What the disloyal leaks about Iran prove about Trump

Trump did what past leaders should have: Take an enemy at its word.

by Marc A. Thiessen

The leaking and finger-pointing on Iran by MAGA disloyalists have begun. The Wall Street Journal reports that then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard warned President Donald Trump in February that if he attacked, “Tehran would rush to close the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing the global energy market.”

Her admonition “echoed warnings Trump was receiving from all corners,” the Journal wrote, including from top military leaders who expressed “concerns about the weapons stockpile and readiness problems for an overstretched force” and from Vice President JD Vance, who “promoted a more cautious approach” focused on negotiations that would be “less costly than a war with unwieldy consequences.”

The message of the leakers is clear: Had Trump only listened to us, we would not be in this mess.

In fact, these self-serving leaks actually show the opposite — by demonstrating what a courageous decision Trump made. Virtually alone, surrounded by naysayers, Trump acted to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

Indeed, Trump not only ignored the words of the naysayers, he did something few presidents before him have ever done: He listened to the words of the enemy.

The most tragic mistake that world leaders made over the past century was the failure to take the words of the monsters of history seriously. These tyrants repeatedly stated precisely what they intended to do, but their ideas were assumed to be too foolish, or too fantastic, to be serious.

In the early 1900s, Vladimir Lenin published a pamphlet called “What Is To Be Done?” in which he laid out his plans to overthrow the Russian czar and establish a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The world didn’t take his words seriously, and the totalitarian empire he founded spawned communist revolution across the globe that killed an estimated 100 million people and brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

In the 1920s, Adolf Hitler published “Mein Kampf,” in which he laid out his plan to establish a thousand-year reich in Germany and eradicate the Jews. The world didn’t take his words seriously, and his Nazi regime built gas chambers, set the world aflame and killed 17 million people.

In the late 1990s, Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa declaring war on the West, calling on all Muslims to wage “jihad against the enemies of God, your enemies the Israelis and Americans.” The world didn’t take his words seriously, and on Sept. 11, 2001, his followers flew airplanes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

In 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin published a 7,000 word manifesto explaining that Ukraine had been stolen from Russia, its “historical motherland,” and promising to reunite them. The world didn’t take his words seriously, and a few months later he launched the largest land invasion in Europe since World War II — a war that has resulted in more than 2 million military and civilian dead and wounded so far.

The lesson is clear: When tyrants and terrorists say what they intend to do, take them at their word.

That is what Trump did with Iran. For 47 years, the Iranian regime pledged to bring “death to America.” In a 2023 speech, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared, “When you chant ‘Death to America,’ it is not just a slogan, it is a policy,” adding that were it not for America the “artificial Zionist regime would have been destroyed.” In 2022, he declared, “Yes, it will happen. Death to America will happen.”

Iran and its proxies have waged relentless war against the United States for nearly five decades — from the 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran to the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the provision of “explosively formed penetrators” to insurgents in Iraq that killed and maimed thousands of American troops, the 2011 plot to set off a bomb in Cafe Milano in Washington, to the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas that killed 46 Americans, among countless other attacks.

If Iran did all this without a nuclear umbrella, imagine the destruction it would wreak if it gets one.

And that is assuming Iran only wants such a weapon as a deterrent. There is a real danger the Iranian regime could be seeking a nuclear weapon in order to use it.

The Islamic republic is run by members of a Shiite sect known as “Twelvers” who believe, as historian Bernard Lewis explained, that the “time is now” for the return of the 12th imam — the “Mahdi” — a “Christ-like” figure who disappeared in 873 A.D. but is not really dead. Rather, Lewis wrote, he “has been hidden away by God” and “will return, as mahdi, at the end of time” to “establish the Kingdom of God on earth.” Anyone who might seek to usher in the end times cannot be allowed to obtain the means of doing so.

It is folly to think that America can reason its way to a durable agreement with negotiators from the Iranian theocracy. Even if Iran were to reach an agreement to give up its nuclear weapons, they would cheat on it — just like North Korea cheated on the nuclear deal it reached with President Bill Clinton in 1994.

Trump’s attack on Iran was not a blunder; it was the bravest foreign policy decision any president has done in my lifetime. Trump acted despite the personal political costs, despite all the doves around him urging him not to do so, despite the unrelenting opposition of Democrats in Congress.

He is the first American president to take the words of our enemy seriously — and act before they were able to kill millions. Even if it hurts him politically in November, he will be rewarded by history.

The conversation explores a wide range of critical perspectives on Marc Thiessen's opinion piece regarding Trump's actions towards Iran. Many participants express skepticism and disapproval of Trump's decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, arguing that it led to... Show more

By Marc A. Thiessen

Marc Thiessen writes a column for The Post on foreign and domestic policy. He is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush.follow on X@marcthiessen