Well intended ideals for declaring wars have a way of seducing nations into believing they will be short, decisive, and neatly concluded. History soberly teaches the opposite. Conflicts are easy to ignite and notoriously difficult to contain. You may predict how a war begins, but its trajectory and ending rarely follow the script. Now, with the current U.S.-Israeli campaign dragging on, oil markets rattled, and no sign of regime or even policy change in Tehran, a difficult question inevitably surfaces: Was this the right course of action?

Any attempt to answer that question requires at least a minimal sense of historical context. The roots of today’s confrontation stretch back to 1978, when the Iranian Islamic Revolution reshaped the Middle East and set Iran on a collision path with much of the Western world.

The Islamic Republic of Iran’s ideology is not subtle, and it is not hidden. It is openly built on Shi’a Islamic governance, unapologetic about the rejection of U.S. and Western influence, promoting the weakening of American power in the region, and calling for Israel’s destruction. The regime defines its mission through the export of Islamist and anti‑Western movements abroad, and through a doctrine that elevates resistance, martyrdom, and permanent ideological struggle. The IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is not simply a branch of the military; it is the regime’s self‑declared guardian, charged with advancing this revolutionary project both inside Iran and across the Middle East and beyond.

In official Iranian and IRGC rhetoric, Hezbollah, supported and armed by Iran is portrayed as a brother movement aligned with Iran’s revolutionary ideology. Hamas, also sponsored by Iran, is depicted as a Palestinian resistance movement that Iran supports as part of its regional “Axis of Resistance.”

In practice, the axis formed by Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas has expressed its ideology not only through rhetoric but through a long record of violent action. Some of the most consequential attacks on the United States began almost immediately after the Islamic Revolution. In 1979, Iranian militants seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 American hostages and holding them for 444 days. Hezbollah, operating with Iranian support, carried out two bombings of the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon — the first in 1983, killing 63 people, and the second in 1984, killing 24. That same year, Hezbollah executed the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American service members. Throughout the Lebanese Civil War, Hezbollah also kidnapped American journalists, academics, and diplomats, using hostage‑taking as a strategic tool.

The United States was not the only target. In 1992, a bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires killed 29 people and devastated not only the embassy but also an adjacent Catholic school and church. Hezbollah publicly claimed responsibility. Years later, Argentina’s Supreme Court concluded that the attack was carried out by Hezbollah with Iranian backing, underscoring the global reach of this network’s violence. Hamas is no less extreme and has been responsible among other violent acts, of the atrocities committed on Oct 7, 2023. Had Hamas not attacked Israel, persisted firing rockets and holding hostages, there would have been no subsequent war in Gaza.

For decades, successive American administrations have described Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism and a strategic threat, but the American response responses were always limited. President Carter severed diplomatic relations after the 1979 hostage crisis. Under President Reagan, Iran was formally designated a state sponsor of terrorism, a classification maintained by Presidents George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush. The Obama administration intensified economic pressure through sanctions. In all these administrations, there was a gap between America’s critical stance versus its actions against Iran.

Until last June, President Trump like presidents before him, pursued a diplomatic track aimed at persuading the Iranian regime to alter its ideology and policies. When it became clear that diplomacy alone was not going to shift Tehran’s course, the United States, together with Israel, launched the twelve‑day campaign last summer. Even after the scale of those Iranian military setbacks, Iran did not adjust its posture. Instead, it obsessively and unflinchingly continued the same trajectory: refusing to halt military‑grade uranium enrichment, developing cluster missiles rather than dismantling its offensive missile arsenal, and maintaining its declared hostility toward Israel and its support for movements aligned with its revolutionary doctrine.

This is what likely led Trump to move to a fuller strategic response. Trump is the only U.S. president who has acted on what previous administrations had long implied what needed to be done.

If the Iranian threat is as evident as this ideological stance suggests, why have European governments not aligned themselves with President Trump’s policy, especially since  Western Europe arguably has more to lose than the U.S. from an emboldened Iran, be it via the spread of Iranian‑backed fundamentalist militancy to their shores, or as of result of dependency on freely flowing Gulf oil. Yet their tepid response has been non confrontive, even though if implemented, the fundamentalist ideology would undermine Western governments.

One possible explanation relates to domestic politics. While most Muslim voters in Europe do not support the IRGC’s ideology, it is reasonable to assume that a significant portion would oppose a confrontational posture toward a Muslim run Iran, and European leaders are acutely aware of the political implications (votes). Another factor is structural: for decades, many Western European governments have reduced defense spending and relied on the United States to shoulder the military and financial burden of confronting threats beyond Europe’s borders. They now are ill prepared to respond to a military involvement. A third possibility is institutional paralysis. The European Union often struggles to reach decisive, unified positions on foreign policy. Finally, there is the simple reality that Trump’s approach often diverges sharply from long‑standing European preferences, making open support politically unpalatable even when interests overlap.

In a confrontation with a conventional adversary, overwhelming destructive force might be enough to push them back from their expansionist posture. But applying that logic to Iran’s ideologically driven leadership is far less straightforward. Trump’s belief that sufficient damage to Iranian infrastructure could bludgeon the IRGC into abandoning its regional and global ambitions may prove overly optimistic. The Iranian regime has spent 47 years preparing for precisely this kind of confrontation. Beyond its visible military capabilities, the existence of underground, hardened “missile cities” designed to shield key elements of its ballistic missile and drone forces is public knowledge. Promoting their ideology is more important to them than the wellbeing of their citizens or maintaining their intact infrastructures.

As we are now seeing with Hezbollah, an organization shaped and supported by the same doctrine, only force that routs the regime itself, not the country’s assets, appears capable of bringing about change. Anything short of force that directly undermines the regime’s ability to sustain its revolutionary project risks leaving its imperial ambitions intact. It should be remembered that despite the extensive military might that the U.S. has, and the President’s bellicose style of communication, all the U.S. wants is for the Iranian regime to stop being a regional terror supporting troublemaker.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)