Trump’s Iran strategy is working and teaching our foes what deterrence means
President Donald Trump didn’t start this war. The Islamic Republic did — on Nov. 4, 1979, when it invaded the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. For nearly half a century, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism has killed and maimed more Americans than any other terrorist regime on Earth. It even plotted twice to assassinate Trump himself.
The regime’s attacks against the United States and our allies are not a series of isolated incidents, but a single, continuous war waged by the mullahs for 47 years. From the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing to the Iranian IEDs that killed 603 Americans in Iraq — roughly one out of every six American combat fatalities — the regime operated on the assumption that Washington lacked the stomach to respond. For years, that bet paid off. Tehran interpreted restraint not as prudence but as permission.
From the October 7 Hamas massacre of roughly 1,200 people, including 46 Americans to 180-plus attacks on U.S. forces last year, the regime has always told us what it wants: death to America.
To confront this looming threat, every American president since Jimmy Carter chose to kick the can down the road, calling it diplomacy. That changed in 2020 when Trump ordered the strike against Qassim Soleimani, the regime’s chief terrorist and IED mastermind. Washington’s foreign-policy class criticized it, but the Iranian people celebrated it.
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When the regime massacred more than 40,000 protesters in January 2026 and attempted to hide the atrocity from the world by shutting down the internet, the people again looked to Trump for help. He answered their call by doing what his predecessors never dared, moving to "end this long-running danger once and for all."
The case for action was strong. Beyond humanitarian grounds, Steve Witkoff, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, revealed the details of his and Special Peace Envoy Jared Kushner’s negotiations leading up to the conflict. Their Iranian counterparts proudly admitted they stockpiled enough uranium for 11 nuclear bombs, attainable in weeks. When the U.S. offered to supply Iran’s nuclear fuel for free in exchange for a halt to enrichment, Tehran refused. Witkoff concluded that Iran had no intention of doing anything other than weaponizing its stockpile.
This nuclear threat was built on decades of deception. The regime hid tubes from IAEA inspectors so it could secretly restore the Arak reactor. It concealed an entire nuclear weapons archive from negotiators (subsequently acquired by Israel), then stonewalled international investigators probing undeclared nuclear materials and activities at multiple sites.
The Obama administration’s deeply flawed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) did not constrain the Islamic Republic. Instead, it legitimized and funded Iran’s gradual pursuit of nuclear weapons. Trump accurately called the JCPOA "the worst deal ever negotiated." He walked away from the agreement in 2018, instituting a maximum pressure campaign, denying the regime more than $200 billion in oil revenue that would otherwise have financed terror operations.
President Joe Biden inexplicably abandoned the strategy, handing Iran the breathing room to accelerate enrichment — until Trump struck the regime’s nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan last June during Operation Midnight Hammer. When Iran’s negotiators bragged about their bomb-ready stockpile, telling Witkoff, "We’re not going to give you diplomatically what you couldn’t take militarily," Trump launched Operation Epic Fury.
The operation’s objectives — the embodiment of Trump’s "peace through strength" doctrine — were laid out by the Department of War: destroy Iran’s offensive ballistic missiles and production facilities, annihilate its navy and naval infrastructure, sever terrorist proxy networks, prevent nuclear-weapons development by targeting related sites and degrade the regime’s security apparatus — including Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) command centers, air defenses, missile and drone launchers and airfields.
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So far, the results are ahead of schedule. In a joint operation with Israel, Ali Khamenei, the regime's leader, was killed alongside much of his inner circle and the senior military command — including the heads of the IRGC and Basij, as well as senior power broker Ali Larijani.
More than 80% of Iran’s ballistic missile stockpile and production capacity has been destroyed, along with the bulk of its naval fleet and port infrastructure. Iran’s proxy financing networks — the pipelines that kept Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas armed and operational — have been severed. Nuclear-related sites across the country have been obliterated. At least 49 senior regime officials have been killed or removed from the battlefield.
This unprecedented degradation of the regime's repressive forces is leveling the battlefield and creating unprecedented conditions on the streets for the Iranian people to rise up and challenge the mullahs directly.
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The job is not finished. But it is on track. Staying the course will finish it.
President Trump spoke directly to the Iranian people in his address launching the operation: "[T]he hour of your freedom is at hand…When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take." That moment is now within reach.
Trump’s strategy is working. His legs are not wobbly and his commitment unshaken: "We don’t want to leave early, do we? … We don’t want to come back every two years." Half-measures against this regime have a 47-year track record of failure. History will vindicate Trump’s resolve to end it.
As Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the leader of Iran’s democratic opposition, put it: Donald Trump will be remembered as the leader who stood with the Iranian people when it mattered most — alongside history’s greatest liberators.