The war is not a choice. Calling it off would be.

The Iranian regime’s war on the West has been inherent in its nature for all its 47 years. America’s only choice has been to fight back in the war or to make temporary truces and fight later.

Iran has used all those truces to ramp up its threat. Its proxies keep us in recurrent terrorism and turmoil. Its nuclear and missile programs place us in mortal danger and get nearer each time to a point of effective deterrence, i.e. the point of no return.

Our choice was not the war itself, but to get serious about our side of it

It was not really war that America chose in 2025. The choice was rather: to take up its own side of the ongoing, decades-old war.

The work on its side of the war must now be completed. Failure to do this – failure to change the regime and get a fundamentally different, friendly regime in its place – would leave the danger not just intact but worsened.

We would be facing an IRGC regime if anything more vicious than the Ayatollah’s, and a rush to get the a-bomb and use it no matter the cost, rather than let us get in the way again. Our friends in the region, Arab and Israeli alike, have told us clearly: We must finish the job.

The nature of the Islamist war-regime

The Iranian regime began from its very start in 1979 an irreconcilable war on the West; and not just on the West proper, but on all the West’s friends and influences, starting with its region. This war is inherent in its nature as a totalitarian Islamist regime.

That is why the West has only been able to get truces with it for the last 47 years. All the seemingly plausible hopes vested in the truces, from the release of the embassy hostages to the nuclear deal to the truce that called off the 12-day war, have evaporated. The practical meaning of the truces has always ended up being: to give the regime the time and space to retrench and build new capabilities for activating the war.

The alternative: Real Regime Change

It was wise in 2025 and again in 2026 for America to cease giving Iran the space to build its forces to the point of irreversibility. It was a necessary move in this long war.

What has been unwise has been to keep interrupting the Western war effort and aiming at another truce with this regime, in the name of reviving the delusion that we would be at peace then. This has given the regime time to recover its footing, harden its reserves, and make it more difficult to finally dislodge it and end the threat.

Failure to win this war would be to lose it in reality. It would have poked the hornet’s nest and left the hornets all seething with revenge on us.

The Soviet and North Korean Cases Confirm This

It is similar to how the Soviet regime allowed only truces with the West. And how all the hopes invested in those truces failed decade after decade. Leaders changed, threats varied between more and less intense, but the underlying threat remained.

Fortunately Soviet ideology had more bridges to Western enlightenment ideology than Islamist ideology has. That gave the truces with it greater value than the truces with the Islamist Republic.

After 70 years, a new generation of Russian leaders finally changed their ideology fundamentally in the 1980s. The regime changed itself in a core way. This allowed real peace and real freedom for a number of years. Even if those years were not used well and the threat is back, still the change was truly hopeful for the world,.

In Iran, the regime has simply not changed. It has only grown worse.

The appeasement of the Iranian regime is dangerously similar to what happened with North Korea. It was allowed, by our government’s decades of temporizing and deal-making, to keep getting the space to build and rebuild its threat. Today we face an existential danger from it, one that we can no longer eliminate and that will continue to pose a deadly threat every day for years into the future.

We must not let this happen with Iran as well. Its regime is every bit as malicious toward us as North Korea’s. And it is far more volatile and apocalyptic in its ideology – far more prone to a kamikaze bout of nuclear destruction.

Fortunately the Iranian regime can end. It was tottering in both of the latest rounds of this war, before we saved it by calling off those rounds. We feared paying a real price for finally resolving the matter on the ground.

The price would be real for seeing it through and ensuring a true change. But it would be modest compared to the costs of all our other important wars. It would be orders of magnitude less than the price – ultimately a nuclear price – of leaving the job undone.

We must listen to our friends this time and finish the job.