Unfortunately there are no good options on Iran
And we as Americans need to disabuse ourselves of all wishful thinking that there are
As the old and tiresome joke runs, “denial” is not a river in Africa.
Denial may not be the longest watercourse in the world. But it has been the prevailing doctrine of American foreign policy toward Iran for the past four and a half decades.
And denial, if we may embellish the metaphor, is often what a stage-4 cancer patient, not to mention their immediate family, indulges in when they refuse treatment because the cure is too painful, debilitating, or disruptive of routines that can no longer by in any candid reckoning be upheld.
The treatment is agonizing. The alternative is death — only slower, and on the disease’s timeline, rather than that of the patient.
That is precisely the predicament of the United States as a whole on Memorial Day weekend 2026, as the debate over the February 28 joint US-Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear infrastructure divides the country along lines that have far less to do with strategic reality than with partisan tribal identity.
Most Americans, as the PBS/Marist poll among others stresses, disapprove of how the Trump administration has handled the conflict.
Six in ten oppose the military campaign. The blame, so far as a large majority of the electorate is concerned, falls on the president, as though he manufactured this war from whole cloth, and as though Iran had been a peaceful, law-abiding neighbor until January 2025.
And as though the Islamic Republic had not spent 47 years declaring, funding, and prosecuting a campaign to destroy the United States along with Israel and everything it represents.
The following needs to be said, even at the severe risk of outraged blowback from every point of the compass.
The Iran War is not Trump’s war, even though he was the one who launched Operation Epic Fury.
This is America’s war. It has indeed been since November 4, 1979.
On that signal occasion the newly empowered minions of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini stormed the American embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.
It was the opening act, and in retrospect it turned out to be the deciding factor that brought down the Presidency of Jimmy Carter in the election of 1980, ushering in the era of Reagan and “free market” conservatism.
Every administration from Carter to Biden managed the conflict at a low register through sanctions, proxy skirmishes, covert operations, and diplomatic shadowboxing, all the while soothing the anxiety of the American people — and themselves as well — with the honey-spiked assurance that the problem could be contained, negotiated, or simply forwarded to the policy inbox of the next administration.
Even with Trump the master negotiator, especially with a bad midterm election outcome rearing its grisly head, the temptation to float down that lazy river seems, if mainly to his advisors and of course the minions of hardshell Trump-despisers, overwhelming.
The temptation is so massive it looks irresistible.
Yet it remains an even more treacherous Faustian bargain that most of us can muster the courage to imagine.
Just ask the Council on Foreign Relations, the most establishmentarian org inside the foreign policy establishment.
According to the CFR’s Global Conflict Tracker, since 1979 there has been an ever mounting score of hostile and aggressive acts toward America.
Those incidents include the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that left 241 Americans dead, the Khobar Towers assault of 1996, the comprehensive provision of advanced weapons to Shia militias in Iraq that took the lives of numerous American soldiers from 2003 onward, and finally a tally by the Combatting Terrorism Center of at minimum 17 Iranian plots on U.S. soil disrupted in the past five years alone, amounting to almost one foiled attempt at terrorism every three to four months.
Currently Iran has bored 800 meters into granite at a new facility south of Natanz known as “Pickaxe Mountain”. In the dry parlance of the intelligence community, the mountain is specifically engineered to defeat the GBU-57 bunker-buster dropped by B-2 bombers during Operation Midnight Hammer.
If America does not want to follow through with what it started in 2026, the Iranian regime will do so in relatively short time what it initiated a half century ago.
Of course, Iran is not a standalone predicament.
Iran is merely the tip of the spear.
The Islamic Republic is the forward deployed asset of a much larger and far more dangerous axis — specifically, Russia, China, and North Korea, all of whom are self-proclaimed adversaries of the United States.
These foreign power seem to have collectively concluded that the post-Cold War American-led international order must be dismantled, and that Iran is their most cost-effective instrument for bleeding American power, attention, and will.
Russia has supplied Iran satellite intelligence, drone technology, and air defense equipment. China has propped up the Iranian economy throughout years of maximum sanctions, relieving a significant amount of economic pressure on the ayatollahs. North Korea has provided ballistic missile components and technical expertise.
Even if the ayatollahs were not irremediable fanatics bent on dying for their own intransigent religious cause in the face of maximal military pressure, they still know there are other powerful “bad actors” to have their back.
Hence they fulsomely feign a willingness to engage in endless and futile rounds of diplomacy.
As British army intelligence offer Lynette Nusbacher told The Jerusalem Post on the eve of Epic Fury, “the Iranians are willing to draw negotiations out as long as possible, agree to as little as possible — with the weakest monitoring mechanisms possible — and comply with their agreement as little as possible”
The very same mullahs call Israel “the Little Satan.” They denounce the United States as “the Great Satan.”
They are not blowing smoke. They mean it. They have always meant it.
And while we have debated, sanctioned, negotiated, arbitrated, and deferred, they built the means to implement their insanity.
There is a dimension of this conflict that the polite precincts of American opinion-making are reluctant to address straightaway. The antiwar sentiment highlighted in the polls and reiterated and recalibrated daily in the press as some sort of organic and bona fide inflection of our corporate American conscience is quite measurably a manufactured item.
A report from Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, led by researcher Darren Linvill, identified 62 social media accounts across X, Instagram, and Bluesky closely linked with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
These accounts masqueraded as those of Scottish separatists, Irish nationalists, and Latina activists from Texas and California. The moment Operation Epic Fury was launched, they pivoted en masse to anti-war propaganda and generated on the spot nearly 60,000 original posts on X with potential reach into the tens of millions.
Linvill’s assessment was terse and emphasized that Iran had “redirected its resources toward propaganda around the war, trying to make the war more painful for the United States.”
The same study underscores how sophisticated information warfare is being deployed against the American public in real time. Furthermore, such tactics have proved to be highly impactful, particularly among younger Americans who would do the actual fighting if the war accelerates and who, according to recent generational polling data, are the most skeptical of the conflict and the least persuaded that the United States is worth defending.
Through its proxy networks — Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, Shia militias across Iraq and Syria — and through the ideological infrastructure of radical Islamism that has found willing fellow travelers in the American academic and activist left, Iran has cultivated over decades a fifth column of sentiment that does not carry Iranian passports, albeit faithfully advances Iranian strategic interests.
The progressive neoliberal opinion class that infests the op-ed pages of mainstream media and the Senate hearing rooms with their congenital partisan verbal cage-fighting theatrics functions, however unwittingly, as a force multiplier for the very regime whose atrocities it is ostensibly too principled to endorse.
The American public, whenever it pauses long enough for a mindful double take, is not nearly as pacifist as the polling headlines indicates.
Polling by Schoen Cooper Research tells a more complicated story. Whereas the country has remained split on the US-Israeli operation itself, 78 percent in March backed disassembling Iran’s global terrorist financing network, 72 percent supported destroying its nuclear program, and two-thirds believed Iran poses a serious or existential threat to national security.
There is no evidence these attitudes have shifted in any meaningful way.
Just today pollster Mark Penn, former advisor to Bill and Hillary Clinton, opined in The Wall Street Journal:
The Iran war isn’t unpopular per se. The state of the economy is unpopular, and it was almost as unpopular before the war, when 53% saw the economy headed in the wrong direction.
In the last Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll, 54% of voters say the strikes on Iran are justified. Two-thirds believe this is an evil regime that doesn’t have the support of its own people. MAGA voters overwhelmingly support the strikes.
The roughly 55 percent opposition to the war does not reflect any kind of adamantine moral conviction on the part of the general public. It is a volatile artifact of political polarization, susceptible to rapid revision the moment an Iranian proxy detonates something in a shopping mall in Kansas City or poisons a municipal water supply in Phoenix.
Nearly a year ago the Department of Homeland Security issued a National Terrorism Advisory System bulletin advising that the conflict has produced a “heightened threat environment in the United States.” That advisory has never been withdrawn.
The question is not whether the threat is real, but how easily Americans will acknowledge it before or after the next attack.
We face two choices, and both are truly terrible.
The first is to “finish the job”, as the hawks word it, i.e., to press the military campaign until Iran’s nuclear materials and facilities are genuinely and durably destroyed, its proxy network thoroughly degraded, and its capacity to reconstitute both severely constrained.
The second is strategic withdrawal by declaring declare the campaign is over. That, of course, will enable Iran to reconstitute at depth, benefit from Russian air defense upgrades and Chinese economic resupply, rebuild Hezbollah and Hamas, complete its nuclear program in hardened facilities that no existing munition can reliably reach, and wait for the reckoning that will then come on Tehran’s schedule, at a moment of Tehran’s choosing, against an Iran that is nuclear-armed and emboldened by American retreat.
These are honestly the clear and only options. There is no “third space”, so to speak, for deliberation.
The chattering classes who demand we occupy one are lollygagging around in a latter day version of cloud cuckoo land and retching up in innumerable opinion columns a gross vomit of strategic fantasies for a fearful and desperate clientele.
The historical analogy the antiwar faction despises most is the one that fits most frictionlessly.
In the late 1930s the America First movement argued with considerable passion that European and Asian entanglements were not America’s concern, that diplomatic consultation with aggressive powers was always preferable to confrontation.
Although they were neither fools nor cowards, they were dead wrong.
Pearl Harbor did not demonstrate the Pacific war inevitable. It made the war inevitable on Japan’s terms, at a moment of Japan’s choosing and at a cost in American lives that a more resolute earlier posture might have mercifully reduced.
But all historical analogies are naturally imperfect.
The question is no longer whether to enter or decline the conflict, as was the case in 1940 or thereabouts. We are already in it, and we have been in it since 1979.
Things are just getting a lot testier.
Talk about “forever wars”!
Rotating the party in power, or pushing Congress to affirm some updated version of the War Powers Act from 1973, which had an entirely different provenance, will not make the deadly, hydra-headed Iranian monstrosity suddenly go poof.
The bipartisan consensus for managed deferral across seven administrations is precisely what brought us to Pickaxe Mountain in the first place. A Democratic Congress in 2026 and a Democratic President elected in 2028 will not ensure Iran is less bent on growing nuclear fangs, less aggressive, or make Russia or China less inclined to go for its own “golden ring” by arming Iran sufficiently to harass the United States and put it out of play.
It will, based on recent Democratic foreign policy precedent — the Iran nuclear deal that released $150 billion in frozen assets, the withdrawal from Afghanistan — accelerate the process of American strategic retreat and Iranian strategic advance.
The ancient Biblical prophet Jeremiah, addressing an ancient Israelite establishment complacent before the Babylonian siege that ended with the destruction of Jerusalem, leveled his most scorching condemnation not of the foreign invader but of the court prophets.
They “dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious”, Jeremiah declaimed. “‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.”
The “wound” of four and a half decades of Iranian aggression, proxy warfare, terror financing, and nuclear ambition is undeniable.
The question before the American people is not whether Donald Trump is an exemplary leader or even a sympathetic political figure.
The challenge is the degree to which a democratic republic, whose public has been systematically cozened, algorithmically exploited, and ideologically enfeeled, retains the capacity to make the hard choice that national survival requires.
Democracies have lost wars not because their militaries were outgunned but because their publics lost the will to sustain them. The information war waged against American will through social media and through the relentless cultivation of a generation that has been taught by its professors and pundits to regard its own civilization with contempt proves to be indistinguishable from the kinetic war underway, and most likely to intensify in the very near future, in the Persian Gulf.
There are no good options. There never were.
And the river of “denial” debouches into a sea of travail.