President Trump: Forget the midterms and finish the job in Iran

Vice President JD Vance and Iran would like Americans to blame the war and Israel for the Republicans’ midterm electoral drubbing. President Trump, however, disagrees . He should rise above this noise and refocus on the U.S. national interest by fulfilling his repeated vow to “ finish the job ” with Iran.

In announcing Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28, Trump articulated five key American goals: “destroy their missiles,” “annihilate their Navy,” “ensure the regime’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world,” “ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon” and “unleash [Iran’s] prosperous and glorious future.”

These original objectives have been pared back over time. The first to fall away, almost immediately, was Trump’s directive to the Iranian people to “take over your government.” By April, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine no longer mentioned ending Iran’s support for terrorism.

Trump walked back the goal of destroying Iran’s projectile threat, suggesting in June that “missiles aren’t the problem.” And, most recently, Vance put an end to demanding the end of Iran’s nuclear program, asking only for a “meaningful” reduction in enrichment.

All that remains of the original U.S. war aims is annihilating Iran’s navy, which is both already accomplished and largely irrelevant to Iran’s threat.

Operation Epic Fury has notched significant accomplishments. Trump overstates the case when he claims that Iran has “been systematically destroyed, both militarily and financially,” but seriously damaged would be correct. Iran’s nuclear program and defense industrial base still lie under rubble. Its economic lifeblood, oil exports, has been largely choked off. A whole tier of military and civilian leaders was eliminated.

Iran rebuilt its conventional military capabilities far quicker than expected after last year’s 12-Day War and could do so again. While most of Iran’s 60 percent enriched uranium was entombed by U.S. B-2 bombers, Iran still could access it. The U.S. and Israel reportedly had a plan to get it out, using ground forces, but Trump opted against it . Pickaxe Mountain, dangerous because of how deeply buried it is, was not even targeted either in last year’s war or this year’s.

Rather than be forced back into conflict by a rearmed Iran, the U.S. and Israel can and should, as Trump has said, finish the job by returning to and fulfilling his original five objectives. That means the U.S. and Israel need to soon launch a new, short but intense campaign of strikes against Iran’s remaining missile and drone facilities, coastal radars, batteries, small boat launches and air defenses.

This operation should also set the conditions for rendering inoperable Iran’s nuclear facilities, including Pickaxe Mountain, and eliminating its 60 percent enriched uranium, with a ground operation as necessary. U.S. strikes should also target a portion of Iran’s domestic energy infrastructure, further weakening the regime’s hold on power, and clearly signal that Iranian retaliation will prompt further such strikes.

Such a campaign will entail risks. U.S. forces and our Israeli and Arab allies’ homelands will come under Iranian fire. Fuel prices will likely spike, at least temporarily. But the alternative, leaving the Iranian threat in place, is riskier and costlier still.

But Iran’s missiles, drones, proxies, navy and nukes are not the primary threats. Even if they were fully destroyed, Iran would attempt to rebuild them or find new means of aggression. The threat is the Iranian regime and its determination to destroy America, Israel and the West at any cost. Thus, even a new round of strikes will not finish the job. The U.S. will have to remain vigilant, monitoring Iran and potentially returning for additional strikes to stop it from reconstituting.

The war will only end by returning to the first objective Trump dropped from his list: the collapse of the fanatical, barbaric Tehran regime. No deal should be made with Iran; it would only sustain the regime. The U.S. military’s blockade is vital to further weakening it and accelerating its demise.

But more is needed: encouraging defections, fomenting distrust and friction among regime factions and strengthening opposition within Iran, providing everything from public statements of support to covert arms shipments to enable the Iranian people to overcome the regime’s violent forces and dispatch the Islamic Republic to the dustbin of history.

The midterms changed the political landscape in Washington but not the geopolitical chessboard in the Middle East. The Iranian threat remains; removing it is still the only way to end the war.

Michael Makovsky, Ph.D., a former Department of Defense official, is president and CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. Blaise Misztal is vice president for Policy at JINSA.