“[O]nly a military intervention at this point could level the playing field,” Prince Reza Pahlavi declared Monday. “This is the reason why the Iranian people have been anxiously awaiting the action that the President has promised he will do in support of the Iranian people, that help will arrive, just hang in there,” he said.
“And they have,” the son of the late Shah said. “And they hope that this president will stay true to his word as he has always demonstrated, and that he’s no Barack Obama.”
Also on Monday, Professor Daniel Schueftan of Haifa University — “Israel’s Henry Kissinger” — invoked the same name: Obama. Asked about President Donald Trump’s grasp of the complex and often dark corners of Middle Eastern conflict, Schueftan said, “Trump has the right instincts. And mostly what he did in the Middle East was very helpful for the whole region.”
“Think of the Abraham Accords,” Schueftan said. “Think of the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. And the support he had for Israel when Israel needed not only to assert its power, not only to destroy the terrorists, but also to deter them from the immediate next step.”
“But so far,” this pillar of the Israeli national security establishment concluded, “his instincts about the Middle East were correct, and he was certainly not the kind of naïve president that we had in Jimmy Carter and in Barack Obama.”
The exiled Crown Prince of Iran and Israel’s Henry Kissinger, in interviews given within an hour of each other, brought up, unprompted, former President Barack Obama in the context of addressing what President Donald Trump should order America’s military to do regarding Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles, it’s nuclear weapons program, and the 150,000 members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Neither the Iranian exile nor the Israeli scholar wants Trump to “blink.” Neither believes he has … yet.
But the president will hear from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today that to accept any agreement from the Iranian mullahs that wards off a strike from America’s massive naval armada and it’s extraordinary collection of fighter jets gathered in the region and those capable of deploying from the United States (and probably at least one Ohio-class submarine equipped with Tomahawk missiles under the seas), will be the equivalent of a surrender by Trump, crashing the U.S. deterrence he has restored after the disastrous presidencies of Obama and then former President Joe Biden.
Neither of the prior presidents can escape the defining records of their time as president. For Obama, that was the absurd and dangerous “JCPOA,” and for Biden, it was the U.S.’s precipitous and calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Both decisions revealed that the two presidents were appeasers, the sort of presidents who could be cowed and manipulated, the sort of presidents about whom history will deliver devastating verdicts about their time in office: They both “blinked” and they both had their knees buckle. The U.S.’s enemies advanced, and they retreated.
That’s it. That is the choice before Trump. History has a way of sorting every post-war president into a pile beginning with FDR and Truman or the pile ending with Obama and Biden. Everything else fades away except a president’s record of stewardship of America’s national security.
Jimmy Carter is not a punch line because of the sweater speech or the gas lines, but because the Ayatollah Khomeini made a laughingstock of Carter before the world.
Ayatollah Khamenei, having repeatedly taunted and insulted Trump, ordered the development and release of an artificial intelligence-generated video of attacks on the USS Abraham Lincoln over the past weekend in his ongoing and desperate attempt to scare Trump away from ordering the U.S. military to strike. Because of those videos and other bluffs, and the massacre of more than 35,000 mostly young Iranian protesters, the blustering from Iran is intended to divert attention from, the Iranians have clearly mistaken Trump for Obama. Again.
TRUMP SHOULD FINISH THE JOB IN IRAN
Trump has ordered, and Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine have overseen, the sort of massive surge of U.S. firepower to the regions all around Iran and those assets can loiter in the vicinity for months, fraying the Iranian ayatollah’s nerves as a battle plan is refined and double, then triple-checked and coordinated with our allies in the region, especially Israel. The equivalent of any 10-minute summary of the firepower assembled, and the risks run to our troops in any confrontation, has been provided by retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, also from Monday. The optimal “window” for striking Iran, according to the admiral who has commanded a strike group such as the Lincoln’s, has now opened and will stay open for about three months. The admiral cited the need for the Lincoln to reach and be on station for two weeks to establish the strike group’s rhythm, which has now been accomplished. Montgomery added that he does not expect the U.S. to strike during Ramadan, taking place from Feb. 17 to March 19 this year, as our Muslim majority allies in the region do not want or need upset among their various “streets” during the high holy days of Islam. So, many factors point to a late March or April strike.
Patience on the part of U.S. hawks is required. It seems unlikely that, confronted with a choice of “be like Reagan” or “be like Obama,” Trump will take the latter. It is the defining moment of his two terms. “Reagan Plus” is how Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) described Trump’s second term. The whole world and history will see. Importantly, so will China and Russia: Xi and Putin will see if Trump “blinks.”
We have to hope that Netanyahu will be greeted warmly, not left to cool his heels in a waiting room for an hour as he was by Team Obama during the years of the locusts in the U.S. If Trump cares for the Iranian people and history’s “forever judgment,” he will strike Iran when the time and tides are exactly right, just as he did with Operations Midnight Hammer and Absolute Resolve.