On Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump declared about Iran’s leaders, “There’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.”
He’s right.
The Islamabad Memorandum was dead the moment Iran attacked three commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, including Qatari and Saudi tankers. But declaring a ceasefire dead is not the same as finishing what this president started.
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In February, after the destruction of Iran’s air defenses and nuclear infrastructure, Trump addressed the Iranian people directly. “Take over your government,” he said. “It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations.” He told reporters that “all I want is freedom for the people.” Those were not throwaway lines. They were a promise, broadcast to 90 million Iranians, risking their lives on the belief that this time, the United States would not abandon them. Mr. president: uphold that promise. Finish the job.
I am an Iranian-American Jewish refugee who fled the Islamic Revolution at the age of six. My family was smuggled through the desert under burlap sacks while Iranian border police shot at us.
My entire life, I have known one thing with certainty: the Islamic Republic of Iran is a cancer. You do not negotiate with cancer. You remove it.
The regime proved it again this week. The Islamabad Memorandum, signed barely three weeks ago, was supposed to formalize a 60-day path to ending the war. It reopened the Strait of Hormuz. It paused military strikes. It waived sanctions on Iranian oil. Tehran pocketed every concession and then, on Tuesday night, while the president was at a NATO dinner in Ankara, attacked commercial shipping in the very waterway it had promised to keep open.
When the U.S. struck more than 80 Iranian targets in retaliation, the Revolutionary Guard launched strikes against American military installations in Bahrain and Kuwait. The regime’s parliament speaker wrote on social media: “The era of bullying and extortion is over.”
He was telling the truth, just not the way he intended. The era of the Iranian regime extorting the world through ceasefire theater must, in fact, be over.
The job is not done until there is regime change. Making the Iranian regime weaker but not eliminating it just kicks this can down the road. The regime does not negotiate in good faith. It never has. The only language it understands is force and power. It sees negotiations and diplomacy as weakness, as a delay tactic to enrich its uranium, rebuild its proxies, and prepare its next provocation. We saw this with the JCPOA a decade ago and we just experienced it with the Islamabad Memorandum.
The pattern is not complicated. The only question is whether we will break it.
This is not a foreign war for Americans; the Iranian regime has built a body count of U.S. lives. Iran-backed militias killed at least 603 U.S. troops in Iraq alone, roughly 1 in every 6 American combat deaths in that war. Iran-backed Hezbollah killed 241 U.S. service members in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. Iranian proxies killed three soldiers at Tower 22 in Jordan in January 2024. The Guard plotted to assassinate Trump and his family, and more of the public has been killed by Iran than by any other terrorist regime.
Their parliament chants “Death to America” not as a metaphor but as a policy. Dismantling the Guard is not a favor to the Middle East. It is an “America First” imperative because the Guard’s terrorist network, from Hezbollah to Hamas to the Houthis, exists to attack American interests, American allies, and American lives.
This is not only a military question or a question of oil stabilization. It is a humanitarian issue. I have spoken with Iranians inside the country who tell me that 90% of the population wants freedom from this regime. They are afraid, not of U.S. strikes, but that the bombs will stop before the regime falls. The people of Iran are terrified of being left with Islamist monsters in power if the war ends prematurely. These are the people Trump promised to liberate. They heard him, and they are counting on him.
Regime change carries risk, but allowing the ayatollah and his regime to remain in power carries more. Every ceasefire with this regime is a down payment on the next war. Every diplomatic concession funds the next generation of Hezbollah rockets, Houthi drones, and Hamas tunnels. Iran has spent decades funding terrorist proxies across the Middle East while its own people starve. Before the revolution, Iran’s cities were modern, cosmopolitan, and open. Women had equal rights, and civilians had freedom. The regime replaced a modern, welcoming society with a crime scene that has been active for 47 years.
Mr. president: You have the leverage. The Treasury Department has already revoked Iran’s oil sales waiver. U.S. Central Command has systematically degraded the regime’s air defenses, command-and-control networks, coastal infrastructure, and naval capabilities. The regime is weaker than it has been at any point since 1979. The Iranian military knows it, and the Iranian people know it. The only thing standing between this moment and genuine liberation is the political will to see it through.
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I owe everything I have to this country. America saved my family. It gave me a life, a platform, and the freedom to speak without fear. I have smelled the smoke of revolution before. I know what it costs when the free world flinches.
The Iranian people were promised, by the president of the U.S., that this was their chance. Do not let it pass. Finish the job.
Dr. Sheila Nazarian is a Los Angeles physician whose family escaped from Iran to America. She starred in the Emmy-nominated Netflix series Skin Decision: Before and After.