On April 13, 2024, Iran, deploying more than 300 drones and missiles, launched a premeditated aerial assault on Israeli military and population centers. While ninety-nine percent of the weapons were intercepted, Iran’s attack is equivalent to a formal “Declaration of War” against Israel.

Since 1979 and the Iranian revolution, Iran and Israel have been undeclared enemies as Iran has used its proxy terrorist groups in the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen to attack Israel. However, and most significantly, the April 13^th attack was launched directly from an emboldened Iran.

Irans’s belligerence necessitates a significant military response against Iran’s infrastructure and nuclear program regardless of the Biden Administration’s duplicity. Iran’s lack of success on April 13^th has exposed the weakness and incompetence of its military. A massive military counterattack would cripple or perhaps end Iran’s long-term ambitions for Arab and Middle East hegemony.

Three and half millennia of Jewish history is replete with examples of weakness on Israel’s part that further emboldened its enemies with dire consequences for the Jewish people. A lack of retaliation by Israel will embolden the mullahs of Iran with dire consequences for not only Israel but the nations of the Middle East and the world.

The Hamas attack of October 7, 2024 and Iran’s de facto declaration of war on April 13, 2024 are the direct outcome of the Obama/Biden policy of appeasement and willingness to allow Iran to become a hegemonic nuclear power. They are the 21^st-century equivalent of the spineless European appeasers of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

The Obama/Biden policy has been to facilitate Iran in becoming a dominant player in the region in the naïve belief that if the West, and in particular the United States, treats the mullahs as equals they will evolve into nonbelligerent leaders who can be trusted. Even if that means the acquisition of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles and sacrificing America’s only resolute ally in the region, Israel.

In 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini, the godfather of the Islamic Republic, claimed that the Iranian revolution was just the start of the revolution within the world of Islam. He set in motion Iran’s underlying long-term goal: to inspire an Islamist revival, to evict the infidels, to annihilate Israel, and to impose a unified Islamic government on the Arab world.

Despite four decades of a crippled economy and numerous domestic uprisings, the Iranian regime has and continues to divert untold billions of dollars into military procurement and support of their Islamist proxies. Terrorist groups who not only target the West and Israel but foment revolutionary conflicts in other Arab nations.

These intractable conflicts have changed the face of countries such as Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon who are now under de facto Iranian control. Nations such as Iraq and Afghanistan are increasingly under the influence of the Iranian mullahs and Saudi Arabia and Jordon are being targeted for instability by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Unless stopped in its tracks, Iranian hegemony over the Middle East is no longer matter of if but when.

American and western foreign policy has consistently refused to understand the power of the ideology spawned by the Iranian Revolution. The Iranian worldview which promotes repressive governance along religious lines combined with uncontrolled hostility to Israel and the West as well as a deep-seated determination to unite, by force if necessary, the two major sects of Islam, has been the driving force of instability and violence in the region for decades.

Western policymakers, with the exception of Donald Trump, have steadfastly underestimated the extent of Iran’s commitment to their revolutionary ideology. The West’s repeated overtures to Iran and unfathomable economic as well as financial cooperation and support has only increased their antipathy toward the West, in particular the United States and Israel -- the only nation founded on western values in the region.

Thanks to the appeasement policies of Obama, Biden, and much of the West, Iran today is more belligerent than ever. Iran can build a nuclear weapon within a matter of a few months and has sufficient fissionable material to build several more. Additionally, Iran is feverishly working on constructing intercontinental ballistic missiles that have the range to hit Europe or the United States. Iran could have them within a matter of months, as it has recently launched its third military satellite into orbit.

The overt missile and drone attack on Israel, the greenlighting of Hamas’ brutality in their invasion of Israel, a fully militarized Hezb’allah controlling Lebanon and attacking Israel, increasing involvement in Syria, and overt manipulation of the Houthis to attack shipping on the Red Sea, is indicative of Iran’s confidence that they can be increasingly aggressive and the West, in particular the United States under Biden and the Democrats, who have essentially financed Iran’s belligerence, will do nothing to stop their determination to control the Middle East.

This mindset also encompasses the little-recognized but vital strategy that through terrorism and societal upheaval precipitated by massive Islamic immigration of Europe and America, they, as the leader of this new caliphate, can undermine and eventually conquer the Western world from within.

Thus, the West is again at another 1930s moment. Will they, led by a feckless United States, continue to turn a blind eye towards Iran’s intractable belligerency and persist in constraining Israel in the myopic hope that by doing so would bring about “peace in our time”? If this is the course of action then there will be an eventual regional war which could quickly spiral out of control as Iran’s revolutionary religious fervor does not rule out the use of nuclear weapons.

Iran as presently constituted cannot be bargained with. The only possibility of avoiding the above scenario is for the West to 1) unleash and directly abet Israel in destroying Hamas and Iran’s military and nuclear infrastructure, 2) negotiate separate mutual defense pacts with Israel and Saudi Arabia, 3) reinstate, enforce, and expand the Trump sanctions against Iran; 4) isolate the mullahs, and 5) actively support and promote regime change in Iran.

The western world, which includes Israel, is at a crossroad. Will it once again hear the anguished voices of millions of dead and displaced asking their self-serving leaders: why did you not prevent world war when you had the chance? Or will the West heed the lessons of World War II in preemptively dealing with an intractable and borderline deranged enemy?

Image: Fars Media Corporation