World leaders should be grateful the US is doing what’s necessary in Iran

According to President Trump’s critics, there is no reason why America is involved in a war against the terrorist regime in Iran. According to America’s enemies, the US is, in fact, losing the war.

That is the claim of Vladimir Putin’s favorite “thinker,” Alexander Dugin, who has recently become popular on a fringe of the American right. Dugin this week said that this war shows that the US can be defeated and that “Iran has already made the huge service to humanity. Nobody will ever fear the US as before.” It is hard to think of a claim more divorced from reality.

Yet a bizarre array of characters at home and abroad are repeating this nonsense.

That is one reason why the president’s address to the nation on Wednesday night was so important. Because amid all the chatter and bad-takes it was important to reassert some fundamental truths.

The first is something so obvious that it was once agreed on across the political aisle. That is that the world’s foremost sponsor of terror — the Iranian Revolutionary Government — should never be allowed nuclear weapons.

That was something that Democrats and Republicans once agreed on. There were several reasons.

First because the millenarian Mullahs would be likely to use nuclear weapons. Theirs might be the only regime in the world for whom the term “Mutually Assured Destruction” sounds like an attractive proposition.

Second because if the Iranian regime were ever to have nuclear weapons, then every other country in the Middle East would rush to get nukes too. Meaning that the world’s most unstable regime would be armed with the world’s most dangerous weapons. Something no future generation could live with.

Democrat and Republican administrations have tried to talk the Iranians down from their nuclear program. But time and again the Iranians simply played for time. They strung along Barack Obama. They strung along the Europeans in the same endless negotiations. And all the time they were covering up what they were really doing. Which was enriching uranium not to the levels needed for a civilian energy program — but enriching it to weapons grade level.

Or a level at which they could go to weapons grade within weeks — as the Iranians boasted to President Trump’s negotiating team before this war began.

The war that the American military has been waging against Iran for the past month is one of the swiftest and most devastating wars in the history of conflict.

It has killed many of the heads of the terrorist government and its infrastructure. Including its Supreme Leader (who, like many terrorist leaders, is not an easy man to replace). It has decimated the remaining nuclear program. And it has devastated the Iranian stockpile of ballistic missiles. Anyone who doubts this point should just notice how few missiles the Iranian regime has been able to launch in recent days compared with their activity at the beginning of this war.

Across the Middle East and Europe there has been a long-standing awareness that this action was going to have to happen someday. It’s just that few countries were willing to do anything about it.

One of the only people who admitted this publicly was the Chancellor of Germany, who said last summer when American and Israeli pilots first headed towards Iran’s reactors that they were doing the world’s “dirty work” on behalf of everyone else.

That is absolutely true.

Which is why when other “world leaders,” like the UK’s Keir Starmer, say that this is not their war, they could not be more wrong.

This is their war even more than it is the United States’ war. Iranian missiles threaten British interests even more than they threaten the US. And Iran’s terrorist proxies are even more active in Europe and the UK than they have been in America.

It’s just that the UK, Europeans and others don’t have the military power or the political will to do anything against that threat. They hoped that one day the US would take this problem off their hands. Because otherwise they’d have sat on those same hands as the ayatollah got ever-closer to the bomb.

Critics of President Trump at home point to the rising price of gas. And that is certainly a concern. But the price will come down as America’s objectives are achieved. And while a month of high gas prices is a concern it is much less of a concern than the price of gas if the Revolutionary Islamic Government in Iran started throwing nuclear weapons around.

Consider how they lashed out at every single one of their Arab neighbors after America’s first strikes on Tehran. This is how they behaved with missiles and drones. Imagine how they would react if they were nuclear.

Meantime some critics of American policy have pointed out how North Korea was allowed to develop nuclear weapons. But that program is a signal lesson to the civilized world as much as it is to dictators. North Korea was able to develop its nuclear program because they were constantly threatening South Korea with an attack by conventional weapons if their unconventional capability was attacked. So they got away with it.

The Iranians hoped they could pull off the same trick. But after the destruction of their armies in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria there was a window — this past month — to stop similar blackmail from Iran.

Of course the Iranian regime has lashed out — aiming missiles at Qatari energy facilities and Saudi airports. They have also — interestingly for an “Islamic” regime — sent missiles that have nearly hit the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. It would be quite an epitaph for the radical Mullahs if they struck that.

Yet the region has managed to suffer through this. All in the knowledge that American and Israeli pilots are stopping a much greater threat ever emanating from Iran.

And that will be the end of the war.

This war does not need to end up with anyone being bogged down. It doesn’t need the dreaded “boots on the ground” that Western powers seem to have become so fearful of.

Another couple of weeks and the Iranian regime will not be able to threaten anyone again for the foreseeable future. Perhaps a little further along the road the regime itself will fall. That will be in the hands of the Iranian people.

But for the time being the pilots of the US Air Force are doing noble work on behalf of the whole world. And not just for this generation but for the generations to come. We should be proud of them.