Donald Trump’s actions in the Middle East continually surprise the foreign policy establishment and media elite. According to commentators on both the right and the left, the reason is that Trump is a megalomaniac—or, as Jon Stewart and former U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan recently agreed on The Daily Show, perhaps addicted to cocaine.
Yet while Trump has repeatedly defied the Beltway consensus on Iran and its allies over the past year and a half, none of the dire consequences that influential commentators predicted have come to pass. World War III hasn’t erupted. The global economy hasn’t collapsed. Instead, the Iranian leadership is dead or decapitated, its nuclear weapons program is buried beneath mountains of rubble, and most of its navy lies at the bottom of the sea. While the loss of 13 U.S. servicemen is a serious matter, it is hardly the thousands of dead and wounded that were routinely predicted as the consequence of any major U.S. action. Israel still exists. So do Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait, along with their oil reserves.
Trump has inflicted heavy punishment in return for relatively light consequences, but pundits insist that a masterful Iran is dictating events. Tehran’s “successful” war-fighting tactics supposedly forced Trump to accept a ceasefire. Onlookers were then baffled when the U.S. walked away from talks in Islamabad and took steps to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, to the strategic detriment of China and the benefit of U.S. energy producers.
In part, the surprises keep coming, because the cognoscenti refuse to credit Trump and Netanyahu with a win. On April 11, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman said the quiet part out loud on CNN’s Smerconish. He admitted that while he wanted to see the Iranian regime defeated militarily “because this regime is a terrible regime for its people and the region,” the real problem for him was something else entirely: “I really don’t want to see Bibi Netanyahu or Donald Trump politically strengthened by this war because they are two awful human beings. They are both engaged in anti-democratic projects in their own countries. They’re both alleged crooks. They are terrible, terrible people doing terrible things to America’s standing in the world and Israel’s standing in the world.”
Friedman’s attitude is not idiosyncratic. Across much of the American and Israeli media, seasoned pundits cannot set aside their contempt for Trump and Netanyahu and have joined the chorus portraying the operation as aimless adventurism. In doing so, they advance the very arguments that serve America’s enemies, undermining the credibility of a successful deterrent action and weakening the case for strong, burden-sharing alliances in the 21st century.
Trump’s Iran campaign is proving so difficult for many observers to parse because it is two conflicts in one. On the battlefield, it pits American and Israeli forces against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. At home, in the realm of ideological warfare, it sets two rival American strategic belief systems against each other—but with a twist. In one corner stand traditional conservatives, represented today by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. In the other stand the transnational progressives associated with Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But this corner is crowded: standing alongside them are influential isolationist figures such as Tucker Carlson and restraint-oriented institutions such as the Cato Institute and Defense Priorities, who routinely repeat the same arguments, often verbatim.
Why does the isolationist right stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the globalist left? Along with a common set of enemies in Trump and Netanyahu, the progressives and America Firsters share a dislike for American global leadership and the use of military force, and therefore they both excuse the behavior of America’s enemies while blaming it for any conflict. When it comes to interpreting Trump’s foreign policy and its results, the two groups therefore often function as one.
Conversely, the progressive-isolationist viewpoint is incompatible with traditional post-war American conservatism. Conservatives see the Islamic Republic as a revolutionary theocracy committed to regional expansion, the destruction of Israel, and the expulsion of the United States from the Middle East. Together with China, Russia, and North Korea, the Islamic Republic seeks to overturn the American-led global order—using its nuclear program as a guarantee of immunity for its aggressive actions. The United States has no choice, therefore, but to wrest the program from the talons of the regime.
Progressives and their fellow travelers in the America First movement advance an alternative perspective based on three key principles. First, military force cannot solve the Iranian nuclear challenge. Iran possesses asymmetric options, such as closing the Strait of Hormuz, that outweigh the gains of offensive action. Second, diplomacy remains the best tool for moderating the Islamic Republic. Third, stabilizing the region requires the United States to create distance between itself and its allies, especially Israel. The United States should behave less as Israel’s wartime ally and more as a mediator between Jerusalem and Tehran.
In public debate, the progressives and the MAGA “restrainers” present their three principles as the essence of hardheaded realism. There are strict limits, they argue, on what American military power can achieve in the Middle East. A mature foreign policy begins by acknowledging them. Only the naïve or the ideologically-driven believe that willpower and force can bend reality to their purposes.
However, the respectful bowing to prudence and restraint in the name of “realism” is mostly a species of fakery. What comes first is not deference to reality, but to ideology. The message is always the same: pull back militarily from the Middle East, engage Iran diplomatically, and distance America from Israel. None of these positions was formed by some immutable strategic logic or by a careful reading of facts on the ground. They are fixed principles, which provide the lens through events are narrativized.
Here are the seven core myths around which the progressives and their MAGA restrainer counterparts are constructing a faulty story about the Iran war.
Myth One: This was a “war of choice.”
For the last five weeks, opponents of the Trump administration have repeatedly called this “a war of choice,” a conflict the president launched without cause or coherent purpose. “[W]hen we ask, what is the administration doing? They can’t answer that question because they don’t know why they’re there in the first place,” Jake Sullivan told progressive talk show host Jon Stewart. “They haven’t been able to give us an answer as to what this is all about.”
The administration has, in fact, made a clear and compelling case. It reduces to two interlocking imperatives. The first is Trump’s longstanding red line. As the president has stated repeatedly for years, “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. It’s very simple.” The second is the enabling condition that made this red line urgent: overmatch. Iran’s drones and ballistic missiles can overwhelm the air and missile defenses of Israel, the United States, and their Gulf allies.
In the June 2025 “12-Day War,” Iran absorbed heavy losses to its ballistic arsenal, which fell to roughly 1,500 missiles, and to key production sites. President Trump hoped that those losses would moderate Iranian behavior and bring Tehran to the negotiating table. That hope proved unfounded.
The IRGC moved immediately to rebuild. Work resumed at production plants, and stockpiles in hardened underground missile cities grew. IRGC Aerospace Force Commander Majid Mousavi stated in January 2026 that the arsenal had in fact grogrown since the June war, and that output across multiple sectors had already exceeded pre-war levels. Israeli intelligence assessed that Iran was on track for a stockpile of roughly 8,000 ballistic missiles by 2027.
At the outset of the war, Secretary of State Marco Rubio described overmatch as the factor that drove America to act. “The United States is conducting an operation to eliminate the threat of Iran’s short-range ballistic missiles and the threat posed by their navy, particularly to naval assets,” he said at a March 2 press conference. He then quantified the threat. “They are producing, by some estimates, over 100 of these missiles a month. Compare that to the six or seven interceptors that can be built a month.”
The arithmetic spoke for itself, and it posed two interlocking threats. The first was conventional. Iran would soon have enough missiles and drones to overwhelm the defenses of Israel and every American base in the region. The second was nuclear. The huge conventional arsenal would serve as a shield behind which Iran could pursue a nuclear weapon without fear of retaliation—directly violating the president’s red line. If Iran were left unchecked, Rubio explained, it would soon “have so many conventional missiles, so many drones, and can inflict so much damage, that no one can do anything about their nuclear program.” Once Iran crossed that threshold, which Rubio called the “point of immunity,” the window for action would close permanently.
America therefore had three choices. To do nothing, in which case Iran would soon enter a zone of immunity guaranteed by overmatch. To let Israel attack alone, in which case Iran would attack American forces and cause significant casualties. Or to work together with Israel to eliminate an intolerable threat to both countries.
Myth 2: The JCPOA had moderated Iran and stabilized the Middle East, before Trump broke it.
While arguing about the war, former Obama and Biden staffers are also attempting to justify Obama’s nuclear deal and the strategy that produced it. The JCPOA, Sullivan tells Stewart, worked. Iran was “complying with the deal. Even the Israeli intelligence were saying they were complying with the agreement.” Trump’s 2018 unilateral withdrawal, Sullivan suggests, discarded this successful state of affairs.
This story fails to comport with reality in three crucial ways. First, the timeline doesn’t work. Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in May 2018. Tehran did not begin enriching its uranium to 60%, a major threshold that dramatically shortens the path to a nuclear weapon, until April of 2021. In other words, Tehran made this crucial leap toward weaponization on Biden’s watch, not Trump’s.
And how did Biden respond? With conciliation. The administration stopped enforcing sanctions, especially against Chinese buyers. Iranian oil exports surged, and with them regime revenues. As Iran’s breakout time shrank to a matter of weeks, Biden and his team painted the increasing threat it had created as Trump’s fault. Every Iranian nuclear advance became, in their telling, not only a consequence of the 2018 withdrawal but also a justification for further conciliation. Then National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said so explicitly in April 2022, when Iran was racing forward under Biden’s presidency. Its progress, he explained, “is a direct impact of [Trump’s] pulling out of the nuclear deal, making us less safe, giving us less visibility. And it’s one of the reasons we pursued a diplomatic path, again, when the president took office.”
Biden restored the core logic of the JCPOA unilaterally. Sanctions relief flowed while nuclear constraints collapsed. Tehran blew past the restrictions on the size of its uranium stockpiles and levels of enrichment while Washington relaxed pressure and pursued diplomacy on Iran’s terms. What Sullivan presents as the collapse of the deal was its continuation on asymmetric terms, slavish compliance in Washington without reciprocity in Tehran.
As sanctions enforcement weakened and oil revenue from China flowed, the regime did not moderate. Iran accelerated its missile and drone programs, deepened its support for proxies, and hardened the capabilities that now define the battlefield. Sanctions relief generated revenue. Revenue funded missiles, drones, and proxies. Those capabilities produced the overmatch that eroded deterrence.
The JCPOA and Biden’s de facto implementation of it financed and enabled the capabilities that drove the region toward large scale conflict. Under Biden, Iran reached 60% enrichment, expanded its missile and drone programs. The Oct. 7 massacre in Israel was a direct result of Iran’s increasingly advantageous strategic posture.
The United States therefore faced the same strategic choice at the end of the JCPOA process as it did at the beginning, but under worse conditions and against a stronger adversary. The policy, that is to say, ensured that the confrontation would come after Iran had advanced closer to immunity.
Myth 3: Biden extracted America from wars in the Middle East.
“When we left office, America was not at war for the first time in 25 years,” Jake Sullivan told Jon Stewart. In this telling, Biden courageously ended Middle Eastern “forever wars.” Trump, Sullivan noted, had campaigned in 2024 as “the peace candidate,” only to change course, perversely, and throw America back into needless conflict.
This claim rests on the same inversion of reality that sustained the defense of the JCPOA itself, namely, that military restraint and diplomatic engagement of Iran had worked. By avoiding direct confrontation with Tehran, and winding down U.S. military involvement, the Biden administration had delivered regional stability and handed its successor an unprecedented calm.
Reality tells a different story, the most violent chapter of which begins on Oct. 7, 2023, when Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei plunged not just Israel but also the United States into one of the most consequential wars of the modern era. That conflict has yet to end and it is reshaping the entire Middle East. Team Biden framed Oct. 7 as a Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This framing advanced the fiction that America itself was not involved in the war. It also absolved Iran of any responsibility for the mass atrocities and hostage-taking by its proxy Hamas, thus allowing the administration to preserve its diplomatic outreach to Tehran.
Meanwhile, Khamenei mobilized the entire Resistance Axis in an asymmetric war against the American alliance system. Hezbollah joined the war on Oct. 8, when it began daily attacks on Israel’s northern border, calibrated to depopulate the north of Israel, bleed Israeli forces and pressure the United States to force a ceasefire that would preserve Hamas in power. A few weeks later, the Houthis launched missiles and drones at Israel while interdicting international shipping in the Red Sea. Iranian-controlled militias in Iraq and Syria opened a direct campaign against American bases. None of these moves seem very peaceful.
Between January 2021 and January 2025, Iranian-backed forces launched hundreds of attacks on American personnel and assets across the Middle East, with the overwhelming majority coming after Oct. 7, 2023. These included well over 170 strikes on U.S. bases in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan, plus dozens of attempts against U.S. Navy vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Three American service members were killed and dozens more wounded.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin publicly acknowledged 83 attacks on U.S. forces before Oct. 2023 alone. After Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, which itself killed 46 American citizens, Iranian proxies launched hundreds of additional rockets, missiles, and drones. The Houthis alone conducted dozens of operations against U.S. warships.
In any previous era, a sustained campaign of this magnitude against American bases and naval vessels would have been called open war. The Biden administration called it historic peace.
Myth 4: Tehran was ready to compromise.
Sullivan told Stewart that, just days before the U.S. and Israel decapitated the regime in Tehran, Iran had put a serious proposal on the table. With the help of Omani mediators in Geneva, Tehran offered concessions that “went a long way towards resolving the nuclear issue.” According to Sullivan, however, the Trump team simply failed to understand what was being offered.
In media interviews, Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi described the Iranian proposal as a breakthrough that put a deal “within our reach.” Tehran proposed zero stockpiling of enriched uranium, with existing material to be down-blended to natural levels and converted into reactor fuel. It offered full IAEA access to all relevant sites, a reduction or pause in enrichment, and even the possibility of American participation in a future civil nuclear program. In exchange, it sought sanctions relief and the unfreezing of assets. Taken in isolation, these terms sound far-reaching, but they did not alter the underlying structure of the JCPOA.
The regime treats its nuclear program, missile and drone arsenal, and proxy network as a single power complex. In negotiations, it is offering temporary and reversible concessions on enrichment levels and stockpiles in return for sanctions relief, while preserving what matters. Down-blended uranium can be re-enriched. Stockpiles can be rebuilt. Meanwhile, Iran’s industrial base, technical expertise, and the broader military system of which the nuclear program is an integral part would all remain untouched.
Under the original JCPOA, sanctions relief did not moderate the regime. Iran accelerated its missile and drone programs, deepened its proxy network, and built the capabilities that now allow the regime to hold 20% of the world’s energy supplies hostage. A new deal on the same old terms would simply have transferred further leverage to Tehran while waiting for a new Democratic administration in Washington that would tolerate a breakout.
Myth 5: Israel dragged America into the war.
In the interview with Stewart, Jake Sullivan distanced himself from the crude conspiracy theory that the Israeli tail is wagging the American dog. “I never bought that,” he said. But he then quickly revealed his alignment with progressive anti-imperialism, in which America is eternally the Great Satan: “I feel like [the Israelis] are a convenient scapegoat for the United States to continue our imperialistic adventures in that part of the world.”
At the same time, he validated the underlying premise that Israel leads America by the nose and against its interests. The Trump administration, he insisted, cannot explain “what this [war] is all about.” Trump and his team “don’t know why they’re there in the first place.” Netanyahu, by contrast, knows exactly what he wants: to “break Iran” and unleash chaos. Sullivan then laid out a supposed divergence of interests. Israel, he suggested, can live with a shattered Iran. The United States cannot. A broken Iran would threaten the Strait of Hormuz, spike global oil prices, trigger refugee flows, and destabilize the world economy. In this telling, Israeli clarity of purpose draws America into a war that serves Israeli interests, not American ones.
A major New York Times article on April 7 about the February 11, 2026, Situation Room meeting reinforced the same impression. Netanyahu arrives with a confident pitch for regime change, complete with a video montage of potential post-theocratic leaders, and Trump responds positively. “Sounds good to me,” he reportedly said. U.S. intelligence later dismisses parts of the Israeli plan as “farcical.” The clear implication is that a hawkish Netanyahu pressed for months while a divided American team was pulled along by a leader so detached from reality that he could barely absorb what he was being told by his canny minders.
This myth ignores the central fact that the bill for JCPOA-enabled Iranian empowerment had already landed on Trump’s desk. First, the Iranian overmatch threat, the danger described in Myth One, endangered both Israel and the United States at the same time. Iranian missiles aimed at Tel Aviv could just as easily target U.S. naval assets and bases across the region. On the eve of the war, the threat was immediate, shared, and growing. American and Israeli strategic interests were therefore aligned: degrade the Iranian threat before it became unmanageable. No amount of hand-wringing about “imperialistic adventures” can alter that basic arithmetic.
Second, President Trump is on record as viewing the Islamic Republic as a mortal threat since the early 1980s—long before Netanyahu’s February 2026 presentation at the White House. He campaigned in three separate elections on preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, repeating his determination to act many dozens of times. Where Barack Obama had expressed his admiration for Iranian terror-master Qassem Soleimani, Trump assassinated him. His instincts aligned with Netanyahu’s because both leaders recognized the same intolerable danger posed by Iran’s aggressive anti-Western posture, which was now accentuated by the threats of overmatch and nuclear breakout. Far from being dragged into war, the United States led the operation as the senior partner in a synchronized campaign that Trump took full responsibility and credit for.
The Trump administration has repeatedly described the U.S.-Israel military relationship as the ideal template for 21st-century alliances. The 2026 National Defense Strategy explicitly calls Israel a “model ally” that “is both willing and able to defend itself with critical but limited support from the United States,” one that does not ask the United States to fight on its behalf. Israel stands out as nearly unique among America’s partners: it is one of the very few allies capable of independently prosecuting sustained, high-intensity military campaigns without requiring American ground troops or direct combat involvement. This self-reliance, which allows Israel to act as a powerful force-multiplier, contrasts sharply with many other allies that depend on extensive U.S. force presence, logistics, and enablers.
Myth 6: Confronting Iran distracts from China.
President Biden directed his staff to end “forever wars,” Jake Sullivan told Jon Stewart, because “China was extremely happy to see the United States tied down in war in the Middle East while they went around the world with their largesse, trying to win influence.” Conflict with Iran, he implied, diverts American attention from the real contest, which is centered not in the Middle East but in the Pacific.
The claim rests on a simple assumption: that the Middle East and the competition with China are separate theaters. They are not.
China serves as Iran’s primary economic lifeline through massive purchases of sanctioned oil and, more importantly, as a supplier of key components that sustain Iran’s military power: sodium perchlorate for solid rocket fuel, carbon fiber, and dual-use electronics. These inputs enabled Iran to rebuild and expand the missile arsenal that now threatens U.S. forces and allies.
Beijing’s role extends beyond supply. Chinese firms have provided satellite imagery and targeting data used by the Houthis to attack U.S. and allied vessels in the Red Sea. When those attacks disrupted global shipping, Chinese and Russian vessels were granted safe passage while Western shipping faced missiles, drones, and costly rerouting. Beijing was not a bystander. It was quite deliberately fomenting and profiting from the very disruption American forces were deployed to contain.
The clearest illustration of this dynamic came in January 2024, when Sullivan flew to Bangkok to meet Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and asked Beijing to use its “substantial leverage with Iran” to restrain the Houthis. The White House said it would “wait to see results.”
The results came quickly. According to Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, Beijing not only refused but encouraged the Houthis to target other nations’ shipping. As Red Sea traffic collapsed, China-linked ships increased their transits and gained commercial advantage. Sullivan had asked China to shut down an operation that was serving Chinese interests. Instead, they increased their mischief.
This episode exposes the flaw at the heart of the progressive framework, which treats Iran and China as potential partners in stabilizing the system, rather than as coordinated actors exploiting it. Meanwhile, Beijing has been building leverage over the two most critical maritime chokepoints in the Indian Ocean: the Bab al-Mandab Strait, anchored by its base in Djibouti, and the Strait of Hormuz, controlled by its partner Iran. In any Taiwan contingency, these chokepoints become decisive. Japan relies on them for roughly 90% of its oil imports, South Korea for about 70%, and Taiwan for roughly 60%. Disruption would cripple America’s allies while leaving China comparatively insulated.
Weakness in the Middle East does not help America conserve its military power for Asia. It hands Beijing leverage over the energy flows and maritime routes that sustain the Asian alliances on which U.S. strategy in the Pacific depends.
Trump and Netanyahu’s campaign against Iran must be understood in this context. Degrading Iranian missile production, naval capabilities, and proxy networks reduces the pressure on U.S. forces, secures vital energy routes, and denies China an asymmetric tool it has carefully cultivated.
The claim that confronting Iran distracts from China reverses reality. The policies that prioritized restraint, accommodation, and distance from Israel strengthened Iran, expanded China’s leverage, and made the current war unavoidable. What is now presented as strategic discipline helped create the very conditions that required force.
Myth 7: Trump and Netanyahu are warmongering megalomaniacs.
In the progressive telling, the personal pathologies of Trump and Netanyahu have dragged the United States into an unnecessary and dangerous war. “Do you really think [Trump] believes … he cracked the code and now he’s invincible?” Jon Stewart asks Jake Sullivan. “I swear to God, I knew people—cocaine did this to them. This is the same. This is how a cocaine person acts. A cocaine person is just like, I’m the best. No, I can’t be stopped.” Jake Sullivan responds without hesitation: “I couldn’t put it better. Yes.”
Rather than admit that years of pursuing an accommodation with Iran produced a stronger, more dangerous adversary, progressives attribute the collapse of their approach to the irrational personalities of their opponents. If only cooler, more restrained leaders had remained in charge, the delicate balance with Tehran would have continued uninterrupted.
This psychological reductionism has now hardened into a broader indictment. Trump and Netanyahu, their critics insist, “have no strategy.” Their failure to achieve total success—regime change, the complete elimination of every underground facility, or the utter erasure of Iran’s military infrastructure—supposedly proves the point.
The record tells a different story. The American-Israeli campaign achieved its core strategic objectives: halting Iran’s advance toward nuclear weapons capability and significantly degrading its ballistic missile program, which together had posed a growing existential threat to Israel and the region. Prior to the operation, Iran was rapidly advancing both programs, with much of its critical infrastructure on the verge of being buried too deeply underground for effective strikes. The joint air campaign delivered devastating blows to Iran’s weapons industry, eliminated key scientists, and has set the nuclear timeline back by many years. At the same time, large portions of Iran’s new missile production network were destroyed before they could be fully protected.
The result was not total elimination of every underground facility or missile launcher, but a decisive disruption of Iran’s most dangerous capabilities. When the dust settled, Iran was also left economically crippled.
This outcome constitutes a clear success because it dramatically lowered the immediate danger without requiring the unattainable “complete victory” standard often demanded by critics who will insist on denying their bêtes noires in Jerusalem and Washington a victory at any cost to their own sense of reality. The operation also produced important secondary effects: Iran’s proxy network has been visibly weakened. The regime itself faces mounting internal pressure that could lead to collapse from within.
In the end, Israel and the United States entered the conflict facing a severe and imminent threat and emerged with that threat meaningfully and verifiably reduced. That is the fundamental measure of victory in war. What the naysayers dismiss as megalomania was, in reality, the clear-eyed recognition that the window for effective action was closing. Trump acted before it slammed shut.
Tehran naturally frames the campaign as a failure in the hope of rallying international sympathy while downplaying the regime’s own deepening vulnerabilities. It also joins with Moscow and Beijing to foil the new military partnership that Trump and Netanyahu have created. If the alliance succeeds, it will have not only degraded a key member of the anti-American axis but also vindicated the conservative vision of alliances built on capable, self-reliant partners. The 2026 National Defense Strategy’s designation of Israel as a model ally points the way toward a future in which America shoulders less of the global burden. That outcome directly undercuts the adversaries’ preference for a weakened, distracted United States tied down by endless regional conflicts.
It is no surprise, then, that Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran broadcast the “megalomaniacs with no strategy” storyline. What is far more disappointing is that so much of the domestic and allied opposition—large segments of the Democratic Party, the anti-Netanyahu camp in Israel, The New York Times, and much of the European press—echoes the same script almost verbatim, ignoring the fact that it was their own preferred policies that brought about a situation that supposedly proves that force cannot work. The obvious damage done by the progressive paradigm thereby serves as its own vindication—a perfect jujitsu move.
History will record the opposite: those who recognized the threat and acted before the window closed dealt with the world as it is and protected the national interest. Those who demanded restraint until restraint was no longer an option built their policies on fantasies that endangered us all.