President Donald Trump’s announcement of a five-day delay before making good on his threats to bomb Iran’s power plants was greeted with relief by those who have been hoping that he would end the U.S.-Israeli military campaign as soon as possible. It remains to be seen whether the talks reportedly taking place with the Islamist regime to end their nuclear program are achieving any real progress.
This may be evidence that those within the White House pushing for a diplomatic deal with Iran are winning the day over concerns about the economy and increasing gas prices. Or, as with previous decisions by the president prior to the 12-day war in June 2025 and the start of the current conflict, it may be that he is giving them one more chance to bend to America’s will to avoid heavier blows yet to come on what’s left of the country’s infrastructure and military capabilities.
In the absence of evidence that the fanatics who still control Tehran are finally giving up their faith in a perpetual jihad against the West, the latter still seems the most likely answer. His assurance that Israel would be satisfied with what the United States is demanding—and his reminder that if the Iranians don’t satisfy him, his threat that “we’ll just keep bombing our little hearts out”—seems to indicate that he has not changed his position from one of maximum pressure to appeasement.
Politicizing Iran
Regardless of how anyone chooses to interpret this development, discussion about the progress of the war is largely being driven by a narrative promoted by the president’s political opponents and their media cheerleaders. They crow that the American effort is already a failure. Democrats like Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), as well as many of his congressional colleagues and other would-be 2028 presidential contenders, have been pouring scorn on the administration from the moment the bombs started falling on Iran. They have variously denounced it as illegal, without clear goals and incompetently led. Every small setback and American casualty is depicted as a catastrophe and reason enough not only to end the strikes immediately, but to impeach the president and every official involved with their implementation.
Some, though not all, of these war critics pay brief lip service to the fact that America’s opponent is a savage, theocratic terrorist government that slaughters its own people in their tens of thousands and has been at war with the United States since it seized power in the 1979 revolution. Yet it’s hard to avoid the impression that most of those claiming that the campaign is already a “quagmire”—echoing the propaganda emanating from regime figures like Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Saeed Khatibzadeh—are in one way or another rooting for the United States to be defeated.
As was apparent from the first days after Trump’s decision, the Democrats and their new allies on the antisemitic right, led by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have a great deal invested in the failure of the effort to stop Iran.
For Democrats, like their Republican foes, in this hyperpartisan age of Trump, every issue, even those that ought to be a matter of bipartisan consensus rooted in a common and easily understood conception of national interest, represents a zero-sum game.
That is especially true for the president’s opponents, whose dislike of him goes beyond normal political antagonism and has become something of a derangement syndrome. In this view, anything that might be construed as a victory for Trump, even if it advances national interests or the security of the American people, is considered bad. That’s because they think he is an authoritarian racist and/or fascist leader, and his discomfiture, if not defeat, transcends every other possible interest.
Where Trump differs
To note this incontrovertible fact about his opponents is not to assert that Trump cannot or has not made mistakes. Nor does it give him a pass for his trademark way of communicating his positions, which is, at best, unorthodox, often confusing and clearly more focused on trolling his critics than on conveying clear messages to the American people. That’s true even if, after sifting through his various comments on this issue, his intentions are not exactly a mystery.
Indeed, Trump has expressed over and over again his belief, shared by his predecessors of both parties over the last two decades, that Iran must not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon and that this must be prevented at all costs. He has also expressed, as has Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a desire to see the Iranian regime fall and the oppressed people of that tortured country given the opportunity to choose a better government, and thus better lives, for themselves. If he hasn’t laid that out point by point as part of a specific address to the American people, then that is more Trump’s governing style, as well as his demonstrating sensible caution about events he can’t control, than a lack of clarity on his part.
Where he differs from other presidents is his clear-eyed understanding that all of the negotiations and deals cut with the Iranians have been disastrous failures. Former President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear agreement was, at best, an effort to kick the can down the road. What it did do was to enrich and empower a dangerous regime, enabling it to finance a campaign of international terrorism and a bid for regional hegemony. Even worse, it not only failed to shut down Tehran’s nuclear program but guaranteed that the mullahs could acquire a bomb once its weak restrictions expired at the end of the current decade.
Those facts may be disputed by partisans, but that doesn’t alter the truth that the efforts of Obama and his predecessor, Joe Biden, to appease Iran actually made the world less safe. Without Obama’s Iran deal and the advantages it gave the Islamist regime, including finances and encouragement of its terror proxies, the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terrorist assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, may not have occurred. And the world would not have gotten to this point.
Still, the debate currently taking place about the Iran war is not about the desirability of stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions, its ballistic-missile program or ending its status as the world’s leading state sponsor of terror. It’s an assertion that the U.S.-Israel military campaign is failing in its goals. And that is as palpably false as is the denial about the disastrous impact of Obama’s nuclear pact in the first place.
Is ‘regime change’ possible?
No matter what follows, there is no question that the devastation of Iran’s military capabilities, nuclear facilities and missile program has, at the very least, set back the regime’s ability to make mischief and inflict pain on the region for years to come.
Should the campaign continue, as logic would dictate that it should, that damage will be compounded. Even now, it’s to the point where the regime has been stripped of much of the power. No longer is it the “strong horse” of the Middle East in the wake of its diplomatic triumph over a feckless Obama administration that gave away its leverage in negotiations to get a deal at any price.
That said, there is no sign yet that the regime is at the point where it will fall, which is disappointing. The notion that the Iranian protest movement that shook the regime back in January won’t rise again and take to the streets is, at best, premature. But the bombing campaign is still ongoing, and it’s too soon right now to be sure of the outcome of the conflict.
Can the campaign be a success, even if the mullahs who have succeeded Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other regime figures taken out during the opening days of the conflict stay in power, however shaky their hold might be?
It’s true that the conflict with Iran will never end until the Islamists are out of power. If Trump accepts a truce at some point with the theocrats still in control, Tehran will declare itself victorious. That verdict will be accepted by Trump’s critics, but also by those in America and Israel who believe that the current campaign is a singular opportunity to end things once and for all.
Yet the real lesson of recent history is not, contrary to Murphy and other Trump foes, that all attempts at “regime change” are foolish and bound to fail. It’s that you can’t impose a change in the system of government in any country from the outside. Trump is right not to invade Iran and replace its government. What he and the Israelis have done is give the regime’s opponents a better chance of success. The United States and Israel have cut their oppressors down to size, killing their leaders and many of their operatives, depriving them of their most deadly weapons and, perhaps most importantly, humiliating them with a resounding military defeat. But the question of their overthrow remains in the hands of the Iranian people, not Washington or Jerusalem.
Simply put, even if the Iran campaign ended immediately, the devastation that it wrought on a dangerous regime should still be counted as a success. Whether it will be a full victory will, as military analyst John Spencer has written, be a function of whether Trump and Netanyahu follow through beyond the current limited scope of their joint effort to ensure that Iran cannot simply come back in a few years with a vengeance, forcing their successors to strike again.
The price that’s being paid
It’s true that the Iranians have made America and Israel pay a price for this military operation.
Israel has suffered through weeks of missile attacks, including some that have caused casualties and significant property damage. The United States has also suffered military casualties. That these losses have been very few when compared to the scale of destruction being visited upon Iran doesn’t make the individual deaths any less tragic. But a dispassionate analysis would have to acknowledge that those casualties do not negate the fact that a dangerous regime that considers itself at war with the West, and allied to China and Russia, has been rendered far weaker. Whatever chance the Iranians had of racing to a nuclear weapon or achieving their hopes to dominate the Middle East is gone. That’s a far greater contribution to the security of the Middle East than that of Obama’s disastrous policy of appeasement.
The war has also caused an immediate and steep rise in oil prices, with a consequential hike in the cost of gasoline at the pump. That, of course, has affected the American and global economies. If this continues indefinitely, it could seriously impact the GOP’s chances of holding onto Congress in the November midterm elections. That, in turn, could ruin Trump’s final two years in office as his Democratic foes proceed to use their majorities to investigate and likely impeach him (albeit with little or no chance of removing him from office) as they did in his first term.
But looking beyond the political implications of higher oil prices, predictions of the collapse of the economy are mere hyperbole, not a serious analysis of the prospects of such an event.
Cheering for Israel’s foes
In the end, the doom-and-gloom view of the war that is being published and broadcast, and echoed by the Democrats, is simply a matter of hoping that their principal opponent can be hurt by the conflict, not whether it’s actually being lost or is doing more harm than good. It is one more cudgel with which to bash anything that comes out of this administration.
There’s also the fact that many of those who are vocally opposed to the attack on Iran are committed to the myth that Israel dragged the United States into a war that wasn’t dictated by U.S. interests. They believe this not because a war against a regime that has killed thousands of Americans and seeks the country’s destruction because of their religious fanaticism is unjustified. Their arguments along those lines are easily refuted by a simple rehashing of the last 47 years of Iranian behavior.
They oppose the U.S.-Israeli campaign because many of them fear it will actually make Israel, as well as America, safer. Those who embrace the post-Oct. 7 Hamas propaganda lies about Israel committing “genocide” are appalled at the idea that an existential threat to the Jewish state is being reduced. Meaning, that is how much a significant cadre in the United States hates the existence of the State of Israel and the power that it currently has.
A poll conducted by the left-leaning Israel Democracy Institute showed that a whopping 93% of Israelis—a figure that encompassed the overwhelming majority of even those who are politically opposed to Netanyahu—support the war on Iran. Indeed, even the far-left Haaretz newspaper, whose politics are even more extreme than those of most liberal Democrats, excoriated J Street, the liberal American group that purports to be “pro-Israel” but which has more in common with anti-Israel and antisemitic organizations than Zionist ones, for opposing the war.
Yet those Israel-haters ignore the fact that the Arab nations in the Gulf and throughout the region are reportedly urging Trump not to stop. Tehran’s decision to attack its Muslim neighbors with even more missiles and drones than the ones it has fired at Israel is a reminder that it is, as it always has been, at war with every country that doesn’t embrace the brand of fanatical and jihad-obsessed Shia Islam that the mullahs have imposed on Iran.
A war for American interests
The war is not a personal project of Trump or Netanyahu. It is one started by the Islamists themselves. They are essentially fighting against everyone but their terrorist allies and auxiliaries. What Trump has done is to stop pretending that this existential struggle is something that can be solved by Western compromises. That recognition ought to be backed by a bipartisan consensus rooted in the notion that politics ends at the water’s edge. Unfortunately, that sort of willingness to prioritize the country’s best interests and security over political one-upmanship is something Trump’s opponents just cannot acknowledge. Their small-mindedness, frustration and obsession with him not winning at any cost make that impossible to consider.
Whatever the campaign against Iran turns out to be—either in terms of regime change or the mullahs’ eventual prospects for rebuilding their arsenal if they hold onto control in Tehran—the effort to strip them of their military assets and make it much harder, if not impossible, to regain the strength they possessed before the current conflict was set in motion by the Oct. 7 atrocities. The blows administered to Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as the significant leadership change in Syria, were all brought on by an atrocious attack on southern Israel. As they say, war has consequences.
As for this one, at worst, it is a limited victory over a dangerous foe that will make the next round of conflict less dangerous for the West and Iran’s Middle Eastern neighbors. At best (and that is still a very real possibility), it has started a process that will eventually end with the collapse of an evil regime and the removal of one of the greatest threats to peace on the planet. Calling that a quagmire—or a failure when these operations are still in full throttle—isn’t just hyperbolic political spin. It’s premature, based on petty prevarications, and downright false.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
