President Donald Trump ran on a platform to end wars, including Ukraine, Gaza, and the Red Sea. He offered Iran multiple opportunities to negotiate a better future.

If people didn’t want to eliminate the Houthi threat that affected our USCENTCOM allies Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt, as well as Israel, that’s OK. If they insisted upfront that American “boots” didn’t belong anywhere in the region, that’s OK. If they didn’t want the US to cooperate with our CENTCOM partner, Israel, OK fine. That’s their opinion.

But if they thought the Iranian regime was not at war with the US, so there was no need to bother them in their pursuit of the destruction of Israel or spread of terrorism — or if they thought Iran’s unbridled nuclear weapons capability only threatened Israel — they are on another planet.

Ilhan Omar, AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Hakeem Jeffries, Ed Markey, Amy Klobuchar, Antonio Guterrez, and more are all out of touch with reality and reason.

Think of it this way: Donald Trump just avenged more than 1,000 American service personnel killed, and thousands wounded and held hostage by Iran since the mullahs declared war on us in 1979.

Don’t forget them.

We are Iran’s “Great Satan” to Israel’s “Little Satan.”

“Student activists” in Tehran occupied the US embassy in 1979 and held Americans hostage for 444 days. The Americans were paraded through the streets blindfolded. Six managed to escape with the help of our Canadian allies — remember Argo?

In 1983, Iran bragged about the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 220 US Marines, 21 other US servicemembers, and 58 French soldiers.

Israel’s pager attack on Hezbollah in September 2024 eliminated the masterminds of the attack – who had been on the FBI Most Wanted list for 41 years.

In 1984, Iran’s proxy Hezbollah kidnapped, tortured, and killed CIA Station Chief William Francis Buckley, whose identity they apparently learned from classified documents seized from the embassy in Tehran. Buckley was transferred to Iran and tortured there, before being returned to Lebanon.

In 1985, US Navy diver Robert Stethem was beaten and kicked to death before his body was dumped on the tarmac by Hezbollah in Beirut. In 1988, Hezbollah kidnapped Colonel William R. Higgins and tortured him for months. Former FBI agent Robert Levinson was presumed kidnapped by Iran in 2007 and killed; his body has not been recovered.

In 1996, an explosion at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia killed 19 American servicemembers.

In 2011, there was an Iranian plot to kill a Saudi diplomat in Washington, D.C., and to attack the Israeli and Saudi embassies. That year, too, Iran began to take steps to mine the Persian Gulf.

US Naval Intelligence shows Iranian warships have been in the Red Sea — where Iran has no border — since 2011. Part of Iran’s support for the Houthi rebellion in Yemen can be explained because it’s near the US Expeditionary Force base in Djibouti, close to the Straits of Hormuz. Iran provides missiles and training to the Houthis.

In 2012, chairman of the Iranian chiefs of staff, Hassan Firuzabadi, said, “We do have the plan to close the Strait of Hormuz, since a member of the military must plan for all scenarios.”

Iranian war games in 2015 were designed against American forces and included passing skills along to proxy forces. Beginning in 2016, swarms of Iranian fast boats harassed American ships and others in the Persian Gulf, engaging in what the commander of the US Central Command called “unsafe maneuvers.”

Iran captured American sailors and released video footage of them — a violation of their rights under the Geneva Convention.

In 2018, US intelligence revealed that Iran was responsible for more than 600 American military deaths in Iraq and thousands wounded by Iranian IEDs in Iraq. In 2024, three military contractors working in Jordan were killed in a drone attack and 40 others were injured. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of Iran-backed militias, claimed responsibility.

If you still think the US is just fine; protected by two oceans and friendly neighbors, and doesn’t have to care about freedom of navigation, trade routes, oil exports, China, Russia, or North Korean missile and nuclear weapons capability, that’s OK, too.

Wait.

No, it isn’t.

Peace is always good; peace is always important. But real peace does not consist of “turning the other cheek” while your enemy gets stronger. It is the outgrowth of strong and measured American cooperation with regional partners — in Europe, in Asia and in the Middle East — to ensure that malevolent actors don’t have an opportunity to ruin the system of international travel and commerce or to impose their vision of “peace” on the unwilling. Or to commit genocide.

Ensuring that Iran does not have nuclear weapons is a crucial step in that direction. And avenging American servicemembers across countries and decades counts as well.

Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly magazine.

The post Striking Back: Iran Has Been at War with America for 46 Years first appeared on Algemeiner.com.