The Myth of the ‘Imminent Threat’

For nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic of Iran has treated its conflict with the United States as a war.  The real question is not whether Iran threatens America, but whether Americans are willing to recognize that reality.

A familiar argument has been repeated by politicians and much of the mainstream media: Iran posed no “imminent threat,” and therefore military action against it was unjustified.  But this claim ignores the true nature of the conflict between the United States and the Islamic Republic.

For many advancing it, the argument is less a strategic assessment than a political one — repeated to obscure danger in the hope of undermining the policy and weakening President Trump and Republicans ahead of the coming election cycle.

Iran’s war against America began on November 4, 1979, when Islamist revolutionaries stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days — cementing hostility toward the United States as a defining principle of the new regime.

The debate over whether Iran poses an “imminent threat” misses the broader reality. The United States has been under sustained attack from the Iranian regime for nearly half a century, and Iran’s hostility toward America — measured in lives lost, resources expended, and instability exported across the region — is beyond dispute.  The regime has never hidden its intentions, repeating its familiar mantra, “Death to America,” while pursuing a strategy of indirect warfare through proxies and militant allies.

Iranian-backed forces carried out the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 Americans and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. servicemen.  Iran’s Revolutionary Guard later armed and trained militias in Iraq that deployed specialized roadside bombs responsible for a significant share of American casualties during the Iraq War.

Beyond direct attacks on Americans, Tehran has spent decades extending its influence across the region — dominating Lebanon through Hezb’allah, influencing Iraq through allied militias, and constructing what its leaders call a “ring of fire” of armed proxies surrounding Israel.  These networks allow Iran not only to threaten Israel, but also to challenge American interests and destabilize governments across the Middle East.

Meanwhile, Iran has continued advancing toward strategic capabilities that would dramatically shift the balance of power.  U.S. and international analysts estimated that Tehran was only weeks away from producing weapons-grade nuclear material when American B-2 bombers struck the Fordow and Natanz enrichment facilities last June.  At the same time, Iran has spent years expanding one of the largest ballistic missile programs in the world, steadily increasing the range and sophistication of systems that already reach eastern Europe and are projected to threaten western Europe — and potentially the eastern seaboard of the United States.

Is that not the very definition of an imminent threat?

An enemy does not suddenly become dangerous at the moment of impact.

One would have to suspend reality to believe Iran posed no imminent threat.  Clearly, it did.

Authoritarian regimes routinely probe their adversaries for weakness to exploit.  The familiar adage that weakness invites aggression is repeated so often because history continues to confirm it.  For revolutionary regimes like Iran’s, confrontation with the West is not merely opportunistic, but ideological, making perceived weakness especially tempting to test.

The lesson was illustrated dramatically during the very crisis that launched the modern conflict between Iran and the United States.  For 444 days, Iran held American diplomats hostage while negotiations dragged on through the final year of the Carter administration.  Yet the hostages were released on January 20, 1981 — minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president, ending the crisis the moment a new administration widely perceived as tougher took office.  The symbolism was unmistakable.  Iran had been willing to defy the United States for more than a year, but it chose to resolve the crisis the moment the balance of perceived American power shifted.

Over the following decades, this relationship between American policy and Iranian behavior has often followed a predictable cycle.  Periods when American strategy projects strength tend to restrain Iranian aggression, whereas periods of hesitation or strategic retreat encourage Tehran to expand its activities.  Each time deterrence weakens, Iran tests the limits again.  The past decade illustrates this dynamic clearly.  The 2015 nuclear agreement negotiated during the Obama administration lifted major sanctions in exchange for limits on Iran’s nuclear program.  The agreement provided Tehran with significant economic relief, which the regime used to expand its regional proxy network and military activities across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

The Trump administration withdrew from the agreement and implemented a campaign of economic pressure aimed at restricting Iran’s ability to finance those networks.  Since 2021, however, under Biden, Iranian-backed militias have again intensified attacks across the region while Tehran continues strengthening its proxy relationships and military capabilities, tragically exemplified by the October 7 massacre.

Iran’s ambitions have never been limited to the Middle East.  Tehran has become an important node in a broader anti-Western alignment linking the Iranian regime with Moscow and Beijing.  Iranian drones have been supplied to Russia for use in Ukraine, where they are routinely used to attack civilian infrastructure.  At the same time, China has continued purchasing large quantities of Iranian oil — often outside the formal sanctions system — providing the regime with critical revenue that helps sustain its military and proxy operations.

Disrupting Iran’s military and economic infrastructure, therefore, has implications far beyond Tehran.  Restricting Iran’s ability to export oil weakens a supply channel that has helped fuel China’s rise.  Preventing Iran from supplying drones limits the tools Russia uses to terrorize Ukrainian civilians.  Constraining the regime’s regional proxy networks reduces the instability that has plagued the Middle East for decades.

In that sense, confronting Iran does more than neutralize a single adversary.  It alters the strategic environment across multiple theaters, shifting the balance of power toward the United States and its allies.  It also weakens the ideological momentum of radical Islamist movements — both in the region and in the West — by demonstrating that the regime long claiming to lead that struggle can, in fact, be decisively defeated.

Trump is not starting a war.  He is ending one.

57

The Reckoning of the West

The problem is not radical Islam alone, but the convergence of radical Islamist ideology with Western institutional weakness and deliberate amplification by foreign adversaries.

History is filled with ignored warnings, but only rarely does it deliver a moment so clarifying that denial becomes more dangerous than confrontation. Fifteen years ago, I argued that radical Islam threatens Western civilization not through military conquest, but through “slow jihad”: demographic pressure, moral confusion, and normalization within open societies. In its early stages, this process was sustained by institutional guilt and a media culture that reflexively equated scrutiny of Islamism with bigotry. As Muslim populations grew in key regions, moral paralysis gave way to political calculation, as politicians increasingly courted Muslim votes, often at the expense of assimilation, social cohesion, and liberal norms.

Long-developing civilizational pressures rarely provoke action until a single, undeniable shock crystallizes them. That shock came on Oct. 7, 2023. It marked the moment when denial became untenable—not only for Jews, who have long understood the pattern, but for the broader West. The atrocities themselves were barbaric enough. What followed—the celebrations, justifications, and moral inversions across Western capitals—was something more: a revelation. The question is no longer whether the warnings were correct, but whether this moment represents the point at which the West finally acts while it still can.

For decades, liberals and the left stigmatized a defense of Christendom or acknowledgment of a civilizational clash with political Islam as veiled far-right bigotry. That rhetorical shield is now collapsing as global events strip away denial, expose the scale of radical Islam, and sharpen the contrast so starkly that the Judeo-Christian world is at last beginning to recover its voice.

The barbarity of Oct. 7 was neither abstract nor ambiguous. Hamas deliberately targeted civilians in their homes and at a music festival. Families were murdered together. Women were raped. Parents were forced to witness the killing of their children. These were not acts of war but acts of ideological ritual.

What followed in the West was as revealing as the attack itself. University campuses across the United States became sites of Jewish intimidation and celebration of violence. Protesters chanted slogans calling for Israel’s destruction and the “globalization of the intifada.” Campus buildings were blockaded. Jewish students were warned to avoid certain areas “for their own safety.” Student groups openly declared that Zionists were unwelcome—using “Zionist” as a newly acceptable proxy for Jew—as administrators invoked “free expression” while Jewish students were excluded from academic life.

Across Europe, the pattern was more advanced. In the United Kingdom, authorities suppressed criticism of Islamism while accommodating Islamist demonstrations. Grooming-gang rape scandals long suppressed in the media—documented in multiple investigations and involving thousands of working-class girls—continued to surface, exposing decades of institutional cowardice driven by fear of appearing “Islamophobic.” Comparable failures have unfolded in France, Germany, Norway, Belgium and Sweden. Oct. 7 did not create these realities; it forced their recognition.

In the weeks following Oct. 7, the jihad was unmistakably globalized, exported into Western cities and campuses where demonstrations crossed from protest into intimidation and celebration of violence. That legitimization emboldened escalation until violence became inevitable, and many in the West began to realize this was more than they bargained for.

What is ultimately at stake is not Israel alone. Israel is the front line, but the target is far larger: the Judeo-Christian civilization that gave rise to modernity itself—individual rights, equality before the law, secular governance, scientific inquiry and moral accountability. Oct. 7 was not merely an assault on Israel; it was an assault on the ethical foundations of the West.

The urgency is not emotional; it is structural. Civilizations rarely collapse suddenly; they erode over time. One of the clearest indicators of civilizational decline is demographic trajectory. Trends in Europe and North America cannot be ignored. Time does not favor the West. Muslim fertility rates in Europe remain well above replacement level, while native European birth rates have collapsed. In the United States, overall fertility has fallen to historic lows, even as populations carrying illiberal norms grow more rapidly. Demographics are not destiny, but they are momentum.

The problem is not radical Islam alone, but the convergence of radical Islamist ideology with Western institutional weakness—and with deliberate amplification by foreign adversaries. Islamist regimes in the Middle East, along with Russia and China, exploit social media, bots, and online propaganda to accelerate radicalization, deepen polarization, and undermine social cohesion within open societies.

For years, Western elites insisted this threat was imagined and, when it became undeniable, that it was marginal or provoked. Oct. 7 tore away the protective cloak that had long insulated radical Islamism from scrutiny. Within hours, murder was reframed as “resistance,” victims as oppressors and barbarism as grievance, revealing an ideological alignment that could no longer be denied.

Words matter because they prepare the ground for action. Western democracies already understand that words can kill; yet when eliminationist logic is voiced through Islamist language, the West suddenly discovers an absolutist devotion to free expression. The long era of debating whether a substantial faction of Islam poses a genuine danger to the West is mercifully over.

What distinguishes this moment from all prior warnings is that the balance has begun to shift. Israel’s post-Oct. 7 victories have punctured the myth of Islamist invincibility; the Chanukah mass shooting on Bondi Beach and the public backlash against Australia’s leadership exposed the cost of appeasement; and in Britain, figures once dismissed as pariahs—Nigel Farage, even Tommy Robinson—now command growing support, while Douglas Murray and other defenders of Western civilization have moved firmly into the mainstream. Across Europe, governments have moved from rhetoric to action: Hungary, under Viktor Orbán, has fortified its borders and reasserted a Christian national identity; France has tightened immigration, conditioned welfare, and dismantled Islamist organizations; Sweden has slashed asylum intakes. Germany has accelerated deportations and begun expelling radical imams, and Italy, led by Giorgia Meloni, has curtailed NGO rescues. Iran and its proxies are weakened, Saudi Arabia again edges toward peace with Israel, and the West, albeit shaken, has begun to recover its voice.

Resistance is not bigotry. Lawful self-preservation is not persecution. What’s at stake is the survival of modernity itself and the Western civilization that produced it. Cultural pluralism cannot mean the institutionalization of parallel societies governed by incompatible norms.

If this moment is to mean anything, it must translate into policy. The West need not abandon liberalism to defend itself, but it must rediscover its boundaries. Deportation of radical clerics, which is already underway in Germany, should become standard practice across Western democracies. Assimilation must be restored as a requirement of residency. Parallel societies cannot be tolerated indefinitely within nations founded on shared civic norms. None of this is racial. None of it targets faith. It is the ordinary exercise of sovereignty—long deferred, but entirely lawful—and the minimum necessary for a civilization that intends to survive.

Civilizations rarely receive infinite chances. The danger is no longer abstract; it is visible, vocal, and violent. Oct. 7 and its aftermath may prove to be the moment when the West finally stops mistaking tolerance for virtue and denial for compassion.

History will not ask whether the West was warned. It will ask whether it acted.