Ben Shapiro

The Ayatollahs learned a very crucial lesson.

Having a weak American president was useful, and you could take hostages and basically do what you wanted.

The Iranian hostage crisis was American weakness embodied on the global stage.

Well, how do we know?

Well, literally the very moment that Ronald Reagan was sworn into office as president, they released the hostages.

Weird how that works.

The Ayatollahs looked at Ronald Reagan, who projected strength, and realized that they had a problem, so they backed down.

Papers were signed, the hostages were put on a plane, our fellow Americans finally came back home.

This is a basic tenet of reality-based foreign policy.

Strength deters, weakness invites aggression.

While the West squabbles about the niceties of diplomacy, peace through strength has always been the iron law when it comes to foreign policy.

At this point, the Middle Eastern-studied sophomores are on the edge of their seats with their next objection.

They point to the Iran-Iraq War of the 80s, and they complain that the United States armed both sides, which is sort of half true.

In the real world, foreign policy is a game of picking among the best of bad options.

Foreign policy isn't a Marvel movie.

You don't always get to choose between Captain America and Thanos.

In 1980, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, kicking off an eight-year industrial-scale slaughter along the Iran-Iraq border.

Saddam was a secular, blood-soaked dictator, but Ayatollah Khomeini was something even more destabilizing, an expansionist, apocalyptic Islamist whose explicit goal was to export his revolution across Iraq, the Gulf, and beyond, and cement a fundamentalist caliphate.

So the United States made a cold strategic calculation.

We provided limited support to Iraq to contain Iran.