The instinct from some among us is understandable. Americans woke up Saturday morning to the words “major combat operations” and felt the weight of Iraq and Afghanistan settle back onto their shoulders. The impulse to reject another military engagement in the Middle East is a rational one.
But instinct is not analysis. And the evidence here deserves more than a reflexive reaction.The America First case for what happened overnight is not complicated. It just requires looking at the facts honestly.
Strikes Are Not War
A distinction is about to get buried in the political noise, so it needs to be established now.
Strikes and war are different instruments with different objectives. Strikes, like what we saw overnight, are targeted, air-based, and built to force behavioral change. They have been a tool of American presidents for decades. Clinton ordered them in Sudan and Afghanistan. Obama authorized them in Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Trump ordered the strike that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020 and directed Operation Midnight Hammer against Iran’s nuclear facilities last June.
War means ground forces, occupation, and the kind of broad transformation of an enemy state that burned through American blood and treasure for two decades.
That is not what is happening here.
There are no boots on the ground. Operations are air and sea. They use carrier-based aircraft and Tomahawk cruise missiles. CENTCOM chief Admiral Brad Cooper briefed the president on military options on February 26. Vice President Vance said flatly that there is “no chance” the United States gets drawn into a prolonged Middle Eastern conflict.
Rep. Thomas Massie, a man who is increasingly at odds with his own party (no man is an island except, perhaps, Massie), called these “acts of war unauthorized by Congress.” The constitutional question is legitimate and worth a serious debate. But it should not be confused with whether the strikes were justified. Every president since Truman has used this same authority. The war powers conversation deserves its own space, not as a stand-in for arguing the strategic merits of the operation itself.
Iran Has Been Waging War Against Us for 47 Years
The wing of the America First movement that treats non-interventionism as total disengagement has to reckon with something: Iran never agreed to leave us alone.
The 1983 Beirut barracks bombing killed 241 American service members. The 1996 Khobar Towers attack killed 19 more. Between 2003 and 2011, Iranian-backed militias killed at least 603 U.S. troops in Iraq with roadside bombs and weapons shipped straight from Tehran. Since October 2023, Iran’s proxies launched more than 170 attacks on U.S. military bases in Syria, Iraq, and Jordan — including a drone strike that killed three American soldiers in Jordan in January 2024.
Then there’s the money. Iran funnels more than a billion dollars a year into Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Shia militias across the region. It was Iran’s proxy Hamas that carried out the October 7 massacre, killing over 1,000 people, including 46 Americans. Iran’s Houthis have spent years hitting international shipping in the Red Sea, disrupting trade routes that affect the price of goods on shelves in every American city.
Iran’s chaos has a direct line to the American economy, to the safety of American citizens, and to the lives of service members stationed overseas. Dealing with Iran is the America First position. Their instability is the single biggest reason the United States keeps getting dragged back into the Middle East. You cannot focus on domestic growth while the world’s top state sponsor of terrorism is constantly setting fires that American troops have to put out.
Diplomacy Had Its Shot
The administration did not skip straight to missiles. Three rounds of negotiations took place — in Muscat, Geneva, and Geneva again as recently as February 26. The American position was clear: stop enriching uranium, accept limits on ballistic missile development, and cut off proxy militias. In exchange, sanctions relief and a path toward normalized relations.
Iran did what Iran always does. It stalled. It equivocated. It kept building the programs it was supposedly negotiating away. After last June’s strikes hit three nuclear facilities, a later U.S. assessment found only one of the three was actually destroyed. Iran went right back to work on the other two.
Critics will point out that Oman’s foreign minister said the latest talks had made “significant progress” just hours before the strikes. Maybe so. But Iran has spent decades saying one thing at the table and doing the opposite once the cameras turn off. At no point did Tehran offer any real guarantee that it was taking American demands seriously. There is a line where accepting the same hollow assurances for the fifth decade running stops being patience and starts being gullibility.
Regime Change, But Not the Kind You’re Thinking
Trump’s call for Iranians to “take over your government” is the most aggressive language a sitting president has aimed at Tehran. I understand why it makes people nervous. “Regime change” is a phrase that still leaves a bad taste after Iraq.
But what’s being proposed here is not what happened in Iraq, and the difference is not just semantics. Nobody is talking about sending ground troops into Tehran. Nobody is drawing up plans for a provisional authority or a decade-long occupation. The idea is to degrade the regime’s ability to threaten American interests and crush its own people, and then let the Iranian people decide what comes next.
And the Iranian people are not sitting idle. The country has seen massive protests since late December in all 31 provinces. The regime responded by killing thousands of demonstrators in the streets. These are people already fighting for their own freedom. The strikes clear the path. Whether the Iranian people walk through it is up to them.
That is not Iraq. That is not Afghanistan. America is using its military to remove threats to our security while opening a door for people who were already trying to kick it down.
On the School in Minab
The reports of a strike hitting a girls’ school in Minab, with Iranian state media claiming dozens of students killed, are alarming. If true, they are awful. There is no way to soften that.
But we need to be clear about where these reports are coming from. Iranian state media has spent decades lying to its own people and to the world. We watched Hamas do the same thing in Gaza for months, inflating casualty figures, staging scenes for international cameras. That does not automatically mean this report is false. It does mean we should wait for independent verification before letting it define the entire narrative around the operation.
What we can verify right now is that Iran’s regime killed thousands of its own citizens in the streets over the past two months. Any honest conversation about civilian lives has to include that.
On Gas Prices
The kitchen-table concern. Oil markets closed Friday with Brent crude at $72.87 per barrel, and analysts expect a jump when trading resumes Monday — possibly to $80 per barrel or higher if Iran follows through on threats to close the Strait of Hormuz.
Energy prices have come down considerably under this administration. There is room to absorb a temporary bump. OPEC+ meets Sunday to consider boosting output, and Gulf producers are already moving to cover the gap in Iranian supply. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have the capacity. If this follows the pattern of last June — a sharp spike, then a quick correction — the pain will be short-lived.
And the longer-term reality is that global energy markets stay vulnerable to Middle Eastern disruption largely because Iran keeps destabilizing the region. Removing that source of chaos is better for American energy security over time, even if it costs something in the short run.
The Military Did Its Homework
As of the latest reports, there are no American casualties from Iran’s retaliatory strikes on U.S. bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, the UAE, and Qatar. There is some infrastructure damage near the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, but the full picture is still developing. Multiple Gulf allies intercepted incoming Iranian missiles.
None of this was thrown together. The six-week buildup leading to these strikes was the largest U.S. naval deployment to the region since 2003 — two carrier strike groups, F-22 Raptors in Israel for the first time ever, and assets spread across the theater. The Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain was drawn down to fewer than 100 essential personnel before anything was launched. Ships were moved out of port. This was planned.
Should we be concerned about American lives? Yes. The president said so himself. But the military was ready, the force was positioned, and the alternative — letting Iran keep threatening American troops while hiding behind negotiations it had no intention of honoring — has its own body count. That tab has been running for 47 years.
The Bottom Line
America First does not mean America absent. It does not mean sitting still while a hostile regime spends half a century killing our people, bankrolling terrorism, wrecking regional stability, and chasing nuclear weapons.
It means American interests come first. And the interest here is clear.
Every diplomatic door was opened. Iran walked away from all of them. The military was ready. The strikes are targeted, from the air and sea. No ground troops. No occupation. No replay of the last 20 years.
Congress should be involved. The American people should demand answers. The administration should be held accountable for what comes next.
But the decision to strike was a defense of American interests that should have come years ago. For anyone who takes the America First framework seriously, this is what applying it actually looks like.
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