It is, in fact, possible to win wars.
I have spent my entire life watching the United States and the West lose wars, or at least not win wars. Initial victory, followed by gradual defeat or bizarre interventionism without the full force, weight, and commitment necessary to carry it through.
What President Trump is demonstrating, however, along with Prime Minister Netanyahu in Israel, is that it is, in fact, possible to win wars.
Let’s recall the timeline here.
On October 7, 2023, the genocidal terror group Hamas invaded Israel’s borders and killed 1,200 Israelis, mostly Jewish, and abducted 250 Israelis and took them back to their terror tunnel hellholes. In those tunnels, Hamas amassed a vast arsenal of rockets, grenades, and small arms over the course of 20 years with the support and funding from nations in the region, including Iran, Qatar, and Turkey.
There was also a serious possibility that Hezbollah was going to enter the war on the same day. In fact, Hezbollah started attacking with small rockets in the beginning and then gradually escalated. And, according to the military experts, Hezbollah was similarly genocidal and was a far better armed Iranian terror proxy based in Lebanon.
Israel also faced down a continuing terror threat from Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Judea and Samaria, the so-called West Bank. Syria was being used as a thoroughfare for Iranian arms for Hezbollah. The Houthis in Yemen were another Iranian-backed terror threat. And, of course, the Iranian government wasn’t merely spreading terrorism, they were also fast-tracking a nuclear weapons program.
That’s where things stood two years ago.
Now, two years later, the Middle East has turned completely upside down.
Israel has completely decimated Hamas, killing its entire top leadership from Gaza all the way to Iran. Israel has destroyed Hezbollah’s efficacy and killed its terror master, Hassan Nasrallah. Its attacks on Hezbollah were so effective that the Assad regime in Syria completely collapsed.
Judea and Samaria have been quieted by the work of the IDF during this time. Iranian proxies in Iraq went silent as well thanks to the Israeli Air Force. The Houthis in Yemen are sort of the one remaining outstanding enemy, and they’ve been thoroughly bombed. They are a nuisance, but they’re not an existential threat to Israel. And Iran’s nuclear program, the greatest existential threat to Israel, has been set back years, if not decades, thanks to the courage of the Israeli Air Force, and, of course, a timely, brave intervention from President Trump that led to an amazing mission flown by the United States Air Force.
And now President Trump has brokered an amazing deal, one that seemed unthinkable not long ago. The release of the final 20 live Israeli hostages all at once, along with all the remaining bodies released. Israel maintains a secure posture in the Gaza Strip itself as a transitional plan toward a future without Hamas, supported by regional allies, including countries that one moment ago were sending cash and weapons into for Hamas to use, like Qatar and Turkey.
The possibility of future Abraham Accords with countries like Saudi Arabia and Indonesia are now on the table.
So, here is the question for the West: How is it that this war was won?
Because it’s hard to win wars.
Well, the answer is the conventional wisdom was stupid — and it has been stupid for decades.
And the decision makers here are ”out-of-the-box” thinkers. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is someone who truly understands the nature of the Middle East and Middle Eastern history. But President Trump is the real difference maker here, because President Trump decided that America would no longer just go along with the 80-year-old slogans promoted by the Arabists at the State Department.
The conventional wisdom was that military action does not guarantee security in the Middle East. That is a lie. It was always a lie. It was always catastrophically wrong.
In fact, every time Israel has provided for its own security, it was not through a peace deal. It was a peace deal after a victory.
Military action is the only guarantor of support and security in the Middle East. It was military action that removed every supporting pillar beneath Hamas’s feet.
The conventional wisdom said the United States ought to play a weird, neutral role between Israel and its genocidal enemies. You saw this from Joe Biden. Kamala Harris talks like this all the time. Bill Clinton tried it until he realized that Yasser Arafat was totally uninterested in peace.
But this was the conventional wisdom. Was that, sure, Israel was a strong ally of the United States, but America had to play honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians. And it turns out that that was not just wrong, it was idiotically wrong.
The Trump administration openly supported the IDF.
They openly provided the weapons.
They openly provided the rhetorical support for Israel to win. And it was that that led to Hamas giving up the ghost and to Hamas, his allies, realizing that actually Israel was not going to be forced to simply accept the risk of its own survival.
The conventional wisdom said that if you threaten to kill terror leaders abroad, that’d be conflagrationist and terrible. That, too, was wrong.
Israel killed terror masters in Iran itself. Israel killed Ismail Haniya, the political leader of Hamas. And of course, it was the strike in Qatar that actually led to Qatar and Turkey deciding to press for Hamas’s ouster.
Israel then hit inside Qatar in an attempted strike on Hamas’s leadership. They missed, but the message was made clear: Israel would be willing to do it again.
And then the president essentially said, “Okay, you know what? We’ll come in. We’ll give a security guarantee to Qatar so this doesn’t happen again. But we need you to end this war. We need you to work with Turkey to stop all of this.”
It was a carrots-and-sticks approach led by President Trump.
President Trump understands the Middle East better than all the so-called experts.
And, by the way, he understands the Middle East far better than the supposed neocons, the total interventionists pushing for ”Democracy in the Middle East.” Trump is not one of those.
He also understands it better than the isolationists in his own party who wanted to reject Trump’s tempered and rational ”Peace through Strength” in favor of what might be called “Cowardice through Catastrophism,” the idea that World War III is lurking behind every corner — despite the fact that President Trump is the most rational purveyor of American force in modern American history. There was no shot that World War III would break out over one B-2 sortie over Iran. That was not going to happen because Trump was backing the IDF’s capacity to destroy Hamas in the Gaza Strip. That was not going to happen. The catastrophism was nonsense and it was nonsense from the beginning.
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Prime Minister Netanyahu, who soldiered through withering criticism both at home and abroad, of course, for the great crime of seeking victory over those who would destroy his country, deserves credit here.
Huge credit, obviously, as Jared Kushner says, to the Israeli people who mobilized in an unprecedented way to defend their nation and their civilization, we’re talking about 45-year-old guys leaving four kids at home and their business to go fight in Gaza in the “Sherut Miluim,” the Israeli Army Reserve Service.
And of course, huge props to the American people who provided Israel the support it needed to win, both in terms of material and mostly by making the right decision and electing Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. So, thank you to all the voters of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
It turns out that victory over genocidal enemies is indeed possible. What it requires is a smart strategy that bucks the conventional wisdom, a desire and willingness to win, and the perspicacity to dismiss people who promote either a starry-eyed millenarianism, in which every nation is going to break out into democracy someday, or a benighted conventional wisdom that fails every single time it’s tried.
