By H. R. McMaster
Monday, June 30, 2025
In my first year at West Point, I was part of a cordon of
cheering cadets who lined Thayer Road to welcome back to American soil 52
people who had been held hostage by the Iranian regime for 444 days. We saluted
as six green-and-white Army buses took them through the scenic campus on the
way to a three-day respite with their families at the Hotel Thayer. The hostage
crisis was just the beginning of what would become a four-decades-long “twilight
war” that the Islamic Republic of Iran has waged against the United States,
Israel, and its Arab neighbors. The U.S. response, across seven different
administrations, has suffered from a failure to consider adequately how
historical memory, emotion, and ideology drive and constrain the theocratic
dictatorship in Tehran.
The exception has been President Donald Trump, who from
2017 to 2021 implemented a strategy of maximum pressure on Iran and in January
2020 decided to kill the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps
(IRGC) Quds Force, Qassem Suleimani, and his Iraqi militia puppet, Abu Mahdi
al-Muhandis, in Baghdad. Trump recognized that the Iranian regime cannot be
conciliated and that efforts to de-escalate confrontations with Iran had
allowed it to escalate on its own terms with impunity. Early in his second
term, Trump has reversed the self-defeating policies of the Biden
administration, restored maximum pressure on Iran, and, most notably, ordered
U.S. strikes on three facilities related to its nuclear program.
The wisdom of Trump’s approach—forcing Iran to choose
between continued isolation and ending its hostility to Israel, the United
States, and its Arab neighbors—became apparent to many only after President Joe
Biden resurrected a hapless effort to appease Iran that started during the
Obama administration. President Biden, in an attempt to restore the flawed Iran
nuclear deal from which Trump withdrew in 2018, relaxed enforcement of the
Trump administration’s economic sanctions—and as cash flow to Tehran increased,
so did Iranian leaders’ confidence that they could use their terrorist proxies
to get away with murder. With few exceptions, Iranian
proxy attacks against U.S. facilities and personnel went unanswered.
Then, on October 7, 2023, the Iranian-supported terrorist
organization Hamas lit the “ring of fire” Tehran had built around Israel with
heinous acts of mass murder, torture, rape, and kidnapping. Hezbollah entered
the war against Israel the next day as Iran mobilized proxies in Syria, the
West Bank, and Yemen. Yet even as Israel fought this multifront war, the Biden
administration stuck with its de-escalation mantra, with the president himself reportedly
suggesting in April 2024 that Israel “take the win” after Israel, the
United States, and other nations successfully defended against the massive,
direct attack launched on Israel from Iranian soil. After another
direct attack by Iran on Israel in October 2024, the Biden White House
pressed Jerusalem not to strike Iran’s nuclear sites or energy-production
facilities.
President Trump prefers peace deals to the use of
military force, and he reportedly
delayed Israel’s plans to attack Iran earlier this spring and destroy—or at
least degrade—the country’s nuclear and missile capabilities. But after the
first few days of Israel’s highly successful air, intelligence, and cyber
offensive in mid-June, Trump did not urge de-escalation. “[Iran] had bad
intentions,” he told
reporters. “For 40 years they’ve been saying death to America, death to
Israel, death to anybody else they didn’t like. They were schoolyard bullies.
And now they’re not bullies anymore.” Trump’s comment reflected his belief
that, since the Jimmy Carter administration, U.S. Iran policy produced
disappointing results because decision-makers failed to understand the ideology
that drives and constrains Iran’s theocratic dictatorship.
Carter himself did not realize how deeply anti-Western
sentiment drove the revolutionaries in Iran. Hoping to develop a relationship
with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and preserve Iran as a Cold War bulwark
against the Soviet Union, officials in his administration closed their ears to
the anti-American cheers of the revolution and averted their eyes from the
reign of terror that Khomeini was inflicting on his people. While visiting
Algiers on November 1, 1979, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski sought
out Iranian Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan at a reception to tell him that the
United States was open to a relationship with the new Islamic Republic. After
Iranian newspapers published photos of the two men shaking hands, the Iranians
in Algiers immediately ended the talks as outraged students in Tehran seized
the U.S. Embassy and took 52 Americans hostage, setting off a long, painful
crisis that would dominate the rest of Carter’s presidency. The Iranian
government released the hostages on January 20, 1981—minutes after Ronald
Reagan was sworn in as president—supposedly as a conciliatory action of
goodwill. But the ideology that animated the regime was hardening.
The destructive war with Iraq from 1980 to 1988—which
cost Iran more than a million casualties and nearly $645
billion—convinced Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini, the clerical order,
and leaders of the IRGC Quds Force (the element that directs unconventional
warfare and intelligence activities) that protecting the “purity of the
revolution” also required exporting its ideology and pursuing hegemonic
influence across the Middle East. Although Iranian strategy is often described
as “forward defense,” it is better understood as a revanchist offensive to
drive the United States out of the region and weaken Arab states (particularly
Saudi Arabia) as precursors to the ultimate objective: the destruction of
Israel and the restoration of the regional influence the Persian Empire lost to
Alexander the Great more than 2,300 years ago.
Consider a
short highlight reel from Iran’s proxy war against the United States
between the 1979-80 hostage crisis and the October 7 Hamas assault on Israel.
In April 1983, a truck bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut killed 63 people,
including 17 Americans. Six months later, Iranian-trained terrorists killed 241
servicemen in a Marine barracks and 58 French paratroopers in their
headquarters. Across the 1980s and early 1990s, Iranian-sponsored terrorists
kidnapped 100 foreigners and tortured to death a CIA station chief and a Marine
colonel. In Saudi Arabia in 1996, a Hezbollah truck bomb outside Khobar Towers
killed 19 American airmen. In Iraq from 2004 to 2011, Iranian-backed militias
killed more than 600 American servicemen and women with bombs manufactured in
Iran. In Iraq and across the Persian Gulf from 2019 to 2023, Iranian forces and
proxies blew up oil tankers, fired missiles into neighboring countries,
attacked Saudi oil facilities with a swarm of drones, shot down a U.S. drone,
attacked the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, and rocketed U.S. bases in Iraq.
Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton,
George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden tended to view each of these
attacks in isolation, rather than episodes in a long-term campaign of
aggression grounded in the Islamic Republic’s foundational anti-American and
anti-Israeli ideology. Iranian leaders reinforced U.S. presidents’ reluctance
to confront Iranian aggression with false narratives about “moderates” within
the government who could counterbalance the hostility of the “revolutionaries”
if only U.S. leaders would open the door to conciliation. But these so-called
“moderates” were no such thing.
The ruse worked. Clinton decided not to retaliate against
Iran for the bombing of the Khobar Towers in part because a new Iranian
president, former librarian Mohammed Khatami, held out hope for reform in Iran.
In a
1998 interview, Khatami spoke of an internal political competition in which
“one political tendency firmly believes in the prevalence of logic and the rule
of law” and “another tendency believes it is entitled to go beyond the law.” He
even called for a “dialogue between civilizations.” But the proxy war went
on—and so did Iran’s nuclear program and the mounting danger to Israel.
In December 2001, former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani, the man who had served as the vessel for Western dreams of Iranian
moderation prior to Khatami, spoke from the podium at Tehran University to
deliver the government’s official weekly sermon. “If one day, the Islamic world
is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now,” he declared,
“then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of
even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything.” The Iranian bomb
was meant to be the ultimate weapon in the Islamic Republic’s sustained
campaign to push the United States out of the Middle East, dominate its Arab
neighbors, and destroy Israel.
The Obama administration doubled down on the conciliatory
approach of its predecessors. The administration scaled back initiatives to
constrain Iran’s aggression, as Treasury official Katherine Bauer recalled,
“for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.” And
once the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action took effect, the Obama
administration avoided any confrontation that might undo the agreement. Money
flowed into Iran, and Iranian oil exports soared, as did funding for terrorist
organizations and IRGC operations across the Middle East.
The nuclear deal emboldened Iran. Just prior to Iran
signing the agreement in the summer of 2015, the U.S. State Department flew
pallets of euros and Swiss francs into Geneva, where trams loaded them on
Iranian cargo planes headed for Tehran. That same day, Iran released four
Americans who had been, in effect, hostages. The operation was reminiscent of
the arms-for-hostages
arrangement under the Reagan administration.
The Obama administration’s lie
that the cash payment and the hostage release were disconnected encouraged
Iran’s long practice of using hostages for coercion and allowed the
revolutionaries in Tehran to portray the ransom payment as an admission of
American guilt and weakness. Hossein Nejat, deputy intelligence director of the
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, stated
that ransom payments demonstrated that “the Americans themselves say they have
no power to attack Iran.” In the months that followed the payoff, the regime
launched multiple missile strikes, boasted about its nuclear stockpiles,
awarded a medal to an IRGC commander with American blood on his hands, seized
two U.S. Navy vessels, and arrested 10 sailors and paraded them in front of
cameras before releasing them 15 hours later. The Iranians continued to take
new hostages, detaining Princeton graduate
student Xiyue Wang in 2016 while he was conducting research on the Qajar
empire and learning Farsi for a Ph.D. in Eurasian history. As in the past,
goodwill did not beget goodwill, and conciliation led to Iranian escalation,
not moderation.
From 2017 to 2020, the Trump administration constrained
Iran’s ability to wage its proxy wars, sanctioning approximately 1,000 Iranian
individuals and organizations. In 2018, Iran’s rial
declined fourfold against major currencies, and oil exports, which generate
most of the regime’s income, dropped to 1 million barrels a day from a high of
2.5 million. Sanctions, a decline in gross domestic product, and high inflation
led to a
10 percent reduction in military spending. Hezbollah’s stipend was halved,
and Iran was having trouble meeting payroll for its proxy army in Syria. But
the Islamic Republic’s leaders had been conditioned to believe that the United
States would not act militarily against Tehran.
Just prior to the U.S. strike on Suleimani and
al-Muhandis in Baghdad on January 3, 2020, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, referring to the prospect of U.S. retaliation for Iranian proxy
attacks on U.S. bases and the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, taunted President Donald
Trump, saying:
“You can’t do anything.” Trump showed him otherwise.
Khamenei dusted off that infamous
barb from his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, once again earlier
this month, arguing
amid nuclear deal negotiations that the United States “can’t do a damn thing
about” Tehran’s nuclear program.
Trump’s decision to strike Iranian nuclear facilities
earlier this month was incredibly consequential, degrading
and delaying a hostile regime’s path to the most destructive weapon on
earth, as well as the missiles designed to deliver it. Those strikes—and
Israel’s campaign that preceded them—also decapitated leaders who had blood on
their hands from Iran’s proxy wars.
But even more importantly, the Israeli and U.S. military
operations directly against the Islamic Republic and its warmaking apparatus
reminded officials in Tehran that they cannot antagonize their adversaries in
the region with impunity—and reminded officials in Washington that Iran’s
theocratic dictatorship cannot be conciliated. “De-escalation” was never a path
to peace—it was an approach that perpetuated war on the Iranians’ terms.
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