Trump Ends the Folly of De-escalation
For too long, American presidents let Iran believe it could act with impunity.
By H.R. McMaster
Published June 30, 2025
In my first year at West Point, I was part of a cordon of cheering cadets who lined Thayer Road to welcome back to American soil 52 people who had been held hostage by the Iranian regime for 444 days. We saluted as six green-and-white Army buses took them through the scenic campus on the way to a three-day respite with their families at the Hotel Thayer. The hostage crisis was just the beginning of what would become a four-decades-long “twilight war” that the Islamic Republic of Iran has waged against the United States, Israel, and its Arab neighbors. The U.S. response, across seven different administrations, has suffered from a failure to consider adequately how historical memory, emotion, and ideology drive and constrain the theocratic dictatorship in Tehran.
The exception has been President Donald Trump, who from 2017 to 2021 implemented a strategy of maximum pressure on Iran and in January 2020 decided to kill the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, Qassem Suleimani, and his Iraqi militia puppet, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, in Baghdad. Trump recognized that the Iranian regime cannot be conciliated and that efforts to de-escalate confrontations with Iran had allowed it to escalate on its own terms with impunity. Early in his second term, Trump has reversed the self-defeating policies of the Biden administration, restored maximum pressure on Iran, and, most notably, ordered U.S. strikes on three facilities related to its nuclear program.
The wisdom of Trump’s approach—forcing Iran to choose between continued isolation and ending its hostility to Israel, the United States, and its Arab neighbors—became apparent to many only after President Joe Biden resurrected a hapless effort to appease Iran that started during the Obama administration. President Biden, in an attempt to restore the flawed Iran nuclear deal from which Trump withdrew in 2018, relaxed enforcement of the Trump administration’s economic sanctions—and as cash flow to Tehran increased, so did Iranian leaders’ confidence that they could use their terrorist proxies to get away with murder. With few exceptions, Iranian proxy attacks against U.S. facilities and personnel went unanswered.
https://archive.is/pK96y#selection-1757.0-2119.55
