“Two months ago,” Donald Trump posted Friday morning, “I gave Iran a 60 day ultimatum to ‘make a deal.’ They should have done it! Today is day 61.” That deadline was firmer than the mullahs realized. Thursday night, Israeli operatives in Iran released swarms of drones and other precision munitions while Israeli aircraft rained down strikes from above. Within hours, they killed the commander of Iran’s military, his deputy, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the head of the terrorist Quds Force, and several top nuclear scientists. The Israelis lured nearly all of the Revolutionary Guard’s aerial leadership into a bunker and then destroyed it. As one reporter put it, “the senior chain of command has collapsed.”
If it achieves its greater goals, Israel will not only mete out justice for the countless lives ruined by Tehran’s murderous fanatics and devastate one of its—and America’s—greatest foes. It will also give the Middle East its first real chance for peace in decades. Donald Trump, who played an important role in this masterstroke, has rediscovered the key to American success in the Middle East: Work with Israel against our shared enemies.
Israel is a model ally for the United States. It is a nuclear armed, militarily powerful, pro-American democracy in a strategically important part of the world. Our interests are not always identical, but our enemies are. Actual realists understand that reinforcing Israeli power, like Henry Kissinger did, is the key to achieving American strategic objectives in the Middle East. In the 1970s, America’s close relationship with Israel forced the Soviet’s Arab lackeys to come begging to Washington. Despite the protestations of the peace process crowd, Kissinger used Israeli power to drive Moscow out of the region.
Yet for some reason, many cannot understand these basic facts and their implications. The peaceniks believe the key to Middle East peace is to convene multilateral conferences that browbeat Israel into, well, something. And since Oct. 7, a swarm of ne’er-do-wells have emerged from the woodwork to claim that the Jewish state is trying to get the United States to fight its wars.
This uniparty of Obama administration veterans, other left-wingers, and self-proclaimed MAGA leaders shrieked in horror at the blow Israel administered to the “death to America” crowd. Tucker Carlson whined that Trump was “complicit in the act of war.” Failed vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz plaintively hoped on Friday that “it might be the Chinese” who could “negotiate some type of agreement … and hold the moral authority.”
This smooth-brained bigotry masquerading as strategic analysis led the United States into a dilemma where its biggest enemy in the region, which has attacked Americans at home and abroad continuously for nearly half a century, was within days of getting the bomb.
Trump is not nearly such a fool. Unlike those ideologues, he is a shrewd judge of power and knows that his base loves allies who fight their own battles and defeat America’s enemies. “I told Iran they should settle,” he told the Washington Free Beacon Friday. “If I were them, I would want to settle.” In the past few weeks, Trump and Netanyahu initiated a textbook deception campaign that caught Iran’s leadership completely by surprise. “I always knew the date,” Trump assured the New York Post, “because I know everything.”
Most of Iran’s senior leaders did not survive long enough to discover their blunder, and the initial Iranian attempt at retaliation was a pathetic failure: Israel crippled the ayatollah’s ballistic missile force while Iran’s Lebanese lackey, Hezbollah, practically begged Israel to let it stay out of the fight. As of this writing, another wave of Israeli aircraft is above Iran again.
This is but the latest battle in the war that Iran began on Oct. 7, and the going could get tougher as Iranian forces reorganize. Israel has reportedly sent many of Iran’s top nuclear scientists to their eternal reward, but the nuclear facilities are still intact.
“Let me be clear,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Thursday night. “Iran should not target U.S. interests or personnel.” Two American destroyers that can intercept Iranian missiles sailed toward Israel on Friday. These are good first steps. He and his subordinates should give the Israelis the time they need to finish the job. Encouraging British prime minister Keir Starmer to borrow a spine from French president Emmanuel Macron would be good.
Removing Iran’s nuclear arsenal is also a priority. It is possible that Israel will not be able to reach some of the more fortified Iranian facilities using conventional explosives. Since this is an existential battle for Israel, it would be prudent to resolve that problem by either convincing what remains of Iran’s leadership to surrender its entire nuclear program or by offering Israel some of our much larger bunker busters.
“I think it’s been excellent,” Trump told ABC. “We gave them a chance [to negotiate] and they didn’t take it. They got hit hard, very hard … And there’s more to come. A lot more.” During Trump’s first campaign, many observed that the best way to understand the future president was to take him seriously, not literally. It turns out that when he said he wanted peace through strength, he meant it both ways.
This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
