Every American alive today has been living in wartime. Every president since December 7, 1941, has been a wartime president. All of them. They can, and should, be judged by how they have waged war, both “cold” and “hot,” against imposing foes and against dangerous irritants. Provided he remains tough, determined and ruthless in this conflict with Iran, President Donald Trump will be the equal of any of them and far superior to most.
There have been stretches of time of largely noncombatant war since the conclusion of World War II, stretches that look a lot like the “peacetime” of the 1920s and 1930s.
From the fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11 — 25 years ago this September — for example, the illusion of “peace” was pervasive. Indeed, a “peace dividend” was demanded and paid via deep cuts in defense spending because of that illusion.
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That illusion survived the United States invasion of Panama and the first Gulf War, the American cruise missile strikes on Iraq in 1993 which President Clinton ordered, the dozen years of conflict with Saddam that followed under both the first Bush and Clinton with the “no-fly zones,” Operation Infinite Reach — when Clinton ordered cruise missiles fired at al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Sudan — and NATO’s Operation Allied Force which was the 78-day NATO bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from March 24 to June 10, 1999.
Not until 9/11 did most of America collectively conclude that the world contained very bad actors and would never leave us alone or allow us to be indifferent to rising threats.
After 9/11, through the debacle of our collapse in Afghanistan in 2021, no one doubted we were in wars. There were obvious reminders in the tragic killings and wounding of American service members in both the Afghanistan and Iraq theaters. And there was the no-longer-possible-to-ignore threat posed by the rise of China into our “pacing threat,” the descent of Russia into dictatorship and the successful lunge of North Korea for a nuclear arsenal.
Through both the long period of illusory peace and the obvious wartime of 2001 to 2023, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been at war with the United States. It has been thus since the hostage crisis of 1979, through the bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in 1983, the bombing of the Khobar Towers in 1996 and the long shadowy campaign of Iranian surrogates against our military in Iraq which killed and wounded thousands of our troops. The fanatics in Iran have not stopped chanting “Death to America” since 1979. They have always meant it.
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Iran’s grand plan was to gain nuclear weapons. Its secondary plan was to amass a missile force so vast and threatening to its neighbors (and eventually Europe and perhaps even America) to assure that the United States and Israel would never strike at the nuclear weapons assembly line. With the immunity that comes with nuclear weapons, the ayatollahs would have been free to pursue their agenda of the destruction of Israel and America.
Presidents before Trump have all vowed that Iran would not be allowed to have such weapons. All of them since Iran set out on this path. None of them acted. They did not act either against Iran’s expeditionary force of terrorists — the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard built and deployed in the first instance by Qassem Soleimani — or Iran’s proxies. Until Trump.
President Carter was paralyzed by the mullahs. President Reagan, intent on confronting the Soviets, withdrew from the confrontation with a much smaller threat in the 1980s, and while President George H.W. Bush destroyed Saddam’s army in 1991, he did not advance to Baghdad, much less beyond and into Iran.
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President Clinton could not stop North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons because he believed the cost to be too high. He would not concern himself with a distant threat when he could not contain the immediate one. North Korea became a nuclear power on Clinton’s watch.
President George W. Bush was a superb wartime president as he battled Islamist extremism and eventually won through to stability in Iraq. He and every other leader in the West were wrong about WMDs, but he persevered, and the Iraqi people have a much brighter future ahead than they would have had under Saddam’s sadist sons. The conclusion of Bush’s intelligence community was that Iran, afraid and chastened, had abandoned its nuclear ambitions. That “IC” was wrong.
President Obama has been the worst of the post-war presidents because he failed even at doing nothing. He did worse than nothing. He acted to legitimize Iranian ambitions and made a $1.7 billion dollar down payment on his policy of appeasement followed by billions of dollars more in sanctions relief through the meaningless promises of the “JCPOA” — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry with the ayatollahs in 2015.
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When Trump gained the presidency in 2017, ruthless realism returned to the Oval Office. Trump tore up the JCPOA — as it had not been a treaty but simply an “Executive Agreement.” It was, of course, his right to do so.
Trump struck Syria twice for using chemical weapons, restoring a “red line” Obama had erased. (Will the new Obama Library have a “Red Line” room into which visitors disappear?) Trump also ordered the destruction of Russia’s “little green men” who dared to attack U.S. forces in Syria. And when Iran would not stop trying to kill Americans in Iraq, Trump ordered Soleimani killed in January 2020, when the Iranian terrorist set foot in Iraq.
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Then the 2020 election and the disaster for the world that was the long regency of whomever was running Joe Biden around while the sadly diminished Biden inhabited the Oval. We won’t know for years who designed the national security policy in those years, but we know whoever was making the decisions oversaw the debacle in Afghanistan which led to the second Russian invasion of Ukraine —the first had come under Obama — and Iran’s lurch towards nuclear weapons and more and more missiles with which to defend that lurch.
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Five months after he returned to power, Trump ordered Operation Midnight Hammer and the Iranian nuclear weapons program was obliterated. At that point, Trump gave the theocrats in Tehran a choice — abandon your ambitions or face another round of punishment. Ayatollah Khamenei misjudged Trump. The Iranians began again to seek nuclear weapons and, this time, to also produce so many ballistic missiles that no one dared stop them.
Trump, along with the Israeli prime minister, dared. Iran’s military, including their nuclear weapons facilities and their missile factories are in ruins. The ongoing campaign is leveling the regime’s ability to rebuild others, and it may yet destroy the oil infrastructure it would need to begin to pay to start again down this path.
By being tough with the mullahs, indeed ruthless and transparent, Trump has already done the world a great favor. The “Alliance of Tyrants” has suffered blow after blow since Trump returned and more are coming as Iran shudders and communist Cuba teeters on the brink of throwing off their dictators.
President Trump really would like to leave a legacy of peace. But he is the sort of tough and indeed ruthless commander in chief the U.S. needs to put away its enemies, not merely put them in timeout. Here’s hoping he sees this battle through until Iran cannot menace us, Israel, the Gulf Nations or anyone for a generation or three.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show” heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
