For nearly half a century, the Iranian regime has been allowed to murder, threaten, fund terrorism, abuse its own people, and destabilize the Middle East, while the West kept asking whether one more round of diplomacy might finally make the ayatollahs reasonable.
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But they were never reasonable; they were simply patient.
Iran learned that it could chant “Death to America,” arm terrorist proxies, threaten Israel, attack shipping, target American troops, pursue nuclear capability, and still count on Western leaders to respond with statements, sanctions, waivers, negotiations, and another invitation back to the table.
President Donald Trump finally ended that arrangement.
I support what Trump is doing in Iran because it is long overdue. The Iranian regime has mistaken American restraint for weakness for decades. It came to believe that America had become too divided, too timid, and too afraid of criticism to use decisive power.
Operation Epic Fury proved otherwise.
Trump’s objectives have been clear: destroy Iran’s ballistic-missile capacity, cripple its navy, cut off its ability to arm terrorist proxies, and ensure that the regime never obtains a nuclear weapon. That is not an open-ended exercise in nation-building. It is the use of overwhelming force against a government that has spent decades making itself a threat to the United States, its allies, and its own citizens.
Some people hear that and immediately begin warning about escalation.
Escalation compared to what?
Iran has already been escalating. It has done so through Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, militias in Iraq and Syria, attacks on American personnel, threats against former American officials, and repeated interference with maritime commerce. The regime has been fighting a war through proxies while relying on the United States to pretend that the war did not exist.
That is the trick.
The ayatollahs attack indirectly, deny responsibility, and then accuse America of aggression whenever we respond directly.
Trump refused to play along.
There is a dangerous habit in American foreign policy of treating inaction as though it were automatically peaceful. It is not. Sometimes inaction simply allows the aggressor to choose the time, place, and cost of the next confrontation. Weakness can postpone a conflict while making the eventual conflict larger, and conversely, strength can shorten one by making the price of continued aggression unbearable.
That is the real meaning of peace through strength. It is not a bumper sticker. It is the recognition that hostile regimes make calculations. They study what America tolerates, how quickly we retreat, whether our threats are credible, and whether our leaders fear bad headlines more than our enemies fear consequences.
Trump changed that calculation.
The strike campaign also matters because of the Iranian people themselves.
We should never confuse Iran with the regime ruling it. The Iranian people are not our natural enemies. They are heirs to an ancient civilization held hostage by a theocratic dictatorship that imprisons women, murders protesters, suppresses religious liberty, controls speech, and spends national wealth on missiles and foreign terrorists while ordinary citizens struggle.
For years, brave Iranians have marched, resisted, and demanded basic freedom. Too often, the West has praised them in speeches and then returned to negotiating with the men beating, jailing, and killing them.
Liberation cannot always be delivered from the outside, and America should be cautious about promising to build another nation in its own image. But we can destroy the machinery that keeps a tyrannical regime powerful. We can weaken its ability to murder dissenters, finance terror, intimidate neighboring countries, and threaten the world with nuclear weapons.
The Iranian people must ultimately determine Iran’s future, and Trump is giving them something Western diplomacy never did: a genuine opening.
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That is not imperialism. It is refusing to protect a dictatorship from the consequences of its own aggression.
The regional consequences are just as important. A weakened Iranian regime means weakened terrorist proxies. It means less money, fewer weapons, and less strategic cover for groups that have turned civilian populations into shields and entire countries into battlefields. It means greater security for Israel, the Gulf states, commercial shipping, and American personnel. It also gives Arab governments more room to pursue trade, normalization, and development without constantly calculating how Tehran will punish them.
There is no stable Middle East with an unchecked revolutionary Iran at its center.
Endless negotiation has failed. Diplomacy became a process Iran used to buy time, divide the West, gain sanctions relief, and preserve the basic structure of its power. Trump understood something simpler: negotiations become serious only after the other side believes refusal has consequences.
His approach has already demonstrated that military pressure and diplomacy are not opposites. Force created the conditions under which Iran had to make concessions. American strength reopened navigation, degraded the regime’s military capacity, and made clear that a nuclear weapon would not be tolerated.
Critics will still call Trump reckless because they confuse predictability with safety. The old policy was predictable. Iran knew it could push, provoke, and delay without facing decisive punishment.
Trump is unpredictable only in one respect: enemies can no longer assume America will absorb every insult and attack. That uncertainty protects us.
Congress should support the president openly, fund the mission, protect our troops, and stop behaving like a panel of television commentators. Members who believe Iran must never obtain a nuclear weapon should have the courage to stand behind the commander-in-chief who is actually preventing it. This is not the time for Washington to sabotage success because the wrong president achieved it.
For decades, America managed the Iranian threat, but Trump decided to defeat it. The ayatollahs mistook restraint for weakness. They mistook diplomacy for fear. They mistook American division for permanent decline. They were wrong.
Peace in the region will not come from pretending evil can be talked out of its ambitions. It will come when the cost of terror, nuclear blackmail, and repression becomes greater than the regime can bear.
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Donald Trump has finally presented Iran with that cost.
America should finish the job.
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