After Iranian forces in Syria launched a rocket attack on Israeli army bases in the Golan Heights early Thursday, the Israeli Defense  Forces attacked more than 50 Iranian targets in Syria in one of the largest operations of the Israel Air Force since 1973. This was the first step Israel took immediately after President Trump embraced its alliance with Israel withdrew from the nuclear deal, in the process untying Israeli hands and freeing them, following the eight years of the Obama Administration, to defend Israel against its enemies with devastating military power.  

In analogy to the events that led up to World War II, history will show that Netanyahu has been a Churchill, Obama was a Chamberlain, and President Trump is a pro-Israel Roosevelt.  

Winston Churchill’s main goal was to convince President Roosevelt to get into the military conflict to crush Nazi Germany. Netanyahu’s goal has been to find a Roosevelt and convince him to stand up alongside Israel to crush Iran with crippling economic sanctions first and then unchain the Israeli army to attack Iran and its proxies in the Middle East. Obama was a Chamberlain all along, believing that negotiating, appeasing, and conceding to an evil regime will stop its sinister aspirations of taking over the Middle East. But with Trump, Netanyahu found a Roosevelt whom he was able to convince to join the fight against evil similar to Reagan confronting the Soviet Union into total regime collapse. 

When President Obama, Kerry, their alumni, and the leftist media argue against Trump’s decision to abandon  the nuclear deal with Iran and reimpose crippling sanctions, their main argument is that America will not be trusted in the future because America broke its word given by a previous American President to keep the deal. 

First, the deal was not ratified as a treaty but created through an executive order and therefore was not legally binding to any future president.

Second, turning his back on a bad deal is exactly what Winston Churchill did in 1938 when he denounced the Munich Agreement reached between British Prime Minister Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler. The United Kingdom and the other signatories such as France and Italy betrayed the state of Czechoslovakia, permitting its annexation in order to appease Hitler and supposedly to prevent war. Churchill characterized the Munich Agreement as a “total and unmitigated defeat” and refused to accept the view that it was a triumph for diplomacy or that it would open the way, as Chamberlain believed, to a reduction of tension and to an even closer relationship between Britain and Germany. Churchill’s principled opposition paved the way for his leadership of the UK during the war years.

Today, the Munich Agreement is widely regarded as a failed act of appeasement towards Nazi Germany and Chamberlain is regarded as a weak leader.  As history applauded Churchill for breaking Chamberlain’s word to Hitler and saving Europe, the Jewish people, and the world in the process, Trump will also be applauded for making America an unapologetic and feared world leader again.

For the last 10 years, Netanyahu has been like Churchill of the 1930s, acting as a voice in the wilderness warning a complacent world against a gathering storm, which in this case is an ambitious Iran intent on acquiring nuclear weapons and creating regional instability.  As a result, the Israeli prime minister was ridiculed, threatened, boycotted, and isolated by the Obama administration, the Democrats, and the world.

Now Netanyahu sees Trump as a partner for broader change in the Middle East, just as Ronald Reagan sought to change the then existing order in Europe. For the first time, there is an American president who sees the danger of Iran just as Netanyahu does and realizes that the ultimate goal should be regime change.     

Netanyahu is correct when he sees Iran as dangerous both in its regional and world aspirations against the West but also weak like the Soviet Union before its collapsed through corruption, inner dissent, and economic malaise.  There are signs of weakness in Iran domestically which can be exploited.

Despite the sanction relief and the 150 billion dollars given to Iran as a result of the nuclear deal, Iran’s economy has been in trouble, even before the Trump announcement.

Since the beginning of the year, the Iranian currency, the Rial, has lost nearly half of its value. When Rouhani came to power in 2013, $1 equaled 36,000 Rials; now that figure stands near 67,800 Rials to the dollar. Observers are pointing to political corruption, mismanagement, and political infighting as major factors in the Rial’s tumble. Moreover, it was reported that hundreds of recent outbreaks of labor strikes and workers protests erupted on Sunday across Iran, against not only employers but also the government, over inflation, unpaid wages, and the failed promises of the nuclear deal which fattened the pockets of the religious ruling establishment and the Revolutionary Guards but left the public behind.  Nobody could forget that a series of public protests occurred in various cities throughout Iran beginning on 28 December, 2017 and continuing into 2018, focusing on the government’s economic policies and its theocratic regime.

Imposing tough economic sanctions and assertive American diplomacy will be the nail on the coffin of the Iranian weak economy, finally leading to regime change.  This is the time to squeeze Iran with economic pressure and credible military threats such as the military humiliation of Iran by daily attacks inflicting casualties on Iranian proxies and Iranian forces in Syria, demoralizing the regime and its supporters.  Eventually, if Iran will dare to start its nuclear program, a devastating Israeli military response will be necessary and possible now that Israel is not constrained as it was under Obama.   

When Obama entered the White House, he immediately removed the Churchill bust in the oval office. Symbolically, when Trump became President, he brought it immediately back and put it on display in the oval office. In 2015, Netanyahu became the first foreign leader since Winston Churchill to speak before the U.S. Congress three times, when he tried to convince Obama, the Democrats, and the world not to sign the nuclear deal.  On that occasion, he was presented by the speaker of the House with a bust of Churchill.  Now it seems that Trump brought back the bust and a real-life Churchill like Netanyahu to stand with him against evil. 

In the fight between good versus evil, evil is counting its last days and good is back to stay.  Glory days are here again under Trump and Netanyahu, making America and Israel great again.  

Shoula Romano Horing is an Israeli born and raised attorney. Her blog: www.shoularomanohoring.com.