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The first half-year of the Iran conflict confirmed a hard truth about every American war since Vietnam: Victory is impossible without sustained public support. Once Americans sour on a war effort, political realities constrain leaders from doing what is necessary to win.
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Operation Epic Fury decapitated senior leadership, degraded ballistic missiles and drones, destroyed the Iranian navy, and hammered economic infrastructure. With sustained maximum pressure and follow-on operations, the regime could have been dislodged. Victory was possible, but it would have required more time, sustained higher costs at the pump, and public endurance that the administration ultimately chose not to demand.
Instead, elevated gas prices and looming midterm elections forced a pivot. Trump downshifted from unconditional Iranian surrender to the more limited goal of reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s regime, indifferent to the suffering of its own people, bet that it could outlast American patience at the pump.
And it won that bet. Vice President JD Vance negotiated a lopsided memorandum of understanding that unfroze billions in Iranian assets while delivering neither verifiable denuclearization nor the dismantlement of Tehran’s proxy networks.
A chorus of Republican leaders slammed the deal as incoherent and naive. The Iranian regime, they warned, doesn’t read concessions as goodwill — it reads them as weakness to exploit. No amount of money was going to buy them off. Their aims are theological, not transactional. The destruction of America, the Great Satan, and Israel, the Little Satan, is their goal. Money is only a means to those ends.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) made the case memorably, saying, “History teaches that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is not a good idea.”
Mere weeks later, the critics were proven correct when Iran attacked commercial vessels and tankers in the strait, openly claiming the right to control, restrict, and toll it as its sovereign domain.
Trump responded by declaring the ceasefire over, pounding missile and drone sites from the air, and threatening to reimpose a naval blockade with strikes on desalination and electricity plants now reportedly on the table.
Full-scale war has not yet resumed, but illusions of peace with this regime should be abandoned. Emboldened by its survival of the American aerial onslaught and its success in holding the West hostage over the strait, Tehran will not relent in its pursuit of a nuclear weapon or its reign of terror in the Middle East.
The fabled “Iranian moderate” will never emerge from within the Islamic Republic, no matter how many pallets of cash Washington offers.
America has no choice: It must finish the job in Iran. It takes two sides to end a war, and this week, Iran once again proved it has no interest in doing so. The Islamic Republic will remain at war with the United States until it is defeated. So we must defeat it first, and it is infinitely preferable that we do so before Tehran crosses the nuclear threshold, not after.
The first priority now must be resetting this conflict with the public. Renewed hostilities, instigated by the enemy, offer the opportunity to do so.
In more than four months of fighting, a true case for the war has yet to be made. That’s partly by design — Trump’s penchant for ambiguity served him well in Venezuela and with Operation Midnight Hammer, limited operations where the enemy couldn’t tell if he was bluffing, and frankly, neither could we. That uncertainty helped secure quick, low-cost wins.
A sustained campaign against Iran requires durable public buy-in, which ambiguity can’t manufacture.
Trump has commendably made preventing a nuclear Iran his north star. Yet he has never fully explained to the American people why that objective is worth the costs. It may seem self-evident, but recent events prove it isn’t. A primetime Oval Office address spelling out why a nuclear Iranian regime would be a moral and strategic catastrophe — the emboldened terrorism, the regional proliferation cascade, the shield it would provide for aggression, and the direct threat to American interests and allies — would go a long way toward persuading the public that a somewhat more expensive gallon of gas is a price worth paying.
Convincing Americans to support a sustained war against Iran is a tall order, and it always has been. The public instinctively senses the difficulty and the potential costs. That skepticism is not ignorance.
IRAN ALLEGEDLY PLOTS TRUMP’S ASSASSINATION
Americans are a wise and moral people — they’ve never lacked courage when the stakes were made plain. The case for preventing a nuclear Iran would speak to their deepest convictions about justice, freedom, and the defense of civilization itself. Trump has repeatedly said that Iran would use nuclear weapons if it had them. He’s right. What Americans need is for someone to say so from the Oval Office.
Trump tried the path of negotiation — no one could say otherwise — and it failed. All that’s left is finishing the job the hard way. The American people will understand this. Trump should give it to them straight.
