Israel’s ongoing aerial attacks directed at degrading and eliminating Iran’s nuclear program and the possibility of direct American involvement have opened a schism within the MAGA movement. Right-wing influencers like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon are leading an increasingly growing cadre of social media warriors feverishly beating the drums of isolationism in the face of a radicalized enemy. Iran is a nation motivated by implacable Islamism and its goal of reconstructing the Caliphate that dominated Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East for seven centuries.
The mullahs’ primary means of achieving hegemony throughout the Middle East and Europe is by acquiring nuclear weapons, along with the unmistakable willingness to use them. That willingness, stemming from their religious fanaticism, has been made clear over the decades, beginning with the Iranian Revolution.
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Since 1979, Iran, rather than declaring war on Israel, has used its proxy terrorist groups in the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen to launch innumerable attacks on Israel and American interests in the Middle East, as well as sponsoring terrorism on American and European soil. The mullahs of Iran were confident that, as long as they did not openly declare war on Israel and/or the United States, they would be free to pursue their maniacal ambitions.
However, on April 13, 2024, Iran deployed more than 300 drones and missiles to launch a premeditated aerial assault on Israeli military and population centers. While ninety-nine percent of the weapons were intercepted, Iran’s attack was equivalent to a formal “Declaration of War” against Israel.
However, and most significantly, the April 13th attack was launched directly from an emboldened Iran confident that within a short period of time it would possess nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them as far as central Europe and in due course the United States.
Iran’s belligerence necessitated Israel’s significant April 19 military response against Iran’s infrastructure and anti-aircraft capabilities. Iran’s lack of success on April 13, 2024, and Israel’s ability to directly attack Iran exposed the Iranian military’s weakness and incompetence.
It was clear to Israel that a massive military attack coupled with embedded counterinsurgency would cripple or perhaps end Iran’s nuclear program and long-term ambition for Arab and Middle East hegemony. However, the United States, with the de facto pro-Iranian Biden Administration in the White House, stood in the way and allowed Iran to continue developing nuclear weapons.
Three and a half millennia of Jewish history are replete with examples of compromise and/or weakness on Israel’s part that further emboldened their enemies with dire consequences for the Jewish people. Israel understood that by not fully retaliating and obliterating Iran’s nuclear program, the mullahs of Iran would have been further emboldened with calamitous consequences not only for Israel but also for the nations of the Middle East and the world.
Iran, following in the footsteps of the mullahs’ ideology soulmates, Hitler and the Nazis, would, first, have used the threat of nuclear weapons to achieve regional hegemony and, second, if faced with potential retaliation and destruction, they would have used their religious fanaticism to justify using their nuclear weapons.
It’s important to understand that the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, and Iran’s de facto declaration of war on April 13, 2024, were the direct outcome of the Obama/Biden policy of appeasement and willingness to allow Iran to become a hegemonic nuclear power. These two presidencies are the 21st-century equivalent of the spineless European appeasers of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
The Obama/Biden policy in dealing with Iran was to facilitate Iran in becoming a dominant player in the region in the naïve belief that, if the West, and in particular the United States, treated the mullahs of Iran as equals, they would evolve into non-belligerent leaders who could be trusted. The administrations willingly followed that theory even if that meant allowing Iran to acquire nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles and sacrificing America’s only resolute ally in the region, Israel.
In 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini, the founding father of the Islamic Republic, claimed that the Iranian revolution was just the start of the revolution within the world of Islam. He set in motion Iran’s underlying long-term goal: to inspire an Islamist revival, to evict the infidels, to annihilate Israel, and to impose a unified Islamic government on the Arab world.
Despite his explicitly stated goals, American and Western foreign policy players have consistently refused to understand the power of the ideology the Iranian Revolution spawned. The Iranian worldview, which promotes repressive governance along religious lines, combined with uncontrolled hostility to Israel and the West, as well as a deep-seated determination to unite, by force if necessary, the two major sects of Islam, has been the driving force of instability and violence in the region for decades.
Western policy makers, except for Donald Trump, steadfastly underestimated the extent of Iran’s commitment to their revolutionary ideology. The West’s repeated overtures to Iran, including unfathomable economic as well as financial cooperation and support, have only increased Iran’s antipathy toward the West, in particular the United States. Iran is not a culture that admires weakness.
Thanks to the appeasement policies of Obama, Biden, and much of the West, Iran grew more belligerent and confident in its ambitions. Virtually every intelligence agency in the world concurred that Iran was days away from building a nuclear bomb and had sufficient fissionable material to build several more.
Additionally, Iran had long been feverishly working on constructing intercontinental ballistic missiles that had the range to hit Europe and, eventually, the United States. In all likelihood, these missiles were already available in September of 2023, when Iran launched its third military satellite into orbit.
The mullah’s Islamic mindset also encompassed the little-recognized but vital strategy that, through terrorism and societal upheaval precipitated by mass radical Islamic immigration of Europe and America, Iran, as the leader of a new caliphate, would undermine and eventually conquer the Western world from within. With Iranian Fifth Columnists within their borders, the nations of the West would have been fearful of confronting a nuclear-armed Iran.
Thus, the West was again at another 1930s moment. Into this power and moral vacuum stepped Donald Trump, leading the West together with a resolute and powerful ally in Israel. Trump understood—and has consistently stood against—the threat that a nuclearized Iran poses to the United States and Western Civilization.
Trump knows that if Israel is not fully allowed to destroy Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, and, it’s to be hoped, spawn a regime change, then there will be an inevitable regional war that could quickly spiral out of control. Iran’s revolutionary religious fervor means that, in such a war, it would not rule out using nuclear weapons to annihilate Israel, thus triggering an inevitable global conflagration.
Those who are adamantly opposed to any potential American direct involvement with Israel’s attacks on Iran are willfully blind to the reality in the Middle East. They do not understand that the United States has a patriot and realist in Donald Trump at its helm, rather than another spineless Neville Chamberlain willing to sacrifice the future for temporary “peace.”
To these myopic isolationists and on behalf of the anguished voices of untold millions dead and displaced who have cried out to their self-serving leaders—why did you not do more to prevent war when you had the chance—the time is now to heed the lessons of World War II in unconditionally dealing with an intractable and deranged enemy.