Andrew McCarthy of National Review Online assesses current conditions in one of America’s longtime enemy states.
Since 1979, the Shiite jihadist regime of Iran has been the most insidious geopolitical challenge for the United States. “Death to America” has been not merely its slogan but its organizing principle: The objective of revolutionary jihadism is to spread the dominion of its fundamentalist version of sharia — Islam’s classical law and societal framework — throughout the world. As the leader of the West and backer of the shah, whom Ruhollah Khomeini’s insurrection toppled in 1979, America has stood as the obstacle to the regime’s sharia-supremacist ambitions. The Iranian government’s Jew hatred is doctrinal. Its hatred of the United States, and its plots against America in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria — indeed, even on our own streets — is strategic. …
… In the face of these atrocities, President Trump and his administration have given the Iranian people rhetorical support — a stark and welcome change from the cold, deaf ear that President Obama turned to their cries for help in 2009. Trump, furthermore, has warned that military action would be taken if the regime persisted in the killing. The killing has continued nonetheless, and there are signs that an American attack — one that would presumably be more broad-based than the U.S. strikes in June against the regime’s nuclear facilities — is imminent. …
… There is no shortage of rebuke, and deservedly so, of President Trump’s itch to abandon the post–World War II global order dominated by America and our allies, in favor of a version of “great power” geopolitics in which — for the siren song of “stability” — Russia and China could expect deference from America in their “spheres of influence.” But years before that, Obama undertook to reorder the Middle East into an Iranian sphere of influence.
