David Frum

And you're bringing a better future to that country.

And you're doing what American soldiers do at their best, which is fight for justice and freedom, not only safety at home and justice and freedom for other people.

And I'd hope to God that that would be true and that there would be people back home who would feel a little bit that sense of what America used to be and should be again, but isn't now.

Well, neither is true.

But the problem is that the truth is one that is a little difficult for leaders to articulate.

So Iran...

in March, I guess the war started in February, in February of 2026, was not an imminent threat to the United States.

That's not why the United States struck.

The United States struck because Israeli action had made Iran so vulnerable that for the first time since 1979, the long simmering US-Iran war, which has been going on nonstop in one form or another since 1979, the United States could strike with devastating effect and at very low cost.

Thanks to the Israeli success last summer against the Iranian air defenses, this was the moment when you could achieve something that every American president has thought about very seriously.

The United States worked with Israel under the Obama administration to use clandestine means to stop the Iranian nuclear bond program.

And the Israelis were doing things like messing up the Iranian centrifuges, killing Iranian nuclear scientists.

The United States

did not veto those actions and probably helped.

So there has been this war in the shadows for a long time.

It goes back to kidnapping of American diplomats at the embassy in 1979, the murder of American Marines in 1982 in Beirut, the torture of the CIA station chief, the Iranians supplying IEDs in Iraq.

This is a long-running battle.

The United States struck now because this was the moment of safety.

And so the claim of imminent threat, I think, is untrue.

Iran was struck because this was the moment to prevent it from becoming the next North Korea.