In just a few days, Operation Epic Fury has eliminated Iran’s leadership, degraded its capacity to terrorize the West, and — for the moment — united the Middle East and most of the world around a vital American interest.
It’s still early, of course. But so far, President Donald Trump has achieved a strategic masterstroke. He has done so by reviving America’s oldest, simplest and best national security policy: peace through strength.
Yet Washington Democrats are blasting the president for ordering the attacks at all. They still cling, bitterly, to President Barack Obama’s delusion of pacifying the ayatollahs through diplomacy and appeasement, not only lifting sanctions but literally delivering pallets of cash to one of America’s most dangerous enemies. On the other side of the aisle, some principled MAGA conservatives are understandably wary of another forever war in the Middle East.
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But both critiques misapprehend this mission, this commander in chief, and his national security strategy.
First, the president’s Go order Friday morning was not a rejection of diplomacy. It was an acknowledgment that diplomacy with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was impossible. Eight American presidents have tried to deal with Iran since the 1979 revolution. After 47 years of theft, murder and terror, even Donald Trump was forced to acknowledge there was no deal there for America to make.
Diplomacy that isn’t ultimately backstopped by force isn’t diplomacy. It’s weakness — the kind that invites rather than prevents wars.
Once Trump decided to act, he ensured our troops would work hand-in-glove with the region’s most lethal military and best intelligence, courtesy of our friends in Israel.
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Second, Donald Trump is neither a Messianic crusader nor a naive nation-builder. He has been president for five years, and the closest thing to a “forever war” he has ever started was his boycott of the White House Correspondents Dinner – and even that is coming to an end. Trump has been a peaceable president and, indeed, a peacemaker. His military interventions have been uniformly swift, decisive and effective.
Peace through strength is most associated with Ronald Reagan’s approach during the Cold War. But its principles can be seen in the foreign policies — however diverse in application — of Richard Nixon, Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt, and the Founding generation.
George Washington said, “To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.” So is applying overwhelming force to quickly resolve discrete, urgent national threats diplomacy cannot. Trump has hewn closer to both rules than any president in a generation.
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As the Heritage Foundation documents in our new 2026 Index of Military Strength, President Trump has built his administration, our armed forces, and his global strategy around the defense of America’s vital interests. Remnants of his predecessors’ globalism and politicization still rattle around the federal budget and nat-sec bureaucracy. But Trump is reforming our military more rapidly and comprehensively than most experts give him credit for.
It’s not luck.
Trump’s pragmatic peace-through-strength approach protects himself, our troops, and our nation from potential quagmires. Even as spirits are running high this week, Trump speaks humbly about the narrow, modest goals of the Iran war: decapitate and defang the regime and then hand the country over to the Iranian people.
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No chest-thumping about a New World Order. No cringy, “Islam means peace” pandering. No “cakewalk” hubris. Just a straightforward settling of accounts with the beating heart of global terrorism and the oil-rich co-conspirator in Russian and Chinese mischief.
In a just world, Epic Fury would put an end to the GOP Establishment’s habit of smearing the America First Right as “isolationist.” Conservative critics of Bush-era adventurism were never any such thing. That is why most of us are cheering Trump’s leadership in Iran today.
A targeted, overwhelming military response to decades of violent aggression and years of diplomatic stonewalling is what peace through strength looks like. So do President Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s reforms of the Pentagon budget. So do Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s frank, but friendly speeches, at the last two Munich Security Conferences.
Operation Epic Fury, like President Trump’s prior interventions in Iran and Venezuela, do not contradict his peace-brokering in Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere. They are all applications of peace through strength, the only American foreign policy that has ever really worked.
