“Elections have consequences,” a triumphant Barack Obama once said. On Saturday night, the world witnessed that principle in action once again. President Trump – long vocal about the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran – ordered the US Air Force to strike some of the regime’s most fortified nuclear sites: Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan.
While the Allies in the 1940s never bombed the train tracks to Auschwitz, Trump bombed the path to a potential second Holocaust. And while the slogan “Never Again Is Now” echoes emptily across a European continent, where the mass murder of Jews actually took place, it was an American president who, however improbably, turned that sentiment into policy. It’s a decision of historic proportions that protects not only Israel, but the region, Europe and the US from an Islamist authoritarian regime with apocalyptic ambitions. In his brief statement following the strikes, Trump cited not only Iranian threats against the US but specifically against Israel as justification for US strikes. He ended simply: “God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel and God bless America.”
This is not the beginning of the Third World War, as the predictable chorus would have it. It is, if anything, its prevention. For nearly 50 years, the Islamic Republic has exported war, terror and pursued nuclear weapons while chanting “Death to America”, “Death to Israel” and, let us not forget, “Death to Britain”. Hundreds of thousands have died at its hands or those of its proxies. Now the US and Israel are doing what needs to be done. As German Chancellor Friedrich Merz put it: “Yes, it is not without risk. But leaving things as they were was not an option either.”
And yet, a bizarre coalition has emerged protesting over the Israeli and US strikes against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme. As ever, opposing Israel unites the strangest bedfellows: far-left anti-Zionists and far-right antisemites, UN officials who mourn dead Jews but shrink from protecting the living, isolationists as well as globalists, and Democratic and European grandees alike. Their arguments are as feeble as they are familiar: that Israel’s campaign and the US strike were a violation of international law; that President Trump’s order lacked congressional authorisation.
But these charges collapse under scrutiny. The war between Israel and Iran did not begin two weeks ago. The latest round of hostilities began last year when Iran launched hundreds of ballistic missiles at the Jewish state, just months after October 7 was perpetrated by groups armed and funded by Iran. Some would trace it even further back, to the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires.
In any case, under the laws of war, these strikes can be seen as a legal part of an ongoing armed conflict or as legal pre-emptive action against an existential threat. Likewise, Iran has long called for America’s destruction, plotted to assassinate Trump and other US officials, its proxies bombed US military and so on. It is Iran that started this war a long time ago.
International law is not a suicide pact; it is meant to make the world safer. To claim that the law protects the regime in Iran from pre-emptive action is not a defence of order and stability, but an argument for chaos, war, and destruction. Such a law would be a sham and in need of change. As for congressional authorisation: since the Second World War, US presidents have used military force without prior congressional approval 99 per cent of the time, as Richard Haass, president emeritus of the Council of Foreign Relations, has pointed out.
The real story, however, is not legal but moral. The reaction to these strikes has revealed just how intellectually incoherent much of the West has become – and how unserious many of its political elites remain. When senior figures begin echoing the talking points of online cranks and historical revisionists, it is time to take stock. What the strikes have clarified, beyond all doubt, is that the Islamic Republic’s strength was always a fiction. And for years we were told its negotiators were shrewd tacticians – masters of geopolitical chess. In truth, they were bluffing with a weak hand. It worked only because their Western counterparts were so eager to fold.
That illusion is now gone. The regime has been exposed as vulnerable. With the main military objectives accomplished, Trump announced a ceasefire Tuesday morning, which Tehran promptly violated, inviting Israeli counter strikes. Trump responded with anger against both sides and the war seemed over – at least for now.
A war that began in horror – with Israeli civilians massacred, raped, and mutilated in their homes due to heartbreaking military and intelligence failures – has now turned into a military and intelligence triumph that will be studied for generations to come. And now, the world’s greatest military power has delivered a punishing blow to those behind the atrocities.
There are many lessons here for Israel. Deterrence failed, making preemption long before the threat becomes existential the new strategic mantra. Allies are valuable, but not always reliable, particularly as so many in Europe have lost moral clarity. But also in the US, elections matter, politics change. Another president may have taken a different decision. And so military self-reliance becomes not a luxury but a necessity.
For now, the path to another Holocaust was not merely denounced. It was destroyed. Out of that destruction, a new Middle East – and a more serious West, one that can distinguish right from wrong – may yet emerge.
