It’s always shocking to see some middle-aged, terribly overweight, poorly shaven magazine editor furiously posting on X, baying for blood in a country thousands of miles away. Shocking, yet expected, especially over the past two weeks, as Israel and Iran have exchanged fire and President Donald Trump has weighed America’s role in the conflict.
Over the weekend, the president decided to launch an attack on Iranian nuclear sites, which included deploying B-2s loaded with bunker-busters, in an operation called Midnight Hammer. Shortly after the operation, Trump began calling for a ceasefire to allow the president and his team to negotiate a new nuclear deal with Iran.
The sabre-scribblers could not be satisfied with anything short of a regime change war. Of course, they have no intention of going to the battlefield themselves—let alone sending their sons. More often than not, they are Never Trumpers who don’t even trust the commander in chief to lead the wars they call for.
These keyboard warriors have no idea what war is really like, but Will Thibeau does. A veteran of the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment and the director of the American Military Project at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, Thibeau joined “The Signal Sitdown” to discuss why Trump is rightfully resisting calls for regime change to focus on his domestic agenda and building a military worthy of the golden age.
“Frankly, when you’re in the army, it’s all you hope for,” Thibeau said. “I mean, guys literally prayed to be able to deploy and seek combat.” He likened being a Ranger platoon leader to “holding dogs on leash,” but age and combat change things: “With some years and with children now, for me, [war] is the last thing you want to happen. It is a measure of last resort for the nation.”
“I’ll never forget wanting it—lusting for it—as much as I did when I was in the Army,” Thibeau told The Daily Signal. “And it’s this really kind of brutal juxtaposition between something that I used to dream of and then something I want to do everything to make sure that the nation does not wage unless it is absolutely necessary.”
”War has become this video game for the nation,” Thibeau continued. “It’s become a sporting event in some ways, where you can observe the effects on the internet and the news, you see statistics like ground covered or casualties or number of bombs dropped, and that is very different from the real visceral experience of having that happen to you.”
The high only lasts so long, however. Trump’s meteoric rise in politics is inseparable from the American people’s disdain for the forever wars of Iraq and Afghanistan. His return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will always be tied to the several wars that broke out on the interloper’s watch.
“I think it is still very much a question of what pressure he wants to exact on the Iranians and the Israelis in order for them to get to a ceasefire,” Thibeau said. “I think a ceasefire is in the rational interest, at least in the near term, for both Israel and Iran.”
The ceasefire was good news for those in the restraint-oriented camp of the president’s supporters, especially as more details emerged of the administration’s delicate diplomatic dance in the lead up to Saturday’s strikes on Iran nuclear facilities. Nonetheless, restrainers were not pleased with the president for greenlighting the operation.
“If I have a criticism for perhaps some of our friends and those with whom we share some predispositions about the nature of conflict and exercising military force, I think it was always pollyannish to assume that President Trump wouldn’t take military action or that it was off the table,” Thibeau said. “To me, it was clear, if you kind of just put the dots together—much less classified intelligence assessments if you’re on the inside—that there was some predicate, some precedent for action.”
The tenuous ceasefire continues to hold, and it’s crucial that it does for Trump to strike a deal.
“The status quo is not sustainable because the status quo has no insight into the true nature of Iran’s nuclear program. We can presume it’s been delayed and degraded and disrupted. Those are military tasks,” Thibeau explained. “I think it’s less certain that it’s been destroyed, and it certainly still exists in some form, but the only way to verify the extent of it, and then, God willing, to verify the end of a nuclear weapons program is either through a diplomatic solution or significant escalation in violence to militarily determine the state of the nuclear program.”
“That dichotomy, that kind of fork in the road, is still here, and I think it’s perhaps now more likely that diplomacy will be the path taken, but we still have to start down the road,” Thibeau told The Daily Signal.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. For the president to accomplish his domestic priorities—securing the southern border and mass deportations, unleashing American energy, modernizing the military, and refocusing U.S. foreign policy on China—“you need an Iran deal,” Thibeau said.