The Iranian regime appears to believe that President Trump today is very different from the president who gave the orders to take out Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani on Jan. 2, 2020 in Baghdad.

Soleimani, the regime’s top terrorist, had flown to Baghdad shortly after midnight to lead an assault on the U.S. Embassy, where thousands of Iranian-backed militiamen had been gathering for many days.  Rather than evacuate the embassy, President Trump ordered a U.S. drone to eliminate Soleimani.  The rest, as they say, is history.

But what history?  For the remainder of Trump’s first term, the Iranians restrained themselves to non-lethal aggression against the United States, including by their proxies around the world.  That all changed when Joe Biden, a longstanding sympathizer and appeaser of the Islamic regime in Tehran, took charge.

Among Biden’s first actions as president were to loosen the “Maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran and to lift the terrorist designation of the Houthis, Iran’s deadly proxy force in Yemen.  Not long afterward, the Iranians repaid the compliment by unleashing the Houthis to attack commercial traffic navigating international waters from the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean.

President Trump has said repeatedly over the past several weeks that he would prefer to negotiate an end to Iran’s nuclear weapons program, but if that fails, he won’t hesitate to take military action.

To that end, he sent a letter via the United Arab Emirates to Iran’s self-styled supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which summoned Iran to dismantle its nuclear weapons manufacturing capabilities within two months — a much bigger demand than the U.S. or our European allies had made under previous administrations.

Khamenei brushed off the overture, as did the allegedly “moderate” president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who told Trump he could do “whatever the hell you want,” but Iran would not comply.

The Houthis, the Iranian proxies in Yemen whom Trump put back on the terror list earlier in the month, then announced they were resuming attacks on international shipping and were caught purchasing hydrogen fuel cells from China to extend the range of  their missiles and drones.

So last Saturday, President Trump showed the mullahs that he means business, ordering the USS Harry S. Truman to launch cruise missiles and fighter-bombers against dozens of Houthi targets in Yemen, including command and leadership centers in their capital, Sanaa.

The president backed up those actions with a crystal-clear message over his social media platform, Truth Social.  “The hundreds of attacks being made by Houthi, the sinister mobsters and thugs based in Yemen, who are hated by the Yemeni people, all emanate from, and are created by, IRAN. Any further attack or retaliation by the ‘Houthis’ will be met with great force, and there is no guarantee that that force will stop there,” he wrote.

Rather than take that message to heart, the Iranians summoned their chief Iraqi proxy chieftain, Akram al-Kaabi, to Tehran the day after the U.S. air strikes to meet with top leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Quds Force, the President’s Office, and the Supreme Council on National Defense.

Iranian sources say the regime wanted their proxies in Iraq, Harakat Hezb’allah al-Nujaba, to launch a massive rocket attack against the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

Apparently thinking they could elude detection by the U.S. Intelligence Community, the Iranians instructed al-Kaabi to deny any responsibility for the attack, blaming it on an unknown group that had never existed before in Iraq.

Fat chance.

As one former CIA officer who for many years belonged to a group of “Iran Watchers” in the region told me, the Iraqi militias “can attack the embassy in Baghdad anytime they want ... but they’d have to be nuts to do it.”

“The Iranians believe that President Trump is bluffing when he says he will use military force against Iran if they continue to supply the Houthis,” an Iranian source knowledgeable of the recent talks with al-Kaabi in Tehran told me.  “They also believe he was bluffing in his letter to Khamenei when he demanded that Iran dismantle its nuclear weapons infrastructure.”

Iran’s leaders would do well to subscribe to President Trump’s Truth Social feed, and to follow his statements to the U.S. media.  Or, like thousands of illegal criminal aliens who have jumped our borders, they can learn the hard way.  This president means business.

Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior fellow at the America First Policy Institute.  His latest work of non-fiction, The Iran House: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue, was recently published by Bombardier Books.

Image: Ninara via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.