Trump’s Iran Strategy Is Working and the Critics Were Dead Wrong

You’ve been fed a steady diet of panic and doom about Iran for weeks now. The talking heads, the foreign policy establishment types, the perpetual hand-wringers who see catastrophe in every bold move. They told you President Trump was reckless. They said he was stumbling into disaster. They were wrong then and they’re still wrong now, but don’t expect any apologies.

Here’s what nobody else is going to tell you. Trump isn’t just winning in Iran. He’s systematically dismantling their capacity to threaten American interests, and he’s doing it with precision. The administration came in with four clear objectives. Three are already done. The fourth is in progress. Yet somehow we’re supposed to believe this is all falling apart?

The confusion starts with misunderstanding what we’re actually trying to accomplish. People keep assuming the goal was regime change. That’s not quite right. Regime change is a tool, not the destination. If the mullahs in Tehran suddenly decided to behave like a normal country, stopped funding terror, stopped threatening their neighbors, stopped pursuing nuclear weapons, then sure, they could stick around. The point isn’t removing specific people from power just for the satisfaction of it. The point is ending the threat they pose.

President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio laid out the goals clearly enough. Dismantling Iran’s regional terror network. Eliminating their military capacity to project power. Crippling their economy so they can’t fund mischief. And stopping their nuclear program. Check, check, check, and working on it.

But the critics have pivoted to a new narrative. Iran is somehow stronger now, they claim. This is the Obi-Wan Kenobi school of foreign policy analysis, where striking down your enemy mysteriously makes them more powerful than you can possibly imagine. It’s a cute line in a movie. It’s nonsense in the real world.

When you strike someone down, they stay down. That’s how force works. That’s how it’s always worked. The spirit of the Ayatollah isn’t going to float around teaching the next generation of jihadists how to blow up our metaphorical Death Star. Iran doesn’t get stronger by watching its leadership get eliminated one by one. It doesn’t get stronger by becoming a pariah to every nation in the region, from Israel to the Gulf states. It doesn’t get stronger by parading around a half-dead figurehead who’s missing a leg while pretending he’s in charge. Weekend at Bernie’s, Tehran edition.

Look at the actual facts on the ground. Iran’s missile launch capacity has been degraded so badly that they’re literally digging up buried launchers just to have something to shoot. We can see them doing it. Satellite imagery doesn’t lie. If there’s another round of strikes, those freshly unearthed launchers become freshly created scrap metal. Their navy is sitting at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. Their air force, which was already flying Vietnam-era junk, is now scattered across the desert in pieces. Their economy was struggling before. Now it’s circling the drain, and in a few weeks they won’t have the cash to pay the IRGC thugs who keep the regime propped up.

The new fallback argument is that Iran will win by outlasting us. They’ll just wait us out. Survival equals victory, apparently. By that logic, Cuba is winning too. The Castro regime survived, right? Are they thriving? Are they a model of success? No, they’re a decrepit police state that can’t keep the lights on. Survival isn’t the same as winning. It’s just not losing yet.

Iran had three methods of resistance they’d been building for decades. First was the so-called Axis of Resistance, all those terror proxies scattered across the region. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, various militias in Iraq. These groups were supposed to be Iran’s forward army, their way of hitting back without direct confrontation. Since October 7th, that network has been systematically destroyed. Hamas is broken. Hezbollah is a shell of what it was. The Houthis keep shooting and keep getting hammered in return.

The second method was their missile and drone arsenal, the capacity to strike at range and overwhelm defenses with numbers. That’s being methodically eliminated, launch site by launch site, storage facility by storage facility. The third was diplomatic isolation of their enemies, particularly Israel, and maintaining relationships that gave them economic breathing room. That’s collapsing too. The Abraham Accords are expanding, not contracting. Arab states are more willing than ever to work openly with Israel against the common Iranian threat.

This is what winning looks like, even if it doesn’t match the Hollywood version where everything wraps up neatly in two hours with a parade at the end. It’s methodical. It’s strategic. And yes, it requires patience and continued pressure. The nuclear threat remains the biggest outstanding issue, but even that becomes more manageable when Iran lacks the resources and regional support to pursue it effectively.

The critics will keep moving the goalposts because admitting they were wrong isn’t in their nature. They’ll find new reasons to panic, new angles to attack, new ways to spin obvious success as impending failure. Don’t fall for it. Judge by results, not by the anxious predictions of people who’ve been wrong about everything else.

Related: California Democrats Finally Admit They Knew About Swalwell Rumors All Along