If Trump Stops Short in Iran, He Loses Forever

Carrying through on regime change in Iran is the key to success for the Trump foreign policy worldwide. He can’t afford to fall short this time,

Carrying through in Iran would deprive Hamas and Hezbollah of the only power that gives them hope. It would reduce them to minor nuisances.

Stopping short in Iran would renew the threats to America that Trump has been trying to overcome. The threats from Xi and Putin, as well as the Chavistas, Hamas, Hezbollah… and Iran itself.

Carrying through in Iran would enable all of President Trump’s other threats, pressures, and deals around the world to succeed.

Stopping short would waste his achievements everywhere. It would destroy his credibility worldwide. It would give new hope to Hamas and Hezbollah and ensure that they will continue their work to rebuild the power that Israel had all but destroyed. It would undo all the good Israel did – its nearly completed destruction of Hezbollah and two-thirds destruction of Hamas – in the war. It would encourage Trump’s enemies in Venezuela to re-emerge as a power and would make a mockery of his success against Maduro.

It would lead Putin to cheat on every deal he makes with Trump. It would encourage North Korea to invade South Korea.

It would undermine our deterrence of China. Suddenly our forces in the Asia-Pacific would look like parade forces, something we’ll never dare to actually use – “a paper tiger”, as Communist China always called us in Mao’s time. China would soon invade Taiwan. It could become a nuclear war.

Worst of all, Putin would see it as invitation to take his war deeper into Europe. That would draw in America. It would be World War III.

All Trump’s previous deals depend on what he does with the Iran crisis today. All the previous ones were half-way ones. Some of them worked, but in many of them, the other side has cheated on them, hoping Trump would never enforce them. Now he needs one crucial thing in order to make them all come out right: to impose a strong enforcement on Iran. After that, the other cheaters will give up and run for cover.

When President Trump joined in Israel’s war in Iran, and then stopped it on condition that Iran carry out our demands and fully denuclearize, he crossed his Rubicon. There is no turning back.

If he were to try to turn back now, he would reap infamy. Just as Obama did, when he turned back on his own red line against the Assad regime in Syria.

We face a choice between the Trump path and the Obama path.

The Obama path is advocated by the faction in the Administration that keeps trying to pull Trump back and stop him from following through to the end anyway. It may use patriotic rhetoric, but in reality, like Obama, it has a profoundly anti-American ideology.

The Trump path is the strong American one: go forward and reap the glory. Not just win a round, but win for keeps.

This time around, the can cannot be kicked down the road. Only the full Trump path will work. Doing an Obama path again — cutting a halfway deal, postponing the real decision – would be reckless this time. Because this is the time when the bills on the previous halfway deals come due. Now they have to be enforced. Kicking the can down the road this time would mean that the deal’s requirements never come due and our enemies are free to run wild against us. They would rightly understand it that way — right.

Now is the time for the Trump path.