This Was The Plan

The war in Iran isn’t a neocon detour. It’s the National Security Strategy in action.

America is at war. This weekend, American and Israeli forces attacked the Iranian regime, hitting military installations, sinking the Iranian navy, and destroying much of the Islamic Republic’s offensive and defensive capabilities. The regime has been degraded, undermined, and, indeed, decapitated – the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed by Israel in a strike on a high-level in-person meeting, along with dozens of other top officials. The Islamic Republic is in internal chaos, dealing with a leadership vacuum, degraded communications systems, and an incredibly high tempo of American and Israeli airstrikes. The flailing regime has retaliated against America and Israel, but has also struck wildly at uninvolved Arab states, launching missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, to name a few. Celebrations and calls to action in the Persian diaspora and within Iran itself have been heartening, especially after tens of thousands of protesters were gunned down by the regime over the past month. And unlike Operation Midnight Hammer – the June 2025 American strikes on Tehran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure – Operation Epic Fury is no one-off.

In a post on his Truth Social account confirming the death of Khamenei, the president stated directly that “The heavy and pinpoint bombing, however, will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” This message was echoed in his Saturday morning speech laying out the rationale for the campaign against the mullahcracy, one that he explicitly labeled a “massive and ongoing operation.” In that address, Trump explained the history of the Iranian regime’s anti-American antagonism and detailed exactly what kinds of targets American forces are focusing on. The president said that the operation was being carried out to “prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests,” and described exactly what America was planning to do to achieve that aim:

“We’re going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground… We’re going to annihilate their navy… And we will ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon.”

Trump has referenced the unmentionable phrase – regime change – multiple times since the campaign began, exhorting “the great proud people of Iran” to “seize control of your destiny” and “take over your government” after American bombs have stopped falling. He told them that “the hour of your freedom is at hand” and that “America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force.” The White House has been clear that the actual overthrow of the regime lies in the hands of the Iranian people, but also that regime change is a desirable end result. This sentiment has been met with support by many of the White House’s most vocal defenders, as well as those in the right’s hawkish and pro-Israel contingents. A brief, successful campaign would likely be embraced by the vast majority of the Trump movement, similar to how the capture of Maduro in Venezuela has been received.

Still, some of the president’s MAGA faithful, primarily those in the restrainer foreign policy camp, are unhappy with the administration’s kinetic action against Tehran. They believed that the 2024 Trump campaign promised “no new wars” and valued several of the president’s more restraint-minded Cabinet selections, including Vice President JD Vance and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Restrainers were put in place throughout the secondary and tertiary levels of the defense bureaucracy, further assuring this faction that Trump was indeed one of them. Now that the president has launched military operations against Tehran, long seen as a pet project of the hated neoconservatives, this faction sees betrayal. Predictions of a new quagmire – yet another ‘forever war’ in the Middle East, sapping our attention from the crucial question of China – abound on social media, as do arguments that this war is not in American interests.

These objections do not survive contact with the administration’s own strategy document. Decisive action against Iran has been telegraphed by the president for years. Preventing the Islamic Republic from getting nuclear weapons has been one of Trump’s few consistent foreign policy ideas, going back even to his pre-political days. That goal alone justifies the current campaign; stopping an apocalyptic, millenarian regime that despises America from getting the most devastating weapons in mankind’s arsenal is directly within our core national interests. Add on top of that the regime’s rapid and sizable buildup of ballistic missiles, including attempts to produce or source intercontinental and hypersonic varieties, as well as its status as the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism – killing over 1,000 Americans during its less than 50-year existence – and you have an airtight case for decisive action. Iran’s proxies have carried out attacks on American civilians and troops across the region and further afield, including in the United States itself. The regime has tried to assassinate several American government figures, even President Trump; that those plots were foiled does not make them any less dangerous. Iran has also operated within the Western Hemisphere more broadly, relying on anti-American regimes in Latin America for money laundering, smuggling operatives into the US under false passports, and building terror networks to threaten Washington closer to home.

Besides those very direct threats to our security, the mullahcracy is an integral part of the axis of enemies America faces in the 21st century. They are close military and economic partners with China and Russia, supplying the former with oil and the latter with drones that it uses against Ukraine on the battlefield. The sanctions evasion industry was essentially invented by Tehran and they have been undermining our economic penalties for decades, trading illicitly with our greatest foes and strengthening their ability to avoid one of America’s most powerful punitive tools. They trade intelligence, military technology, and key dual-use resources with these antagonistic actors, tying them ever-closer into a full-scale alliance structure. Eliminating the Iranian regime would deal a hammer blow to these more serious enemies, especially China, which is Tehran’s main customer for oil export. Cutting off Beijing’s ability to fuel its war machine with Iranian crude dramatically limits China’s scope of action and hampers its plans to eventually retake Taiwan by force. At the same time, removing the Iranian sanctions evasion nexus would allow any future penalties we apply to Beijing to be far more cutting and painful for the Chinese.

We do not defeat the enemy in Beijing simply by focusing myopically on Asia. The Chinese Communist Party is strengthened by the global network of bad actors that it heads; each lesser power in China’s orbit is useful as a force multiplier, a trading partner, and a distraction from what Beijing is trying to do: achieve regional, if not global, hegemony at the expense of the United States. The Venezuela operation and the current war against the Iranian regime must be viewed in that light to understand the White House’s broader rationale. In case of a major conflict with China, its allies in the Middle East, Latin America, and Eurasia will all be activated to diminish our ability to confront Chinese aggression directly and with undivided attention. Instead of surging our strength to the Indo-Pacific, Beijing wants us to be bogged down with various other conflicts in Europe, the Middle East, and even our own backyard. Removing or cowing the regimes in Tehran and Caracas eliminates two of the CCP’s primary means of power projection. Paradoxically, going after these lesser regimes is perhaps the best way we can deter and degrade the capabilities of our greatest foe.

This approach is not a neoconservative or globalist one. It is grounded in concrete American interests, recognizes the world for what it is, and limits American intervention to what is needed to achieve our objectives. And all of it was laid out for the world to see in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, published last December. The same document that the restrainer right praised as a vindication of their worldview laid the groundwork for exactly this operation. In that influential planning document, the basis for the current intervention in Iran is described clearly and cogently. For instance, one of the first security objectives laid out by the Trump team reads:

“We want to protect this country, its people, its territory, its economy, and its way of life from military attack and hostile foreign influence, whether espionage… destructive propaganda and influence operations… or any other threat to our nation.”

The Iranian regime has been a “hostile foreign influence” in America for nearly its entire 47-year existence, fomenting anti-American sentiment, supporting hostile groups, and engaging in “destructive propaganda and influence operations.” This makes it a prime target for the US government under this particular strategy. Shortly thereafter in the document, in a list of America’s “core, vital national interests,” the bullet point on the Middle East says the following:

“We want to prevent an adversarial power from dominating the Middle East, its oil and gas supplies, and the chokepoints through which they pass while avoiding the ‘forever wars’ that bogged us down in that region at great cost.”

Iran is the adversarial power seeking domination of the region – backed, of course, by Beijing – and routinely threatens key energy flows and maritime chokepoints, as they are doing now in the Persian Gulf and did in 2023 and 2024 via their Houthi proxies in the Red Sea. An Iran-centric Middle East, long the goal of the Obama-era foreign policy establishment, would not only be detrimental to our interests, it would be disastrous for them, all while greatly aiding the Chinese. Ending the regime is the only real way to secure those interests and leave the region behind as a suck of American blood and treasure. The admonition against ‘forever wars’, a staple of the MAGA foreign policy outlook, is being carefully observed in this case. Operation Epic Fury has been a triumph of America’s maritime and aerospace dominance, focusing on limited, concrete objectives and allowing our ally Israel and the Iranian people to shoulder the burden of the most direct anti-regime operations. The National Security Strategy centers burden-sharing and capable, independent allies as critical factors in our global security posture; Israel has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that it fits both criteria as well as any partner we currently have.

The restrainer right does not need to abandon its principles to support Operation Epic Fury, it simply needs to read its own national security strategy. This operation is not a betrayal of the president’s foreign policy instincts and predilections, but their full flowering. It does not distract from the problem of China, but takes concrete action to help diminish it. Defeating Iran’s malign ambitions is good for our friends, bad for our enemies, protects our vital interests, and removes a serious, deadly threat from the geopolitical chess board. Operation Epic Fury is what America First was always building toward.