You’ve been lied to.
You’ve been hearing for weeks now from all of the doubters, all of the so-called “panicans.” But here is what you are not going to hear anywhere else: not just that President Trump is winning in Iran, but why he is winning.
He came in with four goals. He has now achieved three of them, and the fourth is on the way.
Iran had three methods of resistance. President Trump has basically eliminated two of them. And the third is about to end.
People keep assuming that the goal of the war in Iran was regime change. No. Regime change is a means; it is not the actual end. In a certain sense, if the regime were to change its behavior dramatically, you wouldn’t need to change the regime.
Yes, if there were to be a regime change, it would pretty much achieve all the goals all at once.
But you don’t have to achieve all of the goals of the war with regime change.
The president and Secretary of State Marco Rubio laid out the goals:
- Destroy the vast majority of Iran’s forward military capacity. Done. We have defenestrated their foreign military capacity, their missile base is basically gone. Their air force, gone. Their navy, gone.
- Wipe out their defense industrial base. Done. The United States and Israel have wiped out their steel foundries. They have hit all of their missile factories. They have hit their missile launchers.
- Keep Iran’s economy in a stranglehold, while depriving it of the means to rebuild. Done. The Iranian economy is defunct. Nothing has been getting in.
- End the Iranian nuclear threat. Pending.
Three of those four have basically been done. It’s the Iranian nuclear threat that remains on the table.
Okay, say the panicans and the liars, but somehow Iran has gotten stronger.
This is what we might call the Obi-Wan Kenobi theory of foreign policy: “If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”
It doesn’t work that way in real life. When you strike someone down, they usually stay down. And if they recover, you can strike them down again.
The spirit of Iran is not going to teach Luke Skywalker how to blow up the Death Star. That’s not how this works. It is not clear how you get stronger by being alienated from every single country in the region, from Jews to Muslims, or how, somehow, you’re getting stronger if all your leaders are dead and you’re walking around as a regime pretending that an impotent, comatose dude with no leg is your actual leader: “Weekend at Mullahs.”
Or how you get stronger when your missile launch capacity has been so degraded, so radically degraded, that you’re being forced to physically unbury the missile launchers you buried.
They buried a bunch of missile launchers to hide them, and now they’re being forced to unbury them just so they have something to shoot.
We can see them doing that; if there’s another round here, we will just blow those up, too.
How do you get stronger if your navy is at the bottom of the sea or if your Air Force, which was a bunch of Vietnam-era crap, is now a bunch of shrapnel? How are you stronger when your economy is totally nonexistent, when in a few weeks you’re not going to have money to pay your IRGC thugs?
Okay, fine, say the panicans and the liars; The Iranians will still win. They will win by outlasting us.
Staying alive isn’t winning unless we’re doing “The Hunger Games,” which we’re not.
To take a similar example: Is Cuba winning right now?
The Cuban communist regime has survived. Are they winning or are they on their last legs? It’s pretty clear they are losing.
And so is the regime in Tehran. The regime in Tehran had three methods of resistance, and they’ve been building all three for years and years.
First, the so-called “Axis of Resistance.” This included all the terror proxies they placed throughout the region, from Hamas to Hezbollah to the Houthis to terror groups in Iraq. All of those members of the “Axis of Resistance” were supposed to be Iran’s forward army. That was their forward capacity.
But since October 7, 2023, Israel has steadily degraded or destroyed that forward capacity.
Hamas is stuck in a small section of Gaza. They may be trying to rebuild, but it won’t matter. Israel will go in and blow them up again. Hezbollah has been greatly reduced as a power in the region, and now it is in danger of complete evisceration. The Houthis could have acted at any time during this war, but they didn’t, and they didn’t for a reason. They knew that if they had, they would have been obliterated.
So the terror proxies Iran had been funding for generations were basically defenestrated. That was their first mode of striking back.
Second was the nuclear program, which they were attempting to develop. They were racing toward a nuclear bomb to protect their regime. That is what caused all of this to happen. If they had given up their nuclear program years ago, they would have had normalized relations with a lot of different countries. The sanctions would not be on them. But they decided they were going to race forward with their nuclear program, and they got the hell bombed out of them.
Third: the Strait of Hormuz. Shutting that down was supposed to be their trump card. That was supposed to stop everything.
And this is where all of the panicans and all of the liars and the people who hate Trump and hate Israel and all the rest started saying, “The Iranians really showed you. They shut the Strait of Hormuz!”
It’s open now.
Remember that time when they said that we would never be able to open the Strait?
What did we do? We said if you close it, we are going to stop all ships going in and out of Iranian ports, and then you won’t have an economy, and you’ll be dead in the water.
Guess what? Within a week and a half, they opened the strait.
They stopped messing around in the strait because they didn’t have the forward operating capacity. Their navy was, in fact, at the bottom of the sea. The Persian Gulf was littered with the hulks of their ships. The reality is that they used their pathetic mine-laying capacities — and I say pathetic because they were actually just putting mines in the water and losing them out there — and we are now de-mining the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump wrote, “I received a call from NATO asking if we would need some help. I told them to stay away unless they just want to load up their ships with oil. They were useless when needed. A paper tiger.”
Fact.
What really happened here is that the Strait of Hormuz closing hurt the Chinese far more than it hurt us. The Chinese presumably brought pressure to bear via Pakistan on the Iranians, and the Iranians decided to open the Strait.
Not only that, oil prices have now plunged dramatically. We’ve been told that that was the chief element that was somehow going to undermine the war.
Nope.
President Trump is winning, big-time.
And don’t let the panicans and liars convince you otherwise.