OPINION:
For more than four decades, the United States has tried to contain the Islamic Republic of Iran. That approach has failed. The moment has come for something far more decisive: help liberate Iran and safeguard the world from its terror. Thanks to President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Iranians now have a historic opportunity to reclaim their country. If the regime falls, the president eliminates the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, neutralizes a nuclear threat and advances freedom in the Middle East.
The Islamic Republic arose from a hostile takeover in 1979. Like the Cuban Revolution, which was born from a coalition of groups resisting an autocrat, the Islamic Revolution united various factions against the Shah. From exile, Ruhollah Khomeini used Shiite Islam to mobilize a populist force to topple the monarchy. Although secular leftists played an important role in the uprising, the revolution was soon dominated by fanatical religious zealots. After consolidating power through a referendum, Khomeini and his clerical allies purged the secular left and subjected Iran to decades of totalitarian rule. What followed was far worse than life under the Shah.
The new regime metastasized into a brutal, chauvinist, theocratic dictatorship that used its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij militia to repress its people, subjugate women and export terrorism beyond its borders. Women and girls were targeted with gender repression by the regime’s Guidance Patrol, the so-called morality police, while dissidents faced fabricated national security charges and the confiscation of their property. Human rights reports estimate that the regime executed as many as 30,000 Iranians during the 1980s alone. More recently, security forces killed as many as 1,500 protesters in 2019 and 2020, 573 in 2023 and tens of thousands during the recent crackdown.
Iran’s war against the U.S. began in 1979 when Khomeini’s supporters stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and the ayatollah justified the act by branding America “the Great Satan.” For 444 days, his followers held dozens of Americans hostage at gunpoint. During a failed 1980 rescue mission, eight U.S. service members died. Four years later, the regime’s terrorist proxy, Hezbollah, detonated a truck bomb outside a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American service members. In 1984, President Reagan designated Iran a “state sponsor of terrorism.”
The attacks did not stop there. In 1988, a U.S. warship struck an Iranian mine in the Persian Gulf, killing 10 sailors. In 1996, Hezbollah bombed the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. airmen. After U.S. forces returned to Iraq, Iran armed and trained Shiite militias responsible for the deaths of at least 603 service members. In 2019, an Iran-backed militia killed a U.S. military contractor in Iraq, and in 2020, Iran launched ballistic missiles on the Ain al-Asad base, leaving more than 140 U.S. soldiers with traumatic brain injuries.
Tehran and its proxies also have terrorized U.S. allies and their civilian populations around the world. In 1994, Hezbollah bombed a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 86 civilians and injuring more than 300. By the early 2010s, the regime armed and supported Houthi militants attacking Saudi Arabia, and from 2012 to 2020, it sent billions of dollars to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, helping arm Hezbollah forces operating there. Tehran has also provided military aid to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, terrorist groups responsible for the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel.
The Iranian regime also spent decades deceiving international inspectors in its pursuit of an illicit nuclear weapons program.
Iran began importing sensitive nuclear materials from China and Pakistan in the late 1980s. In 1987, it acquired technical schematics for centrifuges from the A.Q. Khan network. By the 1990s, Iranian scientists were drafting plans for nuclear warheads while conducting secret underground tests.
In 2003, an Iranian opposition group exposed previously undisclosed nuclear facilities at Natanz and Arak. The International Atomic Energy Agency subsequently concluded that Tehran had violated its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Although Iran publicly pledged to halt its weapons program, it continued to conceal key activities from inspectors.
In 2009, Western intelligence uncovered a covert enrichment facility near Qom. By the mid-2010s, U.S. intelligence assessments warned that Tehran had accumulated significant uranium stockpiles and installed thousands of centrifuges across multiple facilities, giving it the technical capacity to develop a nuclear weapon.
Taken together, these acts amount to more than isolated acts of terrorism.
The Correlates of War conflict data model defines a “war” as a conflict that produces at least 1,000 battle-related fatalities within a year. Although the nearly 1,000 fatalities attributed to Iran’s actions have accumulated over decades rather than a single year, Washington would be mistaken to view Tehran’s targeting of its service members as anything less than a de facto declaration of war.
Over time, the Islamic Revolution evolved into a movement defined by hostility toward the United States and Western values. The post-revolution defacement of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran with anti-American murals and slogans underscores how the ayatollah’s regime fused its revolutionary identity with an enduring campaign against the United States.
Our nation is bound to the Iranian people through a shared struggle against tyranny, and the president is right to align our mission with their liberation. A free Iran would make the United States and the world safer. The two are inseparable.
Skeptics will warn that confronting Tehran risks further instability in the region. Yet four decades of containment have only emboldened the regime’s aggression, expanded its terrorist network and brought it closer to nuclear capability.
Isolationists will call for retreat in the name of peace, but recent YouGov polling shows that most Republicans support U.S. strikes against the regime: 76% approve, including 65% of self-identified MAGA Republicans who strongly approve.
The United States remains the most powerful force to ever stride the face of the Earth. It should not tolerate or cower to threats and acts of terrorism.
President Trump understands this. Real Republicans — conservatives who choose strength over weakness — and liberty over appeasement — will stand with him until Iran is free.
• Jeffrey Scott Shapiro is a former senior official who served at the U.S. Agency for Global Media in the first Trump administration (2017-2021). He currently serves on the editorial board for The Washington Times.
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