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FOREIGN POLICY

Is Trump Abandoning the Iranian People and Guaranteeing War? by Robert Williams

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21710/abandoning-the-iranian-people

“Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of prisoners might be at risk of executions.” — Mahmood Amiry Moghaddam, director of the Norway-based Iran Human Rights Organization, June 26, 2025.

Iran… has reportedly executed 1,700 people in 2025 alone — and it is not even August.

US President Donald J. Trump deserves every credit for bombing the Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan uranium enrichment plants. However, forcing Israel to terminate its “Operation Rising Lion,” just as it was finally giving the Iranian people a glimpse of hope for freedom in the course of destroying Iran’s nuclear program and its key institutions of oppression, was a terrible move. It left Iranians abandoned to a gruesome fate under a regime that had been likely weeks away from facing total destruction. Why? For another 46 years of “fake talks”?

The Trump administration cannot thank Qatar enough for “helping” to negotiate every transition. Qatar is doubtless delighted to help, to make sure that none of its well-funded clients gets hurt. Qatar does not want regime change in Iran. Qatar has also promised Trump more than a trillion dollars in investments in the US.

By rescuing Iran’s regime, is Trump signaling to the people of Iran that actual peace in the Middle East might be just a dream; that more than 90 million Iranian people are seemingly not worthy of the same freedom that other nations have and that they should suffer unspeakable persecution forever?

Throughout the war, most Western leaders aside from Trump, from their comfortable clubs, called for “ceasefires” and “de-escalation”, while Israel was fighting for its existence — and theirs. Would they have preferred to wait for the ballistic missiles Iran was launching at Israel to be nuclear-tipped?

Iran’s mullahs are not going to put their country back in shape: they are going put their nuclear weapons program, war machine and private militia, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), back in shape. The mullahs must be congratulating themselves on how much better it is to be America’s enemy than its friend.

Trump’s newfound generosity towards the Islamic Republic of Iran — whatever happened to “maximum pressure”? — will only allow it to strengthen its hold on power, rebuild its terrorist proxies, establish additional terrorist sleeper cells in the West, continue arming Venezuela, all while the Iranian people will see neither freedom nor prosperity. In addition, it will guarantee further war later on, not only in the Middle East, but also in the West.

The day after Israel began to strike Iran on June 13, the Islamic Republic ratcheted up its crackdown on the captive Iranian people The only activity at which Iran’s regime seems to excel is brutally attacking its innocent, unarmed population.

Since then, at least 1,295 people have been arrested on security-related charges, including “espionage for Israel,” according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency. In addition, it noted, “at least 301 individuals were detained nationwide for sharing content, expressing opinions, or participating on social media.”

Donald Trump, Meet the Twelfth Imam Peter Smith

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/middle-east/donald-trump-and-the-twelfth-imam/

I am a bit this way but mostly that way on Trump’s strategy on Iran. Mostly unenamoured. Dropping those bunker-buster bombs was an unmitigated good thing. It seems unlikely after the Israel bombardment and Trump’s coup de grâce that the Iranians will be able to get back on the nuclear track very quickly, even if some minor mole in the Pentagon leaked it otherwise. But where to from here? Has anything been lastingly solved? Hardly.

While the mullahs call the shots nothing will change. I get the impression from Trump that he believes the Iranian leaders will get behind a MIGA movement (make Iran great again). Doubt it. He is dealing with religious fanatics who look forward to the end times when Muhammad al-Mahdi, the twelfth imam, will return and make Shia Islam great again.

I trust that someone has educated Trump on Islam. Otherwise, however good his negotiation skills, he is out of his depth. Islamists (i.e., fundamentalist Muslims to which legion the ayatollahs most certainly belong) will lie and cheat with impunity if they believe it is in the interests of protecting and promoting Islam. They are obliged to do so. Quite simply you can’t deal with them on a transactional basis. Netanyahu understands that. That’s why he must be secretly ropeable about Trump’s 12-days war when many more days were required.

An opportunity has been recklessly thrown away. Not only to inflict considerably more damage on Iran’s military apparatus but to trigger a regime change; the only pathway to a lasting peaceful solution. There is no other. Was Trump fearful of being blamed for American casualties if the war continued? I hope not. That would be the most fatal of flaws. There is another explanation. Bad enough but not so bad.

A clue is in Trump’s comment: “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f**k they’re doing.” The expletive is unimportant. What is important is the equivalence he appears to draw between Iran and Israel. Don’t get me wrong. Trump knows where the fault lies. The equivalence he is drawing is a transactional one.

The Great President Trump’s Worst, Terrible, Bad Idea Ever by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21723/the-great-president-trump-worst-terrible-bad-idea

Qatar’s job, if it is part of a consortium controlling the Gaza Strip, will be to make sure that the jihad against Israel continues.

If Egypt is in any way involved in securing the Gaza Strip, it is certain there will be renewed smuggling of weapons and terrorists into Israel through and under the Rafah Crossing. The weapons-and-terrorists industry has always been far too profitable and far too successful at attacking Israel just to give up.

Trump’s original plan to make Gaza an American Riviera, together with Israel — or Israeli sovereignty by itself — is a far more dependable way to guarantee security. It is, in fact, the only way to ensure that Israel can either defend itself, or has a US shield nearby to deter aggression — the same way the US stations the forward HQ of Central Command and Air Forces Central Command at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, to protect its survival.

There were rumors this week that a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas might ultimately include a consortium of Arab countries taking charge of the Gaza Strip.

Unfortunately, hardly anything could be more dangerous than that for the stability of the region. A consortium of Arab countries governing the tiny strip of land next to Israel is, in fact, is a sure-fire recipe for a monstrous conflict just around the corner. This plan will make all the breathtaking achievements of US President Donald J. Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the great US Air Force and the Israel Defense Forces be for naught.

The problem: If a consortium of Arab countries controls the Gaza Strip, one of those countries is bound to be Qatar. Qatar will no doubt make sure of that. One of Qatar’s main reasons for existing is to make sure that radical Islamic organizations stay active and well-funded. It is hard to think of an Islamist terrorist group that has not been a large beneficiary of Qatar — from ISIS, to al-Qaeda, to the Taliban, not to mention Hamas.

Buried News: President Trump ends Africa’s deadliest war By Wendy Kinney

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/06/buried_news_president_trump_ends_africa_s_deadliest_war.html

A thirty-year war. Over six million lives lost. Entire villages erased. Generations destroyed by the silent carnage that the world chose to ignore. But in the wake of mounting atrocities in Kasanga and Beni, and after months of quiet diplomacy, the silence has finally been shattered.

Today, something happened that the United Nations never accomplished. Something the European Union only debated. Something the Biden administration didn’t even attempt.

President Donald J. Trump brought peace to Central Africa.

After decades of devastation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), fueled by regional proxy warfare with Rwanda and the brutality of militias like M23, the unthinkable has occurred: a signed peace agreement. Rwanda and the DRC, after thirty years of war and unfathomable loss, have reached a ceasefire. And it was President Trump who brokered the deal.

This is not a footnote. This is one of the most significant diplomatic achievements in modern African history. It didn’t come from the echo chambers of Brussels or the empty chambers of the United Nations. It came from action. Resolve. Leadership.

The world has long turned a blind eye to what happened in the DRC. Since the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, eastern Congo has become a graveyard of the innocent. Militias, backed at times by foreign actors, ravaged the land. M23 rebels, in particular, carried out atrocities across North Kivu, Ituri, and the Kasai provinces.

The death toll surpassed six million. That number is staggering. It eclipses nearly every modern conflict, yet barely registers in Western headlines. Even as late as Holy Week this year, the world was silent as Christians were massacred in Kasanga and Beni.

But President Trump noticed.

Obama’s Doomed and Dangerous Deal Daryl McCann (May 2015)

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/from-our-archives/wiser-men-iranian-deal/

Back in December 2013, former US secretaries of state Henry Kissinger (who served from 1973 to 1977) and George Shultz (1982 to 1989) wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal titled “What a Final Iran Deal Must Do”. This missive appeared a week after President Obama signed the 2013 interim nuclear agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran, one that purported to temporarily freeze Tehran’s decade-long advance towards military nuclear capability. Kissinger and Shultz warned that the Islamic Republic’s quest for the nuclear bomb would be enhanced by the 2013 interim agreement. On April 12, 2015, a week after Obama celebrated his latest “breakthrough” with the Mullahs of Iran, the so-called framework for a preliminary nuclear agreement, Kissinger and Shultz published a sequel in the Wall Street Journal, this time titled “The Iran Deal and Its Consequences”. The worst fears of the former secretaries of state appeared to be confirmed by the latest turn of events:

“negotiations that began 12 years ago as an international effort to prevent an Iranian capability to develop a nuclear arsenal are ending with an agreement that concedes this very capability, albeit short of its full capacity in the first ten years.”

The problem, in the opinion of Kissinger and Shultz, is that the P5+1 (UN Security Council members plus Germany) negotiations have progressively legitimised Tehran’s thirteen-year-old quest for nuclear weapons capability. Between 2003 and 2013 Tehran “defied unambiguous UN and IAEA demands and proceeded with a major nuclear effort, incompatible with an exclusively civilian purpose”. During this time Iran “periodically engaged in talks but never dismantled any aspect of its enrichment infrastructure or growing stockpile of fissile material”, notwithstanding six Security Council resolutions passed between 2006 and 2010. The interim agreement reached on November 24, 2013, had provided the Islamic Republic with an estimated $8 billion in sanctions relief in exchange for a temporary halt to some aspects of its nuclear program. Tehran was not being asked to dismantle or wind back its vast nuclear infrastructure, let alone lengthen the breakout time necessary to acquire nuclear weapons capability. Thus, the 2013 interim agreement effectively “recognised as baseline” past Iranian misconduct including uranium enrichment and plutonium production, all previously condemned by the United States and the international community as illegal and illegitimate.

Trump Hit Iran, So Will China Attack Taiwan? by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21699/iran-china-taiwan

[E]xpect Xi to up the pressure on Taiwan and others in coming weeks.

Xi fully backed Iran and its three main proxy terrorist groups — Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and Yemen’s Houthis — against Israel, with Beijing providing economic, diplomatic, propaganda, intelligence and weapons support.

For a time, Beijing looked as if it was driving events with its sly proxy war conducted by Iran. Now, China’s Iranian proxy, and its proxies in turn, are being decimated, and Beijing cannot respond other than by cutting and running. The mighty People’s Republic of China is bugging out of the Middle East.

But China is not entirely out of the fight. In addition to the renewed air campaign against Taiwan, Beijing has upped the pressure against the Philippines in the South China Sea. On June 19, the same day China started its most recent air campaign against Taiwan, the Philippine Coast Guard announced that more than 50 of China’s maritime militia vessels moved close to Iroquois Reef in the South China Sea, a feature within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines. A Philippine Coast Guard spokesman correctly called the Chinese action an “illegal swarming.”

China claims most of that crucial body of water, including features such as Iroquois, which are far from recognized Chinese shores.

This we learned on June 21: The United States is truly a great power — and China is not.

What Trump’s Critics Still Don’t Understand About Iran Trump’s Iran policy confounds critics because it’s not about war or appeasement—it’s about weakening Iran without revealing the playbook. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2025/06/22/what-trumps-critics-still-dont-understand-about-iran/

Note:  I wrote this column a few hours before the United States bombed and (according to President Trump) “completely and totally obliterated” the hardened Iranian nuclear sites of Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.  Were those bombings, as some think, destabilizing actions?  Or were they, as others believe,  righteous and effective steps towards peace?

Righteous they certainly were. Whether they were also effective in luring Iran back into the community of nations is a matter that only time will tell.  In order for that to happen, as I argue below, Iran’s commitment to murderous, intolerant Islamism must be “completely and totally obliterated” along with its ability to export terror.  That is a matter that the Iranian people must decide.  For myself, I am in favor of making Iran Persia, i.e., a modern, secular state, again.

Donald Trump has betrayed his base by joining hands with the neo-cons in their belligerent support of war with Iran!

Donald Trump has betrayed Israel by trying to engage Iran in negotiations instead of bombing them now!

Which is it?

Neither.

For one thing, with every day that passes, Israel takes more chess pieces off the board of Iran’s military power, both in matériel and personnel. As of a couple of days ago, it was estimated that Israel had destroyed about 1000 of Iran’s 3500 to 4000 missiles. Add the 400-plus that Iran has lobbed at Israel’s cities, and you can see where this game of attrition is heading.

If one major goal is to extirpate Iran’s nuclear capability, then every day Israeli F-15s take flight is another milestone on the path to that goal. A weaker Iran is also a more pliant Iran.

It has been amusing to watch the chattering class suddenly become experts on the GBU-57 “bunker buster” bomb. Only the United States has them, and only the United States has bombers capable of delivering the 30,000-pound “Massive Ordnance Penetrators.” If you flip through the news, you will see scores, if not hundreds, of stories that repeat the same talking points.

At first, it was said that only the GBU-57 could destroy hardened sites such as the Fordow atomic bomb-making—officially, the “fuel enrichment”—site, buried hundreds of feet into a mountain.

Ten Iranian Questions What Trump’s Strike Means for Iran, the Middle East, and American Power. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2025/06/23/ten-iranian-questions/

1. What are we to make of Saturday night’s destruction of the three Iranian nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan?

Trump and the U.S. military took a great risk and succeeded in astounding fashion. Operationally, the destruction of the nuclear sites seems to have gone perfectly, in contrast to a long history of America’s Middle East debacles from the failed 1980 Carter rescue mission to the 2021 flight from Kabul.

The long-overdue message to Iran is that there are finally consequences for a half-century effort of killing Americans, promising death to the U.S. and Israel, and attempting to murder a U.S. president.

It’s also surreal to see leftist critics now say that Trump deviated from past presidents’ heroic, peaceful efforts to negotiate an end to the Iranian nuclear threat, when suddenly, after assuming office, Trump was apprised that Iran was weeks away from getting a bomb.

So, how did that happen after all those heroic diplomatic efforts? Why was the Iranian bomb program not ended during the Biden administration’s last four years? And who but Barack Obama opened the floodgates of Iranian revenue to fund these monstrous programs?

How strange the legal criticisms of the left are. In 2011, repeatedly bombing and killing hundreds of Libyan civilians and setting off a decade of chaos and mayhem were constitutionally okay, but a one-mission taking out a rogue nation’s nuclear facilities that threatened world peace and likely killed few, if any, civilians was unconstitutional and amoral?

Note well: Obama bombed, with B-2s no less, Libya again on his last full day in office in 2017—to finish off his disastrous five-year-long Susan Rice/Samantha Power/Hillary Clinton (“We came, we saw, he died”)/Ben Rhodes-directed destruction of Libya.

In the end, critics on the left and right are flummoxed and left sputtering only, “Iran cannot get a nuclear weapon”—even as every prior president had failed to slow Iran’s progression to a bomb—until Trump alone just did.

Intelligence-wise, it was quite stunning how there were no leaks but lots of successful misdirection and deceptions, such as redeploying the B-2s to Guam. It also made sense to strike early in Trump’s two-week window of warning, as otherwise, each day of quiet worked against the element of surprise.

It was not exactly rah-rah, Yanqui recklessness, but rather almost inevitable. Trump had warned the Iranians on numerous occasions. They never got the message. They were apparently listening to the American Left’s smears of Trump as a “TACO” (“Trump Always Chickens Out”)—a silly slur phrase that just died Saturday night.

President Trump Speaks with Bold Action We couldn’t afford to continue this theater of diplomacy. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/president-trump-speaks-with-bold-action/

Last Saturday, Israel’s operation to eliminate the existential threat of a nuclear armed, genocidal regime reached a spectacular culmination with President Trump’s massive strike against three of Iran’s most important nuclear weapons facilities. The strikes settled the debate over whether Trump would, or should continue to pursue a diplomatic resolution to 46 years of the mullahs’ aggression and the West’s serial appeasement. Trump settled the debate with powerful, decisive action of a sort that our country has avoided for nearly five decades of “diplomatic engagement” and “preemptive cringing” that rationalized our failure of nerve.

But the existential danger of the Iranian theocrats’ nuclear ambitions has never been in question. That didn’t matter to a few Republican “no foreign entanglements” and “endless neocon wars” Congressmen and advisors, who have rejected the existence of the threat, mainly by saying Iran is not capable of, nor interested in possessing nuclear weapons. But that claim has been preposterously false. Just recently, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported, “Iran carried out multiple implosion tests, a key military skill necessary for developing the atomic bomb. Implosion tests do not have civilian nuclear uses.”

Additionally, according to The Straits Times, “At least until Israel’s attacks, Iran was enriching uranium up to 69 percent purity and had enough material at that level for nine weapons if enriched further, according to the IAEA yardstick. That means Iran’s so-called ‘breakout time’––the time it would need to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb––was close to zero, likely a matter of days or little more than a week, analysts say.”

Another argument from some Republicans of an isolationist bent deployed the neocon strawman of “forever wars” that do not directly serve our national interests and security, are poorly managed, and needlessly cost American lives and resources. But the conflicts these critics have in mind––the Afghanistan War, the second Gulf War against Iraq, the Russo-Ukrainian War, and the Obama-Clinton NATO adventurism in Libya––are false analogies with Israel’s campaign to eliminate the threat of an apocalyptic, messianic genocidal regime that is the world’s most lethal state sponsor of terrorism, now on the brink of possessing nuclear weapons.

Trump Keeps His Promise on Iran. The World Is Safer for It.

https://www.thefp.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The president warned that he wouldn’t tolerate a nuclear Iran. He meant what he said.

President Trump promised he would never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Last night, with seven B-2 bombers and a dozen 30,000-pound bombs, he made good on that vow. The world is better off for it.

Trump announced Saturday evening that the U.S. had completed a “spectacularly successful” strike on Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites at Natanz, Esfahan, and Fordow. The last of those is a heavily fortified facility buried some 300 feet deep in a mountain in Iran’s Qom Province. Although Israel has bunker busting bombs, none have the size and destructive power of the most advanced American bombs, with the capability of destroying or severely damaging the site.

In a moment of political decisiveness and courage, Trump deployed those bombs, despite strenuous objections from the “restrainers” in his administration and parts of the MAGA coalition.

“There’s no military that could’ve done what we did,” Trump said during a brief speech to the nation Saturday night. He is correct. As Niall Ferguson and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant recently noted in these pages, Fordow was essentially impervious to assault. There was one bomb that could cut through its defenses: America’s GBU 57A/B Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP). And there was only one plane built to deliver that bomb: the American B-2 Spirit.

“With a single exertion of its unmatched military strength,” Ferguson and Gallant wrote, “the United States can shorten the war, prevent wider escalation, and end the principal threat to Middle Eastern stability. It can also send a signal to those other authoritarian powers who have been Iran’s enablers that American deterrence is back.”

That is exactly what this White House has done.