A war can be badly argued and still be strategically necessary.

The administration may be fumbling the explanation, but the strategic case for confronting the Islamic Republic—an ideologically driven regime that has spent four decades building the infrastructure of regional war—is far stronger than many Americans realize.

In the late 1970s, when I was an undergraduate at UMass Amherst, the campus was full of protests against the Shah of Iran. Iranian students organized rallies, and American students joined them. The slogans were unmistakable: “Death to the Shah.” I even remember one of the campus communist organizations sponsoring a “Death to the Shah Bake Sale.”

At the time, the Shah was widely viewed as a corrupt authoritarian propped up by the United States. Many people on campus—including people who genuinely cared about human rights—assumed that the revolution gathering in Iran would produce something better.

History had other plans.

The monarchy fell, but what replaced it was not a liberal revolution. It was the Islamic Republic: a theocratic regime that fused clerical authority with revolutionary ideology. The people who marched for freedom in 1979 are still marching for it today, and the regime that emerged from that revolution has spent the past forty-five years defining itself through ideological hostility toward the United States and Israel.

Iranian leaders routinely refer to America as the “Great Satan” and Israel as the “Little Satan,” and the regime has openly declared its ambition to see the Israeli state disappear. In Tehran, a government-sponsored countdown clock once displayed the regime’s prediction of when Israel would cease to exist.

Women were among the many Iranians who protested against the Shah in the late 1970s. What followed, however, was not greater freedom but one of the most restrictive systems of gender control in the modern world. Iranian women have spent the decades since the revolution fighting to reclaim rights that were taken away in its aftermath.

It is one of history’s quieter ironies that a revolution many in the West once cheered has spent the last four decades organizing confrontation with the United States and Israel.

I should acknowledge my own vantage point here. As a liberal American Jew, I do not approach this subject as a detached observer. Israel’s security is not an abstract geopolitical question for many Jews; it is bound up with history, identity, and the memory of how fragile Jewish safety has often been. That perspective does not settle the strategic debate about Iran, but it inevitably shapes how many of us understand the stakes.

Now, nearly half a century later, the United States finds itself at war with that same regime. Yet the strategic case for how we arrived here—and what the endgame might be—has barely been explained to the American public.

Instead, the explanations coming from Washington have felt less like a coherent strategy and more like a bowl of spaghetti thrown against the wall to see what sticks. What began as a tweet and received barely a paragraph in the State of the Union has since been revised and reframed so often that it is difficult to tell whether the administration is explaining a strategy or discovering one in real time.

One day the justification is that Iran posed an imminent threat to American forces. The next day the emphasis shifts to defending Israel. Then the rationale becomes protecting global shipping lanes, preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, or restoring American deterrence in the region. Each of these arguments contains an element of truth. But when they appear in rapid succession, without a clear hierarchy or consistent narrative, they begin to sound less like strategy and more like improvisation.

Some supporters of the administration insist that the apparent confusion is deliberate, that the president is playing a kind of geopolitical chess in which unpredictability itself is the strategy. The theory has become a familiar refrain in the Trump era: what looks chaotic on the surface is actually the product of hidden strategic brilliance.

The problem with this argument is that strategy, even when it relies on surprise, eventually reveals a coherent objective. At the moment it is difficult to discern one. What we see instead are shifting explanations, improvisational messaging, and policy rationales that change from week to week.

Sometimes chaos is a tactic. But sometimes chaos is simply chaos.

Part of the frustration is that serious strategic explanations do exist. They simply are not coming from the people currently responsible for explaining the war.

Part of the problem may be that two different strategic arguments are being discussed at the same time, often without anyone clearly distinguishing between them. One concerns Israel’s immediate regional security. The other concerns a much larger geopolitical contest unfolding between the United States, China, and Russia.

One of the more persuasive frameworks comes from Israeli analyst Haviv Rettig Gur, who argues that what we may be witnessing is not one war but two unfolding simultaneously on two different geopolitical chessboards.

Israel’s war is the one everyone can see. It is regional and immediate. Iran has spent decades building a ring of proxy forces—Hezbollah, Hamas, Iraqi militias, and the Houthis—that threaten Israel directly.

But the American war sits within a much larger strategic contest.

Iran is part of an emerging geopolitical alignment that includes Russia and China. Tehran supplies drones used by Russia in Ukraine. China purchases Iranian oil, providing the economic lifeline that allows the regime to survive Western sanctions.

Which brings us to the Strait of Hormuz. This narrow waterway carries a significant share of the world’s oil supply. Whoever can threaten that corridor can threaten the global economy.

Seen through that lens, the confrontation with Iran is not simply about Israel—or even the Middle East. It sits inside a much larger contest between great powers.

Criticizing the administration’s explanation, however, only gets us halfway to the real question. The more important question is whether a war with Iran can be justified at all.

For decades, American policy toward Iran rested on the assumption that the regime could be contained and deterred without a direct military confrontation. Sanctions, covert actions, limited strikes, and periodic negotiations were all designed to manage the problem without resolving it.

That strategy bought time, but it did not change the trajectory of the Islamic Republic.

Instead, Iran spent the past two decades steadily expanding its reach—building proxy armies across the region, advancing its missile and drone capabilities, and moving closer to nuclear weapons capability.

Seen from this perspective, the current conflict may represent less a sudden escalation than the culmination of a long failure of deterrence. At some point a strategy of indefinite containment stops being a strategy and becomes a delay. A revolutionary regime that openly seeks the destruction of its regional adversaries, funds armed movements across multiple countries, and steadily advances toward nuclear capability cannot be managed forever through sanctions and occasional strikes on proxies. Eventually the choice becomes unavoidable: either accept the permanent expansion of that system or confront it directly.

The idea that this is somehow “Israel’s war” also ignores a long history of Iranian attacks on Americans.

Since the early years of the Islamic Republic, Iranian-backed groups have repeatedly targeted American citizens and soldiers. In 1983 Hezbollah bombed the US Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people. Later that same year another Hezbollah truck bomb destroyed the US Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American servicemen—the deadliest attack on the Marine Corps since Iwo Jima. The following year Hezbollah operatives kidnapped, tortured, and murdered CIA station chief William Buckley.

The pattern continued through the following decades. In 1996 a Hezbollah truck bomb destroyed the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 US Air Force personnel and injuring hundreds more.

During the Iraq War, Iranian-supplied weapons were responsible for a significant portion of American combat deaths. In Afghanistan, Iran also provided weapons and support to the Taliban at various points during the conflict.

In recent years Iranian-backed militias have launched hundreds of rocket and drone attacks against US forces stationed in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan.

Seen clearly, the strategic case for confronting Iran rests on three realities. First, the Islamic Republic is not simply another authoritarian state pursuing narrow national interests; it is a revolutionary regime that has spent forty-five years organizing confrontation with the United States and Israel as a core element of its identity. Second, it has built an extensive regional military architecture—proxy armies, missile forces, and militant networks—designed specifically to project power while avoiding direct accountability. Third, it has steadily advanced toward nuclear capability, which would place that entire system under the protection of a nuclear deterrent.

Seen together, these realities help explain why the confrontation with Iran cannot be understood solely as an Israeli security issue. Iran’s revolutionary project has targeted Americans, Israelis, and regional governments simultaneously for more than four decades. It has built proxy armies that threaten Israel directly, carried out attacks that have killed American soldiers and civilians, and aligned itself with Russia and China in a broader challenge to the Western-led international order.

Israel sits at the center of this confrontation, but not for the reasons often suggested in Western debate. Iran has treated the destruction of Israel not simply as a geopolitical objective but as a core ideological commitment. The proxy forces it has built across Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and Yemen were designed first and foremost to surround Israel with a ring of armed pressure. But Israel’s role in this conflict also illustrates something broader: it is the closest and most exposed target of a revolutionary system that ultimately seeks to weaken American influence across the region.

A war can be badly argued and still be strategically necessary.

I should be clear about one thing before going further. I am no military strategist, and I have no illusions about the complexity of the campaign now unfolding. But if the United States is going to fight this war—and we now clearly are—then the country owes itself at least one honest conversation about what success would actually look like.

What success looks like

At a minimum, the war would have to dismantle the military architecture the Islamic Republic has built over decades: degrading the Revolutionary Guard’s ability to direct proxy militias, destroying key elements of Iran’s missile and drone infrastructure, and eliminating its nuclear weapons program.

But any strategy that stops there risks repeating the cycle that has defined US–Iran relations for decades: limited strikes, temporary setbacks, and eventual recovery by the regime.

For that reason, the ultimate strategic objective would have to be political as well as military. The Islamic Republic itself is the source of the system that has destabilized the region for nearly half a century. If the war is fought at all, its long-term objective should be the end of that regime and the emergence—however uncertain—of a different political order in Iran.

History also suggests that the regime’s grip on its own society is far weaker than it often appears. Iran has experienced repeated waves of mass protest—from the Green Movement in 2009 to the nationwide demonstrations of 2019 and the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising in 2022, and most recently protests that led to the deaths of thousands of Iranian citizens, including many women and children.

Each time the regime survived through repression. Each time millions of Iranians made clear that the political order imposed after the revolution does not command universal loyalty.

There is also a harder question that every argument for war must eventually face: Would you want your own son or daughter to fight in it?

That question is not rhetorical. It is the moral test behind every strategic argument. Wars are not fought by analysts or columnists. They are fought by young men and women who carry rifles, fly aircraft, sail ships, and absorb the consequences of decisions made far above their pay grade.

If the answer to that question is no, then the argument for war collapses immediately.

But if the regime we are confronting is one that has spent decades building a system of proxy warfare, expanding toward nuclear capability, targeting American citizens and soldiers, and destabilizing an entire region, then refusing to confront it does not eliminate the risk of war. It merely postpones it—often until the costs are far higher.

The tragic logic of deterrence is that sometimes the willingness to fight today is what prevents a far more dangerous war tomorrow. The United States is now at war with Iran. The conflict is only days old, and American service members have already been killed.

War is not an abstract exercise in geopolitics. It is blunt force trauma—inflicted on soldiers, civilians, and entire societies. A conflict between the United States and Iran has the potential to expand across the Middle East, disrupt global energy markets, destabilize fragile governments, and send shockwaves through the international economy.

The least a democracy owes its citizens in such a moment is a clear explanation of why—and what victory is supposed to look like. Because after forty-five years of shadow conflict, the question is no longer whether a confrontation with the Islamic Republic would come.

The question now is whether it ends with the regime that created it still standing.

Try and enjoy the weekend everyone. Let’s hope for the best for our military, for the IDF and for a rapid and successful end to this war.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)