President Trump deserves full-throated, standing-ovation, no-caveat, no-snark applause for this decision, which included considerable risks.

Last Tuesday on The Editors podcast, I said, somewhat but not entirely in cheek, “I’m glad to see President Trump is getting in touch with his inner neocon.”

Sunday afternoon, on Truth Social, Trump posted:

Mind you, this is after the Sunday morning news shows, when Vice President J.D. Vance declared, “we don’t want to achieve regime change,” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “this wasn’t a regime change move.”

President Trump isn’t quite declaring that regime change is the stated goal of his policies… but he’s also sending a signal to the Iranian people and the region that he wouldn’t mind seeing a new regime running the government in Tehran. He’s regime-change-curious.

If those bombs did what we know they’re capable of doing, the Iranian nuclear program is back to square one, or something close to it — and the U.S., Israel, the Middle East and the world are safer places for it.

Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden all pledged that Iran must not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. While there were some successes — Stuxnet, etc. — Iran kept inching closer to that threshold, year by year. The U.S. government had failed to prevent North Korea from obtaining a nuclear weapon (or at least, we think North Korea has functioning nukes) and we were late to the game when it came to disrupting the A.Q. Khan network. Up until this weekend, an Iranian nuclear weapon looked like a real possibility, perhaps even a probability — another demonstration that when push comes to shove, the Western powers are hesitant and divided and incapable of addressing looming threats, even when they’re obvious.

And then President Trump came along and decided to bomb the hell out of the nuclear enrichment sites.

President Trump deserves full-throated, standing-ovation, no-caveat, no snark applause for this decision, which included considerable risks. There are still risks; Americans in Qatar are being urged to shelter in place until further notice.

But for a generation, Americans have faced the question of what to do about the Iranian nuclear weapons program. We will still face many challenges in the Middle East, but for the foreseeable future, we don’t need to worry about Isfahan, Fordow and Natanz.