On the Ellipse this week, twenty-five years after two towers fell, President Trump stood beside a battered piece of steel from the South Tower and did what he does at almost every occasion: folded the past into the present. He awarded Welles Crowther, the “man in the red bandana,” a posthumous Medal of Freedom. He retold his own contested story of firefighters carrying him from the rubble. And then, without much of a seam, he pivoted to Iran: “I will tell you, we’re right now fighting because we have a certain nation that wanted a nuclear weapon. They were very close to getting it, and now they have no chance at getting it. They will never have a nuclear weapon. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. And they’ve been punished greatly. As you know, we’ve really taken it to them.”

It would be easy to write this off as a president who can’t resist making every occasion about himself, or about whatever fight he’s currently waging. But underneath the self-regard is an argument worth taking seriously, even by people who find the packaging distasteful.

Start with what’s true and well-documented, because it stands on its own. Iran has been a designated state sponsor of terrorism since 1984 — the longest continuous designation in the State Department’s history. That designation isn’t incidental to the regime’s identity; it flows from it. Since Khomeini branded the United States the “Great Satan” and Israel the “Little Satan” in 1979, hostility toward both has functioned as a load-bearing pillar of the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy, not a policy that shifts with the political weather. The IRGC’s Qods Force has spent decades building, arming, and directing a network of proxies: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, militias across Iraq and Syria. Iranian operatives and their proxies have been tied to bombings, hostage-takings, and assassination plots from Buenos Aires to Berlin, and more recently to plots against dissidents and former US officials on American soil. None of this is contested history. It is about as close to bipartisan consensus as Washington gets.

That record is the load-bearing wall of any case for confronting Iran. It doesn’t need 9/11 to be true.

The harder question is whether 9/11 itself belongs in that case, and intellectual honesty demands an answer: not directly. Al-Qaeda was a Sunni jihadist movement that regarded Shia Iran with open hostility. The 9/11 Commission found strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of eight to ten of the Saudi “muscle” hijackers between October 2000 and February 2001 — border officials were told not to stamp their passports — and documented earlier contacts and training arrangements linking Iranian security officials, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda back to the early 1990s. But on the one point that matters most here, the Commission was unambiguous: it found no evidence Iran or Hezbollah knew of the plot before it happened. That conclusion has since been challenged, by plaintiffs in civil terrorism suits and by a couple of Iranian intelligence defectors, but it remains the official finding. Treating Iran as complicit in 9/11 itself is not a claim the record supports.

So the Ellipse speech isn’t really a historical argument. It’s an emotional one. The anniversary supplies the feeling — never forget, the enemy adapts, so must we. Iran’s terror record supplies the substance. Braided together, they produce a narrative in which the last twenty-five years read as one continuous war against actors who use terrorism as statecraft — al-Qaeda, then ISIS, now an Iranian-led proxy network — whether or not any single one of them planned the towers’ collapse. It is rhetorically effective. It is not, strictly, history.

Which raises the question that matters more than the rhetoric: what do we owe Trump in patience for what this war costs — oil prices most visibly?

“Slack” is the wrong frame, because it implies forgiving a mistake. Higher oil prices from a confrontation with a major producer aren’t a mistake to excuse; they’re the price tag of the policy, and they deserve to be named as such rather than hidden or waved off as regrettable but beside the point. Every serious effort to constrain a state sponsor of terrorism with real energy leverage has carried an economic cost — sanctions regimes, oil shocks, inflation that shows up at the pump and in the grocery bill. That was true of the embargoes of the 1970s. It’s true now.

The honest version of this argument doesn’t ask readers to give Trump slack. It asks whether the trade is worth making: a regime with a live nuclear program and forty years of terror sponsorship, set against months or years of elevated energy costs. Reasonable people — including plenty who have no love for the Iranian regime — will land in different places. Some will say the costs of confrontation are front-loaded and finite, while the cost of an Iranian bomb is neither. Others will say oil shocks fall hardest on people who had no vote in the decision, and that a president asking the country to bear them owes it a plainer accounting than a memorial speech allows.

Both things can be true. Iran’s record as a terrorism sponsor is damning enough that it doesn’t need to borrow 9/11’s weight. And a president asking Americans to pay for a war owes them something more precise than a firefighter story and a steel beam.