Massive bombings and a safer world: Trump’s big decision

Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

Events in the Middle East, like tremors along a fault line, often send shockwaves far beyond the region’s jagged frontiers. Their reverberations cross oceans, unsettle alliances, and redefine the calculations of distant capitals. The precipitous and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in the early months of the Biden administration stands as a case in point—a failure not merely of planning, but of perception. It was a scene too visible to be ignored: desperate civilians clinging to departing aircraft, confusion rampant, allies abandoned. To the watching world, it delivered a singular, unvarnished message: that the United States no longer demonstrated a steady hand at the helm.

It was an image ill-suited to a superpower. Enemies took note. In the autocratic courts of Beijing, Pyongyang, and Moscow, the signal registered as opportunity. Weakness—or what was taken as weakness—proved a seduction. Within little more than a year, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Expecting a walkover, he encountered instead the grit of a people unwilling to be crushed. Their valor held back catastrophe. But a critical detail remains obvious: such adventurism had found no crack in the armor during Trump’s first term administration.

The contrast became unmistakable with a single, thunderous act. When President Trump authorized a massive strike against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, the decision was not cloaked in ambiguity. It was resolute, deliberately public, and unmistakably consequential. The strike restored the credibility of American military force. More than that, it dispelled the illusion—dangerous in its simplicity—that the United States would hesitate when challenged. Analysts suggested that Beijing, eyeing Taiwan with the quiet appetite of a patient predator, had been chastened. The American colossus, thought to be in decline, had proved it still retained sharp teeth.

The operation had a broader consequence. It disarmed a dangerous mythology—the idea that America was a “paper tiger,” all bluff and bureaucracy. In its place rose a new calculation among adversaries: that beneath the layers of debate and diplomacy, there remained a capacity for swift and decisive violence. That realization prompted a quiet recalibration. Enemies stepped back. Uncertainty gave way to apprehension. And fear, in international affairs, is often the mother of restraint.

In the corridors of Tehran, the ripples were seismic. The so-called “Axis of Resistance,” Iran’s web of proxy forces used to harass and hem in the region’s Sunni powers, fell suddenly silent. The Ayatollah, once a figure of theatrical defiance, retreated into bunkers, shunning even his cell phone for fear of Israeli surveillance and American drones. Sixty top generals, the architects of the Islamic Republic’s shadow wars, had been killed. The Supreme Leader survived, reportedly at the request of President Trump himself—a gesture less of mercy than of strategy. Regime change, it was judged, would court chaos. Peace, paradoxically, required stability, even if that meant preserving a tyrant in his buried box.

Victory, in this calculus, was not solely Israel’s. Nor did it belong exclusively to Washington. The Saudis—long denigrated by Iranian hardliners as the “Little Puny Satan”—emerged not merely intact, but vindicated. Their sovereignty had been threatened by Tehran’s ambition to seize the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and by its hunger to control the Saudi oil fields. That danger, which had loomed for years, evaporated in the space of a fortnight. The “Twelve-Day War,” as it has come to be called, reset the map.

At the helm of Saudi Arabia stands the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman—MBS—young, calculating, and unbound by the strictures of the past. His ambitions stretch beyond oil. He seeks a future built on artificial intelligence, where data and the enormous energy assets that AI requires merge into a new form of national power. Israeli technology, Saudi fuel reserves, and an emerging détente between former adversaries suggest that the most improbable of partnerships may soon become reality. Where the old world was divided by religion and war, the new one may be united by silicon and trade.

In Iran, the division is less geographic than internal. Its people, highly educated and wired to the modern world, are hostages within their own borders. Perhaps fifteen to twenty percent of the population supports the theocracy. That minority is armed, ideologically intoxicated, and fervent in its devotion. The rest—silenced, surveilled, and disarmed—are unwilling to throw their lives against a regime whose response to dissent is a vengeful death.

Here lies the enduring hallmark of tyranny: the apparatus of repression. Secret police. Midnight arrests. Executions masked as disappearances. No dictatorship on Earth—be it in Tehran, Caracas, or Pyongyang—could endure a free election. But with murder squads and absolute control of communication, they endure. And so too does the dilemma of intervention: to act risks war; to abstain ensures the survival of despotism. No perfect answer has yet been devised.

Nonetheless, one decisive act has tipped the scale. The bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites was not a gesture, but a bold assertion. A line was drawn, not in sand, but in steel and fire. In doing so, the nightmare scenario—an Iranian nuclear strike on Israel—was preempted. Had the mullahs achieved their goal, Tel Aviv might have vanished beneath a mushroom cloud. Millions dead in an instant. The Israeli response, inevitable and catastrophic, would have turned Iran’s cities into funeral pyres. This was not the script of fiction, but a plausible trajectory. It has now been averted.

The lessons are bitter but instructive. For too long, Western policy has been a study in temporization—warnings without teeth, deadlines without consequences. The International Atomic Energy Agency warned that Iran was on the cusp of nuclear breakout. The warnings, like tolling bells, grew louder until action became the only alternative to disaster.

Now, in the aftermath, the world breathes more easily. The danger has not vanished, but it has been substantially downgraded. The path to a broader peace remains treacherous, but for the moment, it is open and promising. Progress will come not through passivity, but through strength—measured, judicious, and decisive. That is the price of security in a world where fanaticism wields power and where silence in the face of evil invites calamity.

Jared Knott, author of Tiny Blunders/Big Disasters Book 2: The Many Tiny Mistakes That Changed the World Forever. Knott was a decorated combat infantry officer in Vietnam in the First Air Cavalry Division.

Jared Knott, author of Tiny Blunders/Big Disasters: Thirty-Nine Tiny Mistakes That Changed the World Forever. Knott was a decorated combat infantry officer in Vietnam in the First Air Cavalry Division.

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