Trump Got This One Right

By Eliot A. Cohen

Sunday, June 22, 2025

 

“Why are the wrong people doing the right thing?” Henry Kissinger is supposed to have once asked, in a moment of statesman-like perplexity. That question recurred as Donald Trump, backed by a visibly perturbed vice president and two uneasy Cabinet secretaries, announced that the United States had just bombed three Iranian nuclear sites. It is a matter of consternation for all the right people, who, as Kissinger well knew, are often enough dead wrong.

 

The brute fact is that Trump, more than any other president, Republican or Democrat, has taken decisive action against one of the two most dangerous nuclear programs in the world (the other being North Korea’s). The Iranian government has for a generation not only spewed hatred at the United States and Israel, and at the West generally, but committed and abetted terrorism throughout the Middle East and as far as Europe and Latin America. Every day, its drones deliver death to Ukrainian cities. The Iranian government is a deeply hostile regime that has brought misery to many.

 

A nuclear-armed Iran might very well have used a nuclear weapon against Israel, which is, as one former Iranian president repeatedly declared, “a one-bomb country.” Because Israel might well have attempted to forestall such a blow with a preemptive nuclear strike of its own, the question is more likely when an Iranian bomb would have triggered the use of nuclear weapons, not whether it would have done so. But even without that apocalyptic possibility, a nuclear-armed Iran would have its own umbrella of deterrence to continue the terror and subversion with which it has persecuted its neighbors. There is no reason to think the regime has any desire to moderate those tendencies.

 

In his address to the nation last night, Trump was right to speak—and to speak with what sounded like unfeigned fury—about the American servicemen and servicewomen maimed and killed by Iranian IEDs in Iraq. It was no less than the truth. Shame on his predecessors for not being willing to say so publicly. When someone is killing your men and women, a commander in chief is supposed to say—and, more important, do—something about it.

 

Trump was also right in making this a precise, limited use of force while holding more in reserve. Israel has done the heavy lifting here, but he has contributed an essential element—and no more. He was right as well (for the strikes were indeed an act of war) to threaten far worse punishment if Iran attempts to retaliate.

 

The rush in many quarters—including right-wing isolationists and anguished progressives—to conjure up prospects of a war that will engulf the Middle East reflected their emotions rather than any analytic judgment. Iran, it cannot be said often enough, is a weak state. Its air defenses no longer exist. Its security apparatus has been thoroughly penetrated by Israeli, American, and other intelligence agencies. Its finances are a wreck and its people are hostile to their rulers. For that matter, anyone who has served in uniform in the Middle East during the past few decades knows that Iran has consistently conducted low-level war against the United States through its proxies.

 

Could Iran attempt to attack shipping in the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Hormuz?  Yes—and members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy would die in large numbers in their speedboats or in their bases as they prepared to do so. The United States and its allies have prepared for that scenario for a long time, and Iranian sailors’ desire for martyrdom has been overstated. Could Iran try to launch terror attacks abroad? Yes, but the idea that there is a broad silent network of Iranian terrorists just waiting for the signal to strike is chimerical.

 

And remember, Iran’s nuclear fangs have been pulled. True enough, not permanently, as many of the president’s critics have already earnestly pointed out on television. But so much of that kind of commentary is pseudo-sophistication: Almost no strategic problem gets solved permanently, unless you are Rome dealing with Carthage in the Third Punic War, destroying the city, slaughtering its inhabitants, and sowing the furrows with salt.

 

For some period—five years, maybe 10—Iran will not have a nuclear option. Its key facilities are smashed and its key scientists dead or living in fear of their lives. Similar complaints were made about the Israeli strike on the Iraqi Osirak reactor in 1981. The Israelis expected to delay the Iraqi program by no more than a year or two—but instead, the program was deferred indefinitely. As things go, crushing the facilities at Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan, following a sustained Israeli campaign against similar targets, was a major achievement, and a problem deferred for five years may be deferred forever.

 

As for Iran, in 1988 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini agreed to “drink from the poisoned chalice” and accept a cease-fire with Iraq. He did so because the Iraq war was going badly, but also because he believed that the United States was willing to fight Iran: Operation Praying Mantis in 1988, following a mine explosion that damaged an American warship, involved the U.S. Navy sinking Iranian warships and destroying Iran’s military installations. In 2003, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Iran reportedly paused its nuclear program. When American forces in Iraq finally picked up five elite Quds Force members in 2007, the Iranians pulled back from their activities in Iraq as well. The killing of Qassem Soleimani in 2020 elicited only one feeble spasm of violence. The bottom line is that Iran’s leaders do not relish the idea of tackling the United States directly, and that is because they are not fools.

 

The president is an easy man to hate. He has done many bad things: undermining the rule of law, sabotaging American universities, inflicting wanton cruelty on illegal immigrants, lying, and engaging in corruption. With his fractured syntax and diction (including the peculiar signature “Thank you for your attention to this matter” at the end of his more bombastic posts on Truth Social), he is easy to dismiss as a huckster. The sycophancy and boastfulness of his subordinates, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth when briefing the attack, are distasteful. But contempt and animosity, justified in some cases, are bad ways of getting into his mind and assessing his actions.

 

Trump has surprised both friends and critics here. The isolationist wing of the MAGA movement was smacked down, although its members probably include the vice president and top media figures such as Tucker Carlson. Trump has confounded the posters of TACO (“Trump always chickens out”) memes. He has disproved the notion that he takes his marching orders directly from the Kremlin, for the strikes were not in Russia’s interest. He has left prominent progressives, including a dwindling band of Israel supporters, confused, bleating about war-powers resolutions that were deemed unnecessary when the Obama administration began bombing Libya.

 

We live in a dangerous world, and one that is going to get more so—and indeed, in other respects worsened by the president’s policies. But Trump got this one right, doing what his predecessors lacked the intestinal fortitude (or, to be fair, the promising opportunity) to do. He spoke with the brutal clarity needed in dealing with a cruel and dangerous regime. The world is a better place for this action and I, for one, applaud him for it.