WSJ
The Iran Strike Was the High Point of Trump’s Year
The president, and the nation, should be proud of the success of Operation Midnight Hammer.
ET
President Trump made a passing reference to foreign policy in his Dec. 17 end-of-year address. “I’ve restored American strength,” he said, “settled eight wars in 10 months, destroyed the Iran nuclear threat, and ended war in Gaza, bringing for the first time in 3,000 years peace to the Middle East, and secured the release of the hostages, both living and dead.”
Not bad, if he does say so himself. As one might expect, Mr. Trump’s list of overseas accomplishments ranged from the subjective (measurements of American strength may vary) to the false (the Middle East, sadly, isn’t at peace). Buried under the verbiage was one of Mr. Trump’s signature achievements, a historic triumph with long-lasting repercussions. Its name is Operation Midnight Hammer.
The military strike that Mr. Trump ordered in July crippled Iran’s nuclear program and, by weakening Tehran’s terror masters, led to the return, at this writing, of all but one of the living and dead hostages in Gaza. No exaggeration is required to prove its importance. Operation Midnight Hammer struck a blow for nonproliferation, humiliated the mullahs and demonstrated American capacity and will to Russia and China. It was Mr. Trump’s best decision of 2025.
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And it was his alone. Kamala Harris wouldn’t have ordered the strike. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden all stated their opposition to Iran’s nuclear program and used sanctions and clandestine means to slow it down. Yet through the decades Tehran’s theocrats continued building nuclear infrastructure, ballistic missiles and a “ring of fire” of terrorist proxies surrounding Israel. Nothing convinced Tehran to change course.
For a simple reason. A bomb would bolster the Islamic Republic’s chances of survival and advance its goal of destroying both the Little Satan (Israel) and the Great Satan (the U.S.). As happens often in formulating policy, American officials failed to consider the nature of the Iranian regime: a revolutionary theocracy with apocalyptic temptations whose contempt for the West can neither be charmed nor appeased. And so the threat grew.
In response, Mr. Trump’s predecessors played for time. Despite decades of enmity, Mr. Obama treated Iran as a good-faith partner. His Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action of 2015, aka the Iran deal, dropped sanctions and sent cash to the ayatollahs in exchange for empty promises not to build a bomb for 10 years. Shepherded by Secretary of State John Kerry, the Iran deal divided the public, alienated allies and rewarded malign behavior. Europe loved it.
“This deal is catastrophic for America, for Israel and for the whole of the Middle East,” Mr. Trump told Aipac, the pro-Israel lobby, as a candidate in 2016. He was right. Mr. Obama’s diplomatic mirage obscured Iran’s continued research and development as well as terrorist mayhem on the part of Gen. Qassem Soleimani’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran and the Islamic State divvied up the Fertile Crescent. The death toll mounted. American influence waned.
Upon taking office in 2017, Mr. Trump reversed the equation that had eroded American power. He moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital in Jerusalem, a location specified in American law for decades but never made concrete. He crushed the Islamic State in a no-holds-barred military campaign. He applied maximum economic pressure on Iran, withdrew from the nuclear deal and droned Soleimani after the IRGC killed U.S. servicemen. He recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and presided over the Abraham Accords that normalized Israeli relations with four Arab countries. In the space of four years, Mr. Trump reasserted America’s dominant position in the Middle East. An end to Iran’s nuclear program seemed imminent.
The 2020 election intervened. In retrospect, Mr. Biden’s all-thumbs presidency may have established the conditions for Mr. Trump’s restoration and Iran’s comeuppance. But such an outcome was far from inevitable. Mr. Biden wanted desperately to entice the Iranians into resurrecting the nuclear deal.
Mr. Biden’s shambolic and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 undermined America’s deterrent. Russia invaded Ukraine the next year. Iran’s proxy Hamas invaded Israel from Gaza the year after that. The terrorists killed more than 1,200 civilians and seized more than 250 hostages, including Americans.
As Israel’s war with Hamas dragged on, Mr. Biden began to resemble Mr. Obama. He distanced himself from Israel, slow-walking weapons and resisting Israeli entry into Hamas strongholds. He tried, unsuccessfully, to build a pier into Gaza that would deliver aid to Palestinian civilians. A U.S. sergeant died from injuries sustained during its construction. Meanwhile, Iran ramped up its nuclear program. Mr. Biden dithered.
And Mr. Trump came back. Having re-established America’s authority during his first term, Mr. Trump was called on to repeat the job during his second. He quickly reimposed sanctions on the Iranian regime. He resumed U.S. arms transfers to Israel and didn’t interfere in public with Israeli military planning. He authorized Operation Rough Rider, in which U.S. forces pounded Iran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen.
While welcoming hostage releases during his first six months in office, Mr. Trump continued to threaten Hamas with unspecified consequences if it didn’t give up its captives. And he insisted, as he’d done for the past decade, that Iran wouldn’t be allowed to obtain a nuclear device.
When Israel launched Operation Rising Lion in June, hitting Iranian nuclear sites and missile factories, Mr. Trump faced a choice. Either he could be a bystander, watching and waiting like previous presidents, or he could commit U.S. forces to a surgical strike that would set Iran’s nuclear program back years if not decades. Mr. Trump’s strategic unpredictability left even close observers unsure of what he would do. Then news arrived that the B-2s were on their way home. Iran’s heavily fortified nuclear facility at Fordow was no more.
Operation Midnight Hammer succeeded. Hostilities ended after Iran’s half-hearted and ineffectual retaliatory strike on U.S. forces in Qatar. Iran’s leadership retreated into paranoid self-destruction, rooting out subversion both real and imagined. Its proxy army was tattered. Hamas had nowhere to turn. A few months later, the genocidal terrorist organization agreed to a cease-fire with Israel and the release of the men and women, living and dead, still in its captivity.
Mr. Trump won. And in doing so he proved the experts wrong. For more than a decade, elites had proclaimed that a strike on Iran’s nuclear program would unleash a regional war in which thousands of American soldiers and civilians would die. Indeed, in the run-up to Operation Midnight Hammer, both Trump-aligned podcasters and staffers in Mr. Trump’s White House counseled the president to avoid entanglement with Israel and pursue diplomacy with Iran.
He didn’t follow their advice. Perhaps Mr. Trump was simply pursuing the line he had taken on Iran since entering the race for the White House in 2015. Or perhaps he intuited that the conventional approach to the Middle East—the strategy pursued by Messrs. Obama and Biden—had things backward.
Peace isn’t achieved by placating murderers. It’s established by creating facts on the ground, by dynamism, surprise and force. By taking out Iran’s nuclear program, Mr. Trump showed that U.S. power makes the world a safer place. It’s a lesson worth following in 2026 and beyond.
Mr. Continetti is a Free Expression columnist at WSJ Opinion.
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