For nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic of Iran has waged an unrelenting campaign of terror, subversion, and ideological warfare against the free world. For just as long, Israel has stood – often alone – as the frontline defender against this self-declared enemy of Western civilization.
On February 28, something historic happened: America finally joined that fight in full. US President Donald Trump led the battle against the Iranian regime, which he had repeatedly called the world’s leading supporter of international terror, because it “cannot have nuclear weapons.”
Trump’s clear warnings about the imminent dangers that the Iranian regime represents were mirrored by US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. He declared, “insane regimes like Iran, obsessed with prophetic Islamist illusions, cannot possess nuclear weapons” and doubled down on the US commitment to protect America and its allies. Hegseth thanked Israel for being “a model ally.” This is significant language, reflecting US appreciation of the equal partnership in the battle to neutralize the Iranian regime.
More than tactical
That’s why the joint US-Israel military strikes on Iran mark more than a tactical military operation. They represent a fundamental realignment – the convergence of two parallel pathways to peace and security that, for decades, had failed to meet. Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have together closed a strategic gap that successive American administrations, regardless of party, never fully bridged.
That gap between the two allies opened in 1979. President Jimmy Carter, in a catastrophic failure of strategic understanding and judgment, helped bring down one of America’s most reliable regional partners – Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – while placing his confidence in the exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whom his administration naively assessed as a potential moderate.
Carter, who had called Iran “an island of stability” as late as 1978, stood aside as Khomeini’s revolution swept away the Shah, paving the pathway for what became the Islamic Revolution. This resulted in the kidnapping and capture of 52 US embassy employees, who were kept hostage for 444 days, and only freed on the day President Ronald Reagan took office on January 20, 1981. Before Carter’s misreading, Iran was a vital counterweight to Arab radicalism. After his blunder, it became the engine fueling global jihad.
The damage Carter caused was compounded 36 years later by President Barack Obama’s misguided Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The 2015 nuclear deal opposite a proven messianic and terror-fueled Islamic republic did not permanently block Iran’s path to nuclear weapons.
The pact included “sunset clauses” that were set to expire between 2026 and 2031. Most critically, it released tens of billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets back to the regime. Iran’s leadership used it to accelerate its ballistic missile program, expand Hezbollah’s arsenal in Lebanon, deepen Hamas’s terror infrastructure in Gaza, arm the Houthis in Yemen, and entrench the IRGC across Syria and Iraq.
Obama told Americans: “Judge me on one thing – does this deal prevent Iran from breaking out with a nuclear weapon for 10 years?”
The answer, even by his own admission, was that Iran would be left with nuclear breakout times approaching “almost zero” the moment the deal expired. He chose appeasement, called it diplomacy, and left his successors to manage what was a strategic and even existential disaster in waiting.
Middle East instability
Trump has understood what Carter and Obama did not: that the Palestinian issue has never been the engine fueling Middle Eastern instability. Rather, the Iranian regime’s ideologically driven and religiously fueled campaign has aimed to dominate the region – and in its own words – ultimately the world, through proxy terror, nuclear extortion, and political subversion.
Iran’s terror proxies Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, and the IRGC’s Quds Force-funded militias in Iraq, are not expressions of local grievance. They are instruments of Tehran’s imperial ambition, constructed methodically across Israel’s borders to execute what Iranian military planners call the “ring of fire” strategy.
The regime’s strategy has its roots not in politics, but in its particular brand of radical Shi’ite eschatology. The Islamic Republic’s Mahdism – the belief that the return of the hidden Mahdi, the 12th imam who disappeared in 874 CE – holds that end times must be actively hastened through jihadist struggle.
The IRGC does not merely fight for geopolitical objectives. Its senior commanders recite religious invocations before missile strikes. Its ideological training, which now consumes more than half of all required IRGC instruction, frames the eradication of Israel and the defeat of America as divine obligations – prerequisites for the Mahdi’s return. Khamenei did not hide this. He declared repeatedly that “Israel will not be secure whether there is a nuclear deal or not.”
This messianic regime cannot be deterred by the West’s arguments for rational self-interest. It is a regime whose leaders believe that triggering an apocalyptic conflict is a feature, not a bug, of their nuclear program.
The regime’s contempt for life has not been reserved for its enemies alone. In December 2025 and January 2026, several million Iranians rose up – driven to the streets by an economy in freefall, a currency in collapse, and 47 years of suffocating theocratic rule.
The regime’s response was to massacre them. By late January 2026, some 40,000 protesters had been killed and half a million injured – most of them on January 8 and 9 alone, when the regime imposed a near-total internet blackout to conceal its atrocities.
Bodies were piled in refrigerated trucks at Tehran’s Kahrizak morgue. Families searching for their children were shown hundreds of body bags on video screens. Khamenei called them all “rioters” and “terrorists affiliated with the United States and Israel.”
Challenge to Western civilization
Western diplomats have spent decades futilely trying to negotiate with this incorrigible regime. In fewer than two days, the Islamic Republic killed more of its own citizens than it has killed Israelis and Americans over 47 years across the entire Middle East.
This is the challenge to Western civilization, which both Trump and Netanyahu are actively addressing. Trump has grasped this with a clarity that has eluded Washington for a generation. In his address to the Iranian people – delivered as American and Israeli aircraft were striking regime targets – he told Iranians directly that “the hour of your freedom is at hand.”
This was not the language of diplomacy or deterrence. It was the language of civilizational solidarity. A generation of Iranians who have been chanting “death to the dictator” in the streets deserved to hear it.
The Trump-Netanyahu partnership has now done what decades of American foreign policy failed to do: identified the Iranian regime – not the Palestinian issue, not the Arab-Israeli conflict, not any other symptom – as the source of the Middle East’s long agony, and moved to end its reign of terror.
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states’ declaration of support for the American attack on Iran is the latest indication of American-Israeli leadership in countering the threat. The Arab Sunni establishment is following the “winning horse.” America and Israel are currently the front-runners.
History will judge the American-Israeli offensive for freedom against Iran’s forces of evil. It will likely judge it more kindly than the appeasement of Carter, the illusions of Oslo, or the self-deception of the JCPOA. The US-Israel alliance, rooted in the shared values of Judeo-Christian civilization, has always been the region’s best hope for security, stability, prosperity, and perhaps, peace. Now, that hope may become reality.■
Dan Diker is president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (jcfa.org). He is a former secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress.