Iran stood at the peak of its power on Oct. 7, 2023. For decades, the Islamic Republic armed, trained and funded Hamas. On this day, the terrorist organization inflicted the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas gunned down young concert-goers in an open field, dragged children dragged from their beds and massacred residents in 21 communities dotting southern Israel. Hamas murdered more than 1,200 innocent men, women and children—some burned alive or beheaded—including 46 Americans. Another 251 were taken hostage, 85 never to return.
Israel, a nation that had built its security doctrine on anticipating its enemies, had been caught off-guard. It was Israel’s 9/11, just larger in scale. The mullahs of Tehran were jubilant. Now Israel would be forced to fight a war with hostages held ransom on a stage with many nations and media eager to disparage the Jewish state and rooting for Israel to lose.
In the days after Oct. 7, the Iranian regime’s murderous schemes appeared ascendant. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei failed to understand that Oct. 7 would mean the unraveling of his regime and a death sentence for him a little more than two years later.
Oct. 7 caused a reckoning long postponed by the West. Iran and its network of terrorist proxies—the so-called “Axis of Resistance”—could not be ignored. The Houthis, encouraged and funded by Iran, threw international shipping in the Red Sea into chaos, putting immense pressure on the U.S. Navy. Hezbollah, the most capable of Iran’s proxies, made its move on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. The Gulf state Qatar cynically played both sides, negotiating with Hamas for hostages while still allowing Hamas to maintain its headquarters in Doha. The international community demanded little accountability from Qatar in return. It was as if Neville Chamberlain had arisen from his grave.
But through brutal and incessant fighting, Israel re-established itself as a nation with the resilience, resolve and wherewithal to defend itself. After dismantling Hamas’s military infrastructure in Gaza through grinding urban combat, Israel pulled off one of the most surgical, targeted counterterrorism attacks in history with a meticulously coordinated strike on Hezbollah through compromised pagers and walkie-talkies. This single operation effectively—and sometimes, perhaps literally—decapitated Hezbollah’s leadership.
Iran’s nuclear ambitions proved to be its undoing.
Last summer, Iran was dangerously close to acquiring a nuclear weapon. It had already enriched its uranium to a 60% threshold. This arduous process complete, the ability to reach weapons-grade enrichment could be accomplished in about a week. Within months, a nuclear bomb could have been constructed with this material. Israel struck first and decisively, starting a war that lasted 12 days, with the United States stepping in to deliver the final blow: B-2 bombers that demolished three of Iran’s hardened nuclear facilities, severely setting back its weapons program.
Yet even after the major military setback, the Iranian regime remained undeterred from its mission to obtain a nuclear weapon and continue its aggressive ballistic-missile program. When hundreds of thousands Iranian people bravely took to the streets in December, the regime responded with lethal force, extinguishes the lives of tens of thousands of Iran’s own people The mullah-led regime that has chanted “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” since the 1979 Iranian Revolution will not be impeded in its mission to destroy the West, even with losses on the battlefield and mass outcries at home.
For years, successive administrations operated under a grand illusion that Tehran’s aggression was transactional, that economic relief might moderate a theocratic regime whose very identity is built on defeating the West. The years-long pursuit of nuclear deals rested on this flawed assumption. Oct. 7 changed that view. The clerics who orchestrated the seizure of the American embassy in 1979 and held Americans hostage for 444 days are the ideological forebears of those who bankrolled the Hamas massacre 44 years later. The regime has not changed; only its weapons have grown more dangerous.
The record speaks for itself.
In April 1983, an Iran-backed suicide bomber destroyed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans. Months later, Hezbollah operatives—directed and equipped by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—drove a truck bomb into the U.S. Marine barracks at Beirut International Airport, killing 241 American service members and 58 French paratroopers in a single morning.
The bombings of the Khobar Towers, the U.S. embassies in East Africa and the USS Cole followed over the next two decades, all with Iranian fingerprints. Despite more than 40 years of sustained, state-sponsored terrorism against Americans, some naively still thought diplomatic engagement might work. After Oct. 7, this gullibility toward the threat of nuclear-armed Iran began to wane. In the aftermath of this summer’s limited strikes against Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, it became clear that Iran would not abandon its work in seeking the destruction of Israel and America.
Unchecked, Iran will threaten civilization with ballistic missiles and one or more nuclear weapons. In sponsoring the perpetrators of Oct. 7, the Islamic Republic made clear the dangers of deferring action against them. Tehran’s funding of its terrorist proxies, nuclear weapons brinkmanship and contempt for human life necessitated its own destruction.
