Stop calling this Israel's war or America's war.
In 1979, Islamists in Iran started a war with the free world. After decades of appeasement and failed diplomacy, we finally decided to confront the regime — for the benefit of the entire free world.
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Between 1979 (when the Islamic Republic of Iran was founded) and April 2024, there have been 66,872 Islamist terrorist attacks worldwide resulting in approximately 250,000 deaths, according to the French think tank Fondapol.
These attacks have taken place on nearly every continent. They have struck cities, airports, markets, schools, and synagogues. They have killed civilians in New York, London, Paris, Mumbai, Nairobi, Madrid, Jerusalem, and countless other places.
Behind a large share of the infrastructure enabling this violence sits one government: the Islamic Republic of Iran, widely recognized as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
For decades, Iran has funded, armed, and trained militant organizations across the Middle East and beyond. It has bragged about having “sleeper cells” throughout Europe. It has turned proxy warfare into a geopolitical strategy. The result has been instability that stretches from Lebanon to Yemen, from Gaza to Iraq.
Yet when a confrontation with this regime finally emerges, many commentators insist on framing the conflict as Israel’s war or America’s war. That framing is profoundly misleading. This is not a bilateral conflict between two nations. It is a struggle over whether the international system will tolerate a regime that exports extremism, destabilizes entire regions, and openly pursues nuclear weapons while calling for the destruction of other states.
In other words, this is the free world’s war, whether the free world knows it or not.
To some readers, that sentence will immediately sound like recycled “conservative talking points.” But interpreting it that way reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the moment we are living through. What is unfolding is not a partisan debate about foreign policy; it is a geopolitical reality.
Reducing this reality to the language of superficial politics — Left versus Right, conservative versus progressive — misses the point entirely and is dangerously complacent. The question is not whether one political faction happens to favor confrontation with Iran more than another. The question is whether the international community is willing to recognize that an Islamist regime openly committed to destabilization, nuclear brinkmanship, and the sponsorship of terror proxies is confronting the very foundations of the modern international system.
When viewed through that lens, the conflict stops looking like “America’s war” or “Israel’s war” — and starts looking like exactly what it is: a struggle whose consequences extend far beyond the borders of any single country.
In this moment, two countries have shown the courage to act: the United States and Israel. Whatever one thinks of the American and Israeli political leaders involved, the reality is that they have demonstrated something increasingly rare in global politics: strategic bravery. They are willing to confront a horrendous regime that many others prefer to appease or ignore.
I am still astounded by the political critique of this war, which for many boils down to a simplistic equation: I dislike Trump or Netanyahu, therefore I oppose the war. That is not a serious way to evaluate a geopolitical conflict. Wars are not judged by the personalities of the leaders involved, but by the realities they confront and the consequences of action or inaction.
Any real debate must center on strategy, deterrence, and security, not personal dislike for particular politicians. Reducing a conflict of this scale to a referendum on Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu may be emotionally satisfying for some, but it avoids the harder and far more important question: What happens if the regime in Tehran is allowed to continue its trajectory unchecked?
Unfortunately for the Europeans, many of their politicians have no real answer to this question, and their political institutions appear operationally paralyzed. Countries that once defined the Western world now struggle to take decisive action on issues that affect their own security.
Part of this paralysis stems from domestic political realities. Large Muslim populations across Europe wield more and more political influence. There is nothing inherently wrong with a growing Muslim presence in Western countries, but there is something fundamentally wrong with Muslims who live in the West and enjoy its wide array of benefits, yet disavow Western attitudes and beliefs, instead holding onto an undying allegiance to political Islam and its patrons, like the Islamic Republic.
To add insult to injury, European leaders often appear reluctant to challenge ideological movements connected to Islamism for fear of social unrest or electoral consequences. The result is a strange geopolitical reality, one that social media has captured with a biting joke:
The Muslim countries supporting the American–Israeli attack are Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Kuwait. The Muslim countries opposing it are Britain, France, Germany, and Spain.
Former British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt summarized the perception bluntly, saying in an interview: “The reason that Trump treats European leaders like this is because he thinks they’re weak. … The contrast in the way Donald Trump treats Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and actually Netanyahu in Israel, with respect. … He treats European leaders with contempt. And that is because we are weak.”
A local himself, who understands the political landscape quite well, saying what serious observers have come to realize about that part of the world: European leadership has become increasingly incapacitated.
One of the most revealing moments of this war came when Iranian missiles and drones struck the United Arab Emirates.
At one point during the conflict, nearly 60 percent of Iran’s projectiles were targeted at Emirati territory, including strikes at key landmarks like Burj Al Arab, Jebel Ali, and international airports. Disrupted flights left thousands stranded. In Abu Dhabi, the government issued a remarkable directive to every hotel in the country: Extend all tourist stays for free. The state would cover the bill to ensure visitors remained safe and comfortable.
Why did Iran target the United Arab Emirates so intensely?
Nadim Koteich, a former general manager at Sky News Arabia, offered an interesting explanation: “Iran attacked the UAE because the UAE is the argument Tehran cannot win. This small Arab Gulf country represents the most operationally successful refutation of political Islam’s central claim.”1
For decades, the Iranian regime has tried to frame the Middle East as a civilizational struggle between the “resistance” camp and Western influence. The UAE represents the opposite model: economic development, global integration, and cooperation with Israel through the Abraham Accords.
In other words, the UAE demonstrates that prosperity and stability are possible without Islamist ideology. As Koteich argued:
“Every missile fired at Dubai is a confession. … The regime that claimed to speak for the oppressed could not compete with what the UAE built. So it reached for the one argument it had left: destruction.”
The Islamic Republic of Iran’s leadership frequently claims to defend the Palestinian cause and protect Islamic holy sites, but reality tells a different story. During this war, Iranian missiles struck the al-Makassed Hospital in East Jerusalem, forcing the hospital to close. Another Iranian warhead landed less than a kilometer from the al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan — one of the holiest sites and times of the year in Islam.
The same regime that claims to be the guardian of Palestinian dignity was willing to endanger both Palestinian civilians and one of Islam’s most sacred sites. The contradiction is difficult to ignore.
But what is perhaps most remarkable about this conflict is how predictable it was. On November 4, 1979, 66 Americans were taken hostage at the United States Embassy in Tehran, with 52 of them being held until January 20, 1981. That’s 443 days of captivity, and it was only the beginning of nonstop murders of Americans and other Westerners at the hands of the Islamic Republic and its allies.
In 1980, during the aforementioned Iran hostage crisis, a young real estate developer named Donald Trump (at the time a supporter of the Democratic Party) was interviewed about the situation.
“That this country [the United States] sits back and allows a country such as Iran to hold our hostages is a horror,” he said. When asked whether the United States should send troops into Iran, he answered bluntly: “I absolutely feel that, yes.”
Decades later, political leaders from both of America’s two main parties reached similar conclusions. In 2008, Hillary Clinton — who’s as liberal and as molded into the Democratic Party as one can be — said in an interview: “Whatever stage of development they might be in their nuclear weapons program in the next 10 years, during which they may foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.” In 2015 she added, “I will not hesitate to take military action if Iran attempts to obtain a nuclear weapon.”
A year earlier, a U.S. Senator from Florida named Marco Rubio (now Trump’s Secretary of State) foresaw that the heavily flawed 2015 Iranian nuclear deal, engineered in large part by the Obama Administration, would eventually lead to today’s conflict: “The argument the [Obama] White House uses is if you’re not in favor of this deal, you are in favor of war. I would argue that a bad deal almost guarantees war … at some point certainly in our lifetime.”
And yet, when Iranian negotiators reportedly bragged to their American counterparts just days ago about having enough enriched uranium to build 11 nuclear bombs (a gross violation of the Iranian nuclear deal) and military confrontation finally arrived — somehow critics claim that Trump is impulsive and he cannot be trusted day to day. The record suggests otherwise.
Perhaps the most telling images of this war have not come from missile strikes or military briefings. They have come from ordinary Iranians.
At the Israeli embassy in Greece, the building was reportedly flooded with Iranian visitors expressing gratitude toward Benjamin Netanyahu. Shouts of “Bibi joon!” (literally, “Bibi dear” or “Bibi beloved” in Farsi) have been heard on Iran’s streets.
Many Iranians understand something that Western activists often ignore: The Iranian regime is not Iran. Millions of Iranians have spent decades protesting against their own government. Many have been imprisoned, tortured, and executed for doing so. But when the Iranian regime goes to war against its own people, we hear crickets from the “Free Palestine” circus that disrupted Western cities and campuses for more than two years.
This week, one of the most widely circulated topics involved the possibility that a U.S. bomb accidentally killed 150-plus schoolgirls because a school was located near an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps building. Civilian casualties are tragic in every war, but the outrage surrounding it reveals a profound double standard — because the Iranian regime itself has been at war with schoolgirls for decades.
Since 2023 alone, more than 1,200 Iranian schoolgirls have been deliberately poisoned inside their schools, according to the UN Human Rights Office. Iran has officially registered over one million child brides, including tens of thousands of girls between the ages of 10 and 14. More than 115 children were killed during one wave of state violence this past January as security forces crushed protests. Every year, more than 180 girls and women are murdered in so-called “honor killings.” Femicide has risen sharply in recent years. Meanwhile, nearly 1,000 executions were carried out in a single year, including juvenile offenders, according to a joint report by the organizations Iran Human Rights and Together Against the Death Penalty.
And the regime’s military wing, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has repeatedly turned civilian schools into military staging grounds, placing soldiers and equipment on campuses and effectively using students as human shields. It is a tactic familiar from the strategy employed by Hamas in Gaza. As Iranian-American writer Elica Le Bon wrote:
“It is not inhumane to care that Iranian school girls were killed. It is inhumane to need the missile to be fired by the U.S. or Israel before deciding to care. That protest doesn’t come from your heart. It comes from your hate. Trust me, we feel it.”2
This conflict will continue to be described as Israel’s war or America’s war, but those labels obscure the larger reality. The Iranian regime has spent decades killing Americans and other Westerners, building networks of militancy, exporting revolutionary Islamist ideology, destabilizing countries, and pursuing weapons that could threaten entire regions.
If the regime succeeds, the consequences will not be limited to Jerusalem or Washington. They will affect Riyadh, Dubai, Berlin, Paris, London, Mumbai, Melbourne, Buenos Aires, Madrid, and beyond — which is why the truth is simple, even if many governments refuse to acknowledge it: This is not Israel’s war. It is not America’s war. It is the free world’s war, and history proves this.
In June 1981, Israel launched a daring preemptive strike against Iraq’s nuclear program, destroying the Osirak reactor in an operation known as Operation Opera. Eight Israeli fighter jets flew more than 600 miles to bomb the reactor just outside Baghdad, eliminating what Israeli leaders believed was Iraq’s most promising path to a nuclear weapon.
At the time, the strike was met with near-universal international condemnation. The United Nations Security Council unanimously passed United Nations Security Council Resolution 487, declaring the attack a violation of international law. Even Israel’s closest ally, the United States, condemned the strike and temporarily suspended the delivery of certain military equipment.
Critics argued that Israel had committed an act of aggression that could destabilize the Middle East. Many Western governments insisted that Iraq’s nuclear program was intended for peaceful purposes and that international inspections could manage any risks. At the time, Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussein, who publicly denied any intention of developing nuclear weapons. Israel, however, believed that once the reactor became operational, destroying it would risk releasing radioactive material and would therefore become politically and militarily impossible.
In hindsight, the operation is widely viewed very differently. After the Gulf War, international inspectors discovered that Iraq had indeed been pursuing a far more extensive nuclear weapons program than previously believed. Many analysts concluded that the destruction of the Osirak reactor significantly delayed Iraq’s ability to acquire nuclear weapons. What had once been denounced as reckless unilateralism came to be seen by many policymakers and historians as an example of successful preventive action against a hostile regime seeking catastrophic capabilities.
Even some American officials who initially criticized the strike later acknowledged its tremendous impact on the region and even global stability. The episode has since become one of the most frequently cited precedents in debates about preemptive action against nuclear proliferation. What was once considered an unacceptable act of aggression is now often remembered as a case in which a controversial military decision, condemned at the time, proved prescient in hindsight.
Nadim Koteich on Instagram
Elica Le Bon on X
I agree. This is a war fighting to save the free world!
"I am still astounded by the political critique of this war, which for many boils down to a simplistic equation: I dislike Trump or Netanyahu, therefore I oppose the war. "
I totally agree with you. I can't stand Trump for a bunch of reasons. But, here he is right and I support the war effort.
People have lost their ability to think critically. People react reflexively, as you state, like a knee struck by the physician's hammer. But, geopolitical thinking is more complicated than a reflex.