Western imperialism and corrupt local regimes. In this theoretical sense, the ideology is pan-Islamic and global. Iran is a revolutionary theocracy much as were Vladimir Lenin's Soviet Union 100 years ago or Mao Ze Dong's China 76 years ago, and Iran wants at a minimum to export its revolution all over the Middle East.
President Trump wisely bombed Iran's nuclear facilities in June 2025 in the Twelve Day War, but it had become clear by the winter of 2026 that Iran had restarted its nuclear program. Prior to the February 28, 2026 U.S. and Israeli strikes, Trump administration envoy Steve Witkoff stated Iran was "probably a week away" from industrial-grade bomb-making material, and President Donald Trump later estimated Iran was "two weeks away" from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
President Trump faced the hardest and bravest decision of his life and of his two terms as President in February of 2026. Should he use the military to destroy Iran's nuclear program, which would be wildly unpopular in the wake of President George W. Bush's failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Or should President Trump follow the advice of almost all his top advisors and do nothing, and leave to his successor, elected in 2028, a nuclear armed "Death to America" regime that views us as the "Great Satan"?
Young advisors like the naïve and inexperienced Vice President, J.D. Vance, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and most of the top generals in the Department of War took the wrong, over-cautious view. They quite rightly said that going to war to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear bombs would be hard, dangerous, and unpopular work. Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz, oil and natural gas prices would rise, and the world's economy, including the U.S. economy, would take a hit. Such a war would be unpredictable, and our European allies would fecklessly decline to help. We would run out of weapons because stockpiles in the U.S. were dangerously low. The war would not be a quick victory like the kidnapping of Venezuelan Dictator Nicolas Maduro; it would instead drag on. Trump might even lose the 2026 midterm elections or fail to keep the presidency in Republican hands in 2028. The American people would never understand why war with Iran was necessary when the Afghan and Iraq Wars were not.
President Trump weighed his options, and he bravely chose to go to war in an intelligent way in which American casualties would be very limited. Trump launched a knock-out strike on February 28, 2026, that decapitated the Iranian leadership—civilian, theocratic, and military—in a bombing that killed the Supreme Iranian leader (the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei), an avowed enemy of the U.S. President Trump deployed three aircraft carrier groups, huge numbers of marines, and all the conventional weapons of the U.S. military against Iran. President Trump deployed the U.S. Navy to blockade successfully all Iranian oil and gas shipments, a move which is likely costing Iran over $400 million a day. Iran has not closed the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping of oil according to the Institute for the Study of War, but President Trump has closed the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping of Iranian oil.
After five months of war, Iran is further away from building a nuclear bomb than it has been in some time, its economy has been absolutely crushed, its entire Navy has been sunk, its Air Force has been obliterated, and its enormous stockpiles, hidden under ground, of ballistic missiles have been over 90% obliterated. There is major civil unrest in southern Iran, and Kurdish "freedom fighters" are striving for a free Kurdistan in northwest Iran, which they richly deserve.
The new Ayatollah, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the late Ayatollah, may well be dead; if he's alive, he's afraid to appear in public, to speak in video or audio recordings, or to talk to the President of Iran and his cabinet. The ultra-authoritarian theocratic Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) runs the country aware that it is hated by 81% of the Iranian people. The Iranian economy is in free fall with hyper-inflation, acute shortages of food and medicine, and even a drought that is causing the President of Iran to say that all nine million residents of Tehran, might need to evacuate the capital city of Iran if there is not more rainfall. Life is going very, very badly for the Iranian theocrats right now.
Congressional Democrats and the news media led by the New York Times have been much in the wrong on this. Some people seem to me to be openly rooting for Iran to win, and they talk endlessly about how long it is taking to subdue a country of 92 million people halfway across the globe. Congressional Democrats have repeatedly used the unconstitutional War Powers Act to try to shut down the war, while offering no good ideas of their own as to how to prevent Iran from someday nuking the United States. President Trump has been steadfast and brave in continuing his war on Iran in the face of these U.S. critics and notwithstanding the lack of American public support.
Iran ranks 17th out of 240 nations in the world both in geographic size and in population. Moreover, the United States has deliberately decided to save American lives by having no troops on the ground, and it is still whipping the daylights out of Iran just with just our Navy, Air Force, and Space Force. As of now, only 18 American soldiers have died, and 808 have been wounded wounded. In contrast, casualties in the 20 yearlong Afghan War were 1,922 killed and an additional 20,769 wounded. Casualties in George W. Bush's failed Iraq War were 4,492 killed and 32,292 wounded. President Trump has won a great deal, while losing very little.
At the moment, opponents of the war have persuaded 60% of Americans to oppose U.S. involvement in the Iran War even though (1) Iran is an even more mortal enemy of the U.S. than are China and Russia, (2) we are clearly winning the war, and it is only a matter of time before all resistance collapses, (3) our armed forces are at very little risk and have suffered very few casualties, and (4) 80% of the Iranian people hate their own government.
In the long term, the IRGC regime will collapse, and the U.S. will be able to work with a new Iranian government to greatly expand Iranian oil and gas exports, as we are now doing in post-Maduro Venezuela, which will lower long term energy prices. In the meantime, we need to be patient and wait. We should all be very grateful for President Trump's boldness, bravery, and steadfastness with respect to this war.