America Visits Iran | The American Spectator

“Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
So spoke Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in a speech to the House of Representatives on July 4, 1821. On February 28, 2026, America went abroad to destroy a monster — the Islamic regime that has plagued the people of Iran and much of the world since it seized power in 1979. President Trump, who launched the attack under his Article II powers in coordination with Israel, called upon Iranians to overthrow the Islamic regime, but he justified the air and naval attack on U.S. national security grounds, especially Iran’s killing of Americans since the 1980s, the threat posed by the regime’s growing arsenal of ballistic missiles, and its avowed goal of obtaining nuclear weapons.
President Trump’s brief address announcing the attacks cited Iran’s “unending campaign of bloodshed, mass murder targeting the United States, our troops and the innocent people in many, many countries.” Trump cited the regime’s taking of American hostages in 1979, the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. military personnel, the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, the killing of American military personnel in Iraq by Iranian proxies, attacks on American vessels in shipping lanes, its promotion and funding of terrorism throughout the world, the Iranian-supported Hamas attack on Israel, and the recent massacre of Iranian citizens who were protesting against the regime. And Trump accused Iran of attempting to rebuild its nuclear weapons program.
The president’s list of Iranian and Iranian-sponsored attacks against Americans is reminiscent of the powerful argument set forth by the late Norman Podhoretz in his book World War IV: The Long Struggle Against…