Most students of history have likely pondered the question: Is it the times that make the man, or is it the man that makes the times? The question, though superficially intriguing, seems to have an easy enough answer: Sometimes it is the times that make the man, and sometimes it is the man that makes the times. Rarest of all is the man who is both summoned and elevated by the times, on the one hand, and who has the courage and conviction to shape the times in return, on the other hand. It is this lattermost group of men who we might refer to as the truly great men of history.
Donald Trump is, on this metric, a great man of history.
In 2016, Trump was first swept into office, just a few months after the Brexit referendum in the UK, amid a broader wave of nationalist backlash to the regnant neoliberal global order. Trump, a lifelong free-trade skeptic with New York City outer-borough sensibilities, was the right man to lead at the right moment. He became the first president since Richard Nixon's fateful trip to visit Chairman Mao in Beijing to begin decoupling the U.S. from its economic bear hug with the Chinese Communist Party. More recently, Trump has overseen a historic securing of America's porous southern border and an equally historic withdrawal from dozens of transnational institutions.
Trump has met the moment and risen to the occasion in numerous foreign theaters besides China and the broader Indo-Pacific as well. He saw decades of American malaise, managed decline and overextended empire, and he has promptly reversed course.
Trump and his administration have repeatedly proven willing and unafraid to criticize America's European allies, nudging our core NATO partners to be better versions of themselves in such areas as military spending and defense self-sufficiency. He has responded to decades of buildup of murderous transnational nonstate cartels and Chinese and Russian entrenchment in our own hemisphere by reasserting the Latin America-centric Monroe Doctrine, as most spectacularly evidenced by January's Operation Absolute Resolve extraction of fugitive Nicolas Maduro in Caracas.
And now there is the unfolding Operation Epic Fury in Iran.
For 47 years, Iran's revolutionary Shiite theocracy has been attempting to kill, and indeed killing, Americans. From the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut in 1983 to the Bush-era roadside IEDs in Iraq to the attempted (and indicted) assassination of Trump himself, the mullah regime in Tehran has a long and bloody track record when it comes to American loss of life — more than 1,000 Americans killed in total, according to U.S. Central Command. For decades, presidents kicked the can down the road, appeasing and negotiating with the mullahs as if they were atheistic Soviets and not 72 virgins-aspiring apocalyptic Islamists. The mullahs dissembled and stalled, while racing toward nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles on which to mount them.
And then Trump came along.
Trump campaigned on ending so-called forever wars in the Middle East. His critics, both on the Left and in certain pockets of the impotent Right, have accused Trump of violating that promise with the current campaign. But those critics are wrong. Iran has been at war with us, whether or not we think about it and acknowledge it, since the founding of the revolutionary regime in 1979. The revolutionaries' very first action was to storm the U.S. embassy in Tehran and commence a 444-day hostage crisis. Tehran's "death to America" chants since then have been daily, and its anti-American atrocities have been legion.
With Operation Epic Fury, Trump isn't starting a new forever war — he is ending one.
Time and again, Trump has shown that he is willing to take actions that U.S. presidents of both parties long paid lip service to support but never actually effectuated. The notion that the world's most zealous Islamist regime cannot acquire the world's most dangerous weapons had been spoken so many times by so many different politicians over the decades that it had become old hat. No one actually acted on it until Trump tore up Barack Obama's disastrous nuclear deal in 2018 and bombed key Iranian nuclear facilities during Operation Midnight Hammer in 2025. Now, with Operation Epic Fury, Trump is attempting to finish the job and permanently ensure that Iran no longer threatens American interests.
God bless him for it.
The polling on Operation Epic Fury is mixed — predictably, it's split largely along partisan lines. But I strongly suspect Trump does not care in the slightest about the polling. Great men of history do not put a finger in the wind before deciding to take a seismic, world-altering action. They don't read the polls; they read the times and allow the rising tides of zeitgeist to elevate them to their better, most dynamic selves. And they have the corresponding vision and determination to shape the times for the better, in return. The American national interest will be improved by seeing the current mission in Iran through. So too will the broader condition of the Middle East — and, for that matter, the whole world.
The skeptics may shriek loudly. Let them do so. Because for Trump, a drastically improved national — and regional and global — outlook is more than justification enough. Just as it is for all great men of history.
Editor's Note: For decades, former presidents have been all talk and no action. Now, Donald Trump is eliminating the threat from Iran once and for all.
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