Trump Reverses Obama on Iran

By Rich Lowry

Friday, March 13, 2026

 

Donald Trump has always been the anti-Obama.

 

He rose in opposition to President Obama and has reversed many of his Democratic predecessor’s policies. But perhaps no Trump undertaking runs so directly counter to Obama’s approach than the Iran war.

 

Obama sought to accommodate the Iranian regime, while Trump hopes to topple it.

 

Obama tolerated an Iranian nuclear program, even if one theoretically constrained by a nuclear deal, whereas Trump wants to destroy it.

 

Obama facilitated the rise of Iranian power in the region. Trump, in contrast, is endeavoring to crush it.

 

Back then, Obama operated on the basis of conciliation and caution. Today, Trump is all about confrontation and assertion.

 

We don’t know how Trump’s operation in Iran will turn out. There are many ways it could go sideways. But there’s no doubt that Trump’s vision of the Middle East — with Israel and the Arab states putting their enmity behind them, while the Iranian regime is defanged or eliminated — is more in keeping with U.S. interests than Obama’s.

 

The Obama theory was that Iran could be made into a responsible regional player if the nuclear issue were set aside, and if the U.S. forged a balance of power between Sunni powers in the region and Shia Iran. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal restricted Iranian nuclear activity, while allowing the regime to sit on the cusp of a nuclear weapon and giving it major sanctions relief. The Obama administration literally sent pallets of cash to Tehran, and the relaxation of sanctions gave the regime more runway to build up its missile arsenal and its terrorist proxies.

 

Trump 1.0 disrupted this model by tearing up the nuclear agreement and creating a “maximum pressure” campaign to squeeze the regime financially. The campaign had kneecapped Iranian oil revenue, when Joe Biden came into office in 2020 hoping to revive the Obama strategy.

 

Before October 7, Iranian power had reached a high-water mark. Its proxies dotted the region, from Gaza to Lebanon to Iraq to Syria to Yemen. It was working with U.S. adversaries China and Russia. It was a regional leader, just as Obama had imagined, but not a moderate one. Iran wielded its proxies as instruments of an Islamic radicalism threatening to Israel and U.S. interests.

 

In retrospect, October 7 looks to be for Islamic extremists what Pearl Harbor was for the Japanese — a brilliant tactical success that carried within it the seeds of strategic defeat.

 

Israel went about systematically degrading Iran’s proxy forces and then hit Iran’s defenses in retaliation for Iranian missile launches. This paved the way for the twelve-day war, and Trump’s strike on Iran, Operation Midnight Hammer. The operation was a signal that we weren’t going to trust or verify — we were going to blow up as much of the Iranian nuclear program as possible.

 

Operation Epic Fury is the second act. It seeks to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and is going after the foundations of Iranian power unaddressed in the Obama nuclear deal — namely, the missile program and other elements of the Iranian military.

 

If it achieves maximal success, there won’t be any Iranian regime to deal with any longer; failing that, it can still reduce Iranian power and influence (assuming Iran isn’t allowed to establish de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz).

 

The hope is the war will open the way to build on the Abraham Accords. That first-term Trump initiative rejected the conventional wisdom that the U.S. had to distance itself from Israel to make diplomatic progress. Instead, the U.S. could embrace Israel in a way that was anathema to Obama and bring together the Jewish state with its Gulf allies, while marginalizing Iran.

 

Much depends on successfully prosecuting Operation Epic Fury, but what Trump is trying to achieve would be better for the peace and security of the region than the policy of one of the least worthy Nobel Peace Prize winners in history.