Americans Are Skeptical of the Iran Strikes. That’s a Good Thing.
Initially, there was polling which indicated that more Americans were for the airstrike campaign, which took out Iranian tyrant Ali Khamenei and several of his top lieutenants, not to mention a host of key political, military, and intelligence facilities, and continues in a clear effort to facilitate regime change in that beleaguered country.
But polling since indicates that isn’t the consensus. More respondents indicate they’re opposed to President Trump’s decision to unleash the whirlwind on the Iranian regime than for it.
I could give a dissertation on the quality and efficacy of modern polling in an era when our phones are deluged with calls and text solicitations, and we are hounded with spam of every kind. I don’t need to; you already know. I will note, as I noted in a recent column, that polling gold-standard Gallup has confessed to getting a puny 5 percent response rate to its own polling, and if that’s all Gallup is getting, there isn’t much of a reason to believe any polling organization can honestly claim to capture the will of the people. (RELATED: Ten Thoughts on Operation Epic Fury and Its Aftermath)
That said, I think I’m on relatively firm ground when I say that the reaction to the strikes over the weekend so far is more muted and mixed than enthusiastic.
My own position is that the strikes were inevitable. Not because of anything having to do with Donald Trump or neocon warmongering at the Pentagon, or Israel and its influence on American policy, or any of that.
For 47 years, we have attempted to normalize relations with the Iranians based on some very simple and reasonable demands…
The strikes were inevitable because sooner or later they had to happen. For 47 years, we have attempted to normalize relations with the Iranians based on some very simple and reasonable demands — that they and their proxies stop killing, maiming, and capturing our citizens, and that they stop threatening our nuclear annihilation while pursuing the means to achieve that aim. (RELATED: War With Iran: Justified Strike, Uncertain Horizon)
Iran proved intransigent on both accounts. And for the benefit of the Left, who suddenly believes that American history began when Trump descended that escalator in Manhattan to announce his first presidential run, no — this wasn’t unprovoked, and it wasn’t a war we initiated. This war was initiated back in 1979, and our prosecution of it has been an on-and-off, mostly off, endeavor for all of that time. What happened over the weekend was simply Trump deciding, for several quite apparent reasons, to begin prosecuting it decisively so as to end the 47-year war. They won’t accept this, of course — and the chief reason is that they’ve already chosen sides in the 47-year conflict with the mullahs. The side they chose is not the American one. (RELATED: The Democrats’ Epic Fury Over Iran Strikes)
And an intelligent observer will note that the nature of war has changed a lot over the past century. War isn’t just kinetic — it’s economic, it’s political, it’s cultural, and when it involves the United States of America, it’s almost always asymmetrical.
What I mean by that is you won’t face down an Iranian army with tanks and guns on a field of battle, just like you won’t face that challenge from Venezuela or Cuba. They know they can’t win that, so they will fight you in other ways. With Iran, terrorism is the general weapon of choice, with Israel as the general victim of choice. With Venezuela, before Trump acted to take down Nicolás Maduro and, in so doing, wind down that long-term asymmetrical conflict, the weapon of choice was political and then criminal, as the Maduro regime was consolidating the cocaine trade under its control. (RELATED: Why the Isolationist Wing Is Wrong: Trump’s Maduro Takedown Is Pure America First, Not Nation-Building)
That we’ve gone kinetic with Iran is our own form of asymmetrical warfare. We might not have an effective deterrent to Iranian terrorism, but they certainly don’t have an effective counter to the death from above we are capable of raining on them with surgical precision. Terrorism reached its zenith on 9/11, to be sure, and it changed American culture in lots of ways worthy of lamentation, but in the big picture, terrorism is an irritant much more than it is decisive.
What’s left of the Iranian regime is beginning to realize this as its flailing response has now hit no less than 10 of its neighboring states, all of whom have stepped up their level of irritation to that of belligerence toward the mullahs.
For the benefit of those on the Right who are furious about the strikes as a violation of the America First principles they say they voted for, however, the response should be more nuanced and comprehensive.
If you’re Generation X and above, this is easier to understand. Your frame of reference begins in 1979, not in 2015. You understand that we’ve been in direct conflict with that regime for most or all of your life. But if you’re younger, and your experiences with the Iranian threat tell you this is more of a Jewish/Israeli problem — and if your worldview is being shaped by the revelations in the Epstein files and other harbingers of outsized Jewish/Israeli influence on American policy, you’re less likely to understand the long game here.
You might take into consideration that the Arabs were, for more or less the first time, supportive of the effort to take out that regime. Both because they understood that it was realistic for it to be deposed, and that they saw the bright possibility for a prosperous future on the other side of its demise. That makes this much less of a Jewish thing and more of a strategic thing benefiting everyone. (RELATED: Why Iranians Have Unified Around Reza Pahlavi)
Of course, none of this matters unless the campaign unleashed late Friday night is successful in removing the regime — or, more specifically, in creating the conditions by which the Iranian people themselves remove the regime.
If that project is successful, almost literally everything changes in American politics and world politics as well.
Here I’ll reference the great Glenn Harlan Reynolds, who, in a Substack post on Monday, noted that Trump’s approach to actually solving problems rather than monetizing the discussion of them might be putting the latter approach out of business…
In fact, Trump’s approach across the board, which has brought him success after success in his first 13 months back in office, is to solve problems the way the guys in the bar say they would do it. Too much illegal immigration? Close the border and deport the illegals. Problems with Iran? Kill their leaders and encourage a revolution. Venezuela shipping drugs and gangs to the U.S.? Capture their leader and encourage his successor to cooperate or share his fate. You can just do things.
The thing is, though, that there’s a subtlety in this approach. Just doing things turns out to work. But if you take a step back from these actions of Trump’s, the big picture shows a pretty coherent strategy. Trump wants to weaken China without going to war with China. He has now cut off two major suppliers of oil to the PRC, which produces hardly any oil of its own. (It’s worse than that, because China wasn’t paying for that oil with dollars, and now it will need dollars to buy oil elsewhere.) That applies a squeeze to an already squeezed CCP, and will make Xi’s position, domestically and internationally, weaker. Also the military excellence recently displayed has to inspire second, third, and fourth thoughts about invading Taiwan.
Reynolds makes the prediction, assuming the strikes ultimately prove successful, that this will all redound famously to Trump’s benefit. That would necessitate that the more isolationist elements of the Right will come around.
It’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t, in the event that happy Iranians choose a pro-Western, pro-peace government which declares America a friend and gravitates to the good-guy side of the global equation.
But most Americans aren’t convinced, and I wouldn’t argue they should be. Not yet.
It isn’t enough to make a strategic choice. The execution of that choice can’t be botched. It has to produce the desired results.
I go back to the initial crisis, which began the 47-year conflict between the U.S. and the Iranian regime. Jimmy Carter, whose feckless foreign policy brought the mullahs to power in the first place (Khamenei’s predecessor Ruhollah Khomeini, in exile in Paris before spearheading the revolution against the Shah, flat-out lied to American and European politicians and journalists in claiming he and his regime would be more Western than the Shah, and then showed himself to be the opposite), sought to use the military for a way out of the hostage crisis. That was probably the best decision he made, but the ill-fated Desert One expedition, which was to free the U.S. embassy hostages from the grasp of Khomeini’s thugs, ended in humiliation. (RELATED: Reagan’s Shadow, Trump’s Moment)
And these strikes could similarly end in humiliation.
I’m not predicting that. But the risk can’t be ignored.
The regime could survive. As the hours and days move forward, and it becomes more obvious that our use of relatively cheap one-way drones (our LUCAS system is a knock-off of an Iranian drone platform which was itself a knockoff of an American design, and LUCAS drones are far cheaper to manufacture than are the Iranian Shahed model, a fact which is probably the most notable item in this entire campaign) makes for a different reality than anyone currently recognizes, it seems unlikely that Iran’s government will remain extant for much longer.
But it could.
Or what replaces it could be just as bad or worse. That’s unlikely, of course, but we don’t know.
Matt Walsh, who has become a skeptic of this campaign for a number of reasons, some well-reasoned and others not so much, said something worth recognizing…
What exactly is the end game? “The Iranian people rise up and take control of their government”? Okay what does that mean exactly? Which people? How are they taking control? What happens after they do take control? Are we sure the new people, whoever they are, will be better than…
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) March 1, 2026
Walsh isn’t wrong.
And then there is the prospect of having to follow these strikes with ground troops in order to accomplish the stated aims of his campaign, which becomes the real quagmire we’re all so anxious to avoid.
The proof is in the pudding. And we shall know them by their fruits.
We don’t know yet what those will be. And we should be skeptical until we do.
READ MORE from Scott McKay:
Ten Thoughts on Operation Epic Fury and Its Aftermath