Iran calls the nuclear bomb the ‘Sword of Allah.’
That phrase is not a metaphor. It comes from Qur’anic verses that call to spread Islam by the sword when other means fail. When Iranian leaders use that language they are not speaking about deterrence. They are describing a weapon that advances the faith and punishes its enemies.
Iran does not just want to have nuclear weapons. Their government has been clear for decades that they want to use nuclear weapons.
We like to think that Iran cannot hit the United States, but a jihadist with a minivan would prove a very accurate delivery system, and we should all agree that the Islamic Republic of Iran can never have nuclear weapons.
During negotiations before the war, Iranian officials told our negotiating team that Iran possessed enough enriched uranium to build roughly ten nuclear weapons within about a week. Iran thought that telling us how close they were strengthened their negotiating position. What it actually did was to end the negotiations and force us to act.
War is destructive. It destroys cities, economies, and lives. Any serious nation prefers peace, and anyone who has experienced war understands that. Sometimes, however, the choice is not between war and peace so much as between war and surrender, or between a small war now or a much larger one later.
The United States could have avoided World War II by surrendering after Pearl Harbor. Japan would have taken what it wanted in the Pacific, Germany would have ruled Europe, and America would have lived under the shadow of regimes that hated us.
Peace was not really an option.
Peace survives only when a nation’s enemies know that the nation is willing and able to fight. Once enemies decide that the threat of war is empty, they begin testing until either they conquer, or push too far.
Whenever there is conflict, all parties have to agree to have peace. Any one party can cause war, and there are certain conditions that make war the best option.
The first condition is a real threat. That threat might be to our country directly, or it might be to an ally, but whatever the threat is it must be something serious enough to justify a military reaction, should it occur.
The second condition is time favoring the enemy such that waiting makes the threat either stronger, more likely, or both.
Condition three is that negotiation isn’t viable. Diplomacy only works when both sides are actually seeking peace. When one side negotiates in bad faith, or negotiates to buy time while preparing for war, diplomacy becomes a weapon rather than a solution.
The fourth condition is a strategic moment that favors action. This could be a situation that makes immediate attack strategically favorable, or it could be a situation that makes pre-emptive action necessary.
When all four conditions are met, inaction does not preserve peace. At best, it delays, creating a larger and more dangerous war in the future.
In 1938 Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich waving a piece of paper and declaring that he had secured “peace for our time.” What he had actually done was to give Hitler the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. Hitler took not only the Sudetenland, but the entire country, and the following year, Hitler invaded Poland.
Germany in 1938 was not yet ready for a major war. Hitler’s generals understood that. Several of them were prepared to remove him from power if he provoked a conflict Germany could not win. Czechoslovakia possessed a strong army and formidable border fortifications, and had France invaded Germany from the west while Germany attacked the Czechs, Hitler could not have fought both fronts at the same time.
When Hitler moved on Czechoslovakia, he did not leave enough troops facing France to do much more than provide directions. Had France invaded, they’d have had an open door to Berlin.
Instead of confronting the threat while Germany was still relatively weak, the Western powers forced Czechoslovakia to surrender the Sudetenland. That decision stripped the Czechs of their defenses and handed Germany the industrial base that would soon fuel the German war machine. The war Chamberlain believed he had avoided arrived anyway, and when it came Germany was far stronger, and France was far weaker.
Iran has followed a pattern that should feel familiar to anyone who remembers the leadup to WWII. For forty-five years the regime in Tehran has funded militias, armed terrorist groups, and attacked Western interests across the Middle East. Hezbollah in Lebanon operates as an Iranian forward arm on Israel’s northern border, and Shiite militias in Iraq have attacked American soldiers and Iraqi rivals alike.
I was not yet a Marine in 1983, when 241 American servicemembers, including 220 Marines, were killed by an Iranian-backed Hezbollah truck bomb while conducting peacekeeping operations in Lebanon.
Hezbollah was created inside Lebanon’s Shiite population and armed, trained, and financed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. We should have responded by sending in far more troops, and destroying Hezbollah. Instead we withdrew and Iran’s proxy grew stronger.
The Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen have launched missiles and drones toward shipping lanes and cities throughout the region.
The regime rarely confronts its enemies directly. Instead it fights through proxies, allowing others to bleed while it denies responsibility. The result has been a long war conducted in fragments, a campaign meant to wear down opponents without provoking a decisive response.
Nor does Iran really hide its involvement. These proxy forces operate under the guidance of the Quds Force, the foreign operations arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which trains, arms, and directs militias across the region.
While waging this proxy war, Iran quietly built a nuclear program.
Western governments tried to stop it through sanctions and negotiation. Through all of it the centrifuges continued spinning. Iran agreed to restrictions while steadily building the technical base required to produce weapons-grade uranium. At each stage diplomats celebrated temporary progress while Iran continued edging closer to a bomb.
The Obama administration’s Iran Deal imposed limits on enrichment and centrifuges for a number of years, but those limits came with expiration dates. Once the sunset clauses arrived, Iran would have been free to expand its nuclear program with international legitimacy.
We should all agree that the Islamic Republic of Iran should never be allowed a nuclear weapon.
The agreement was never ratified by the Senate and therefore was not a treaty, which allowed Donald Trump to withdraw the United States from it.
The Iran Deal did not eliminate Iran’s nuclear program. It was only designed to push Iran’s breakout time from a few months to about a year, and to keep them roughly a year away from a bomb for a decade, after which the restrictions would expire, and Iran could build nuclear bombs to its heart’s content.
Even had Iran not cheated under the deal, an Israeli child born on the day the deal took effect could have seen a Nuclear Iran before starting High School. And Iran wanted the bomb.
Iran has never hidden its intentions. When leaders of the regime openly state the intent of using nuclear weapons, they are not talking about strategic deterrence. They are invoking a religious narrative in which violence advances faith while killing the infidel. That rhetoric might be dismissed as theater if it were not paired with decades of militant action across the region, and Iran has always been clear that they want not only to have nuclear weapons, but to use them.
When Iranian officials opened negotiations by stating that they could produce enough weapons-grade material for roughly ten bombs within about a week, the reality became impossible to ignore, and waiting longer would not reduce the threat.
When Iran announced that it could have ten nukes in a week, conditions one and two were met. It became clear during the negotiations that Iran was only negotiating to stall, which satisfied condition three.
Then something unusual happened. Iran’s senior leadership gathered with the Ayatollah in one place. It was an obvious target.
That satisfied condition four.
Israel struck and killed roughly forty senior leaders in one blow.
Much of the conversation about Iran assumes that the country is a formidable military power. In reality Iran’s conventional military is aging, poorly equipped, and unevenly led.
Much of its equipment is from before the 1979 revolution. The air force flies aircraft that modern militaries retired decades ago, and their navy relies heavily on small boats and harassment tactics rather than traditional naval power.
Iran’s strength lies in asymmetric warfare and proxy forces rather than in conventional battlefield dominance. The regime survives not because its army is powerful, but because its enemies have avoided decisive action. The real difficulty in confronting Iran has never been its army. It is its geography.
The Zagros Mountains run across the country like a natural fortress wall protecting the Iranian plateau. Mountains slow armies and multiply the cost of attack.
Geography has protected Iran more effectively than its military ever could, yet not all of Iran lies behind those mountains. The oil fields of Khuzestan sit west of the Zagros range, near the border with Iraq. The city of Ahwaz lies at the center of that region.
Khuzestan represents Iran’s Achilles Heel. Much of Iran’s oil production flows from those fields, and that oil finances the regime’s ambitions at home and abroad. Control that region and the regime loses most of its revenue. Reclaiming it would require Iran to cross the same mountains that protect the rest of the country, turning geography from shield into obstacle.
We should take and hold Khuzestan until the Ayatollah regime falls.
The Strait of Hormuz presents another vulnerability. Iran threatens global shipping from small islands scattered across that narrow waterway. Radar systems, missile batteries, and mines positioned on those islands allow Iran to menace one of the most important energy routes in the world.
Remove that foothold and the threat to global oil shipments collapses.
Trump should take Iran’s islands in the Strait of Hormuz, and particularly Qeshm. Really, he should have done that within the first few days of the operation (after we radically reduced Iran’s ability to launch missiles and drones). We could put anti-drone and anti-missile resources on those islands and take away Iran’s ability to threaten shipping through the strait.
We might as well take Kharg Island too. It is not in the Strait of Hormuz, but Iran’s entire economy goes through it. Nearly all of the regime’s oil exports leave from that small strip of land.
Success in a conflict with Iran, incidentally, does not require the immediate collapse of the regime. A regime that suddenly finds itself weak and exposed turns inward. Leaders begin worrying less about projecting power abroad and more about surviving the turmoil at home.
Even if the regime remains in place, a weakened Iran would spend years dealing with its own internal fractures rather than funding militias abroad. That would represent a major strategic victory, even if the regime never fell, and if we took and held Qeshm and Khuzestan, the regime would be bankrupt.
Note too that the Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, whom nobody has seen or heard from since a cardboard cutout of him was sworn in as Supreme Leader, was selected by the Mullahs of Iran at gunpoint by IRGC leadership. Eventually the 15% of Iranians who support the theocracy will figure out they no longer live in one, but are ruled purely by a military/terrorist junta with no legitimacy under Iranian law, and when that happens, even the fanatics will reject the cardboard cutout.
Iran has proven very adept at creating and disseminating fake videos and other AI resources throughout social media to present an image of strength, but the truth is that the USS Abraham Lincoln was not hit by anything, and Iran’s missile and drone capabilities are down more than 90% while the United States and Israel have complete air supremacy over Iran, as we continue to bomb at will.
Iran stands as the central engine driving much of the region’s conflict. Remove that engine and the political landscape of the Middle East changes.
Many Arab governments now quietly accept Israel’s existence. Trade relationships between Israel and other states in the Middle East have formed and expanded. Security cooperation is growing as well.
A free Iran would transform the region in ways that are difficult to overstate. The Persian people possess one of the oldest civilizations in the world, and many of them hold deep resentment toward the clerical regime that rules them. A government in Tehran that pursued normal relations rather than revolutionary struggle would alter the strategic balance overnight.
This would also isolate Qatar, as without Iran, the propaganda networks and diplomatic maneuvering that flow through Doha would lose a critical source of both deflection and support. Regional politics would begin reorganizing around a different set of incentives.
War remains tragic. It always will be. But refusing to confront certain threats carries its own price, and the four conditions that make war necessary do not go away.
Iran has declared ideological intent, approached nuclear capability, used negotiation as a stalling tactic, and suffered a rare blow to its leadership. All four conditions have been met.
War is not free for either side, either. Iran has killed several US and Israeli servicemembers, has hit a number of military and civilian targets across the region, has struck shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, has made cyberattacks against the United States (most notably at this point, against Stryker in my home town of Kalamazoo, MI.), and has threatened to unleash Iranian-allied terrorists smuggled over the years into the United States and across Europe.
We could do like Chamberlain, and back down, but Chamberlain did not provide peace for his time.
When a regime calls nuclear weapons the Sword of Allah and announces it can build them in a week, delay does not preserve peace. Delay invites a larger war, fought under a mushroom cloud.
