President Trump’s views on Iran have apparently been consistent for at least four decades. A clip from a Barbara Walters interview in the 1980s circulated this week showing Trump arguing that the United States should seize Iranian oil installations in response to Iranian provocations, a position he reiterated to the Financial Times this week, telling the publication that his favorite outcome would be taking Iran’s oil and specifically contemplating seizing Kharg Island, which he compared to the American approach in Venezuela, saying the United States could control production there indefinitely.
Jonathan Tobin, editor-in-chief of Jewish News Syndicate, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess where the campaign stands and respond to the growing chorus of criticism from both the left and a faction of the right.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio spent the weekend restating the administration’s objectives on multiple programs, pushing back against the characterization that the campaign lacks clear goals or a definition of success. Rubio said the operation has been systematically destroying Iran’s navy, degrading its missile launcher capacity, and dismantling its defense industrial base, meaning the manufacturing facilities that would allow Iran to replenish missiles and drones in the future. He said the Iran being confronted now is Iran at its weakest point, and that allowing the regime two more years to accumulate thousands of additional missiles and expand its production capacity would have represented an unacceptable strategic risk. On the Strait of Hormuz specifically, Rubio said it will be opened when the operation concludes, either because Iran agrees to comply with international law or because a coalition of nations ensures that compliance by force.
Tobin said the administration’s objectives are coherent and represent nothing more than what every American president of both parties has publicly stated toward Iran over the past twenty-five years. The difference, he argued, is that Trump is actually acting on those objectives rather than repeating them as aspirational rhetoric while pursuing policies of engagement and appeasement that enriched and empowered the regime. He said the Obama and Biden administrations’ approach to Iran, culminating in the JCPOA and its successor frameworks, directly produced the conditions that led to the October 7th attacks and the current conflict, by providing the regime with resources, sanctions relief, and the confidence that the United States would not act.
On the criticism coming from Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, and others on the right who have argued that Israel is driving American foreign policy decisions, Tobin was blunt. He noted that Trump’s documented views on Iran predate his relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu by decades and that claiming a country with fewer than ten million people and the geographic footprint of New Jersey is manipulating the most powerful military in the world into a conflict against its interests requires ignoring a substantial amount of contrary evidence. He said the contradiction between portraying Trump as an authoritarian strongman and simultaneously portraying him as being led around by a small ally is one that critics on both sides have not attempted to resolve because resolving it would require abandoning one of the two attacks. Proft noted that Carlson this week praised Oswald Mosley, the World War II era British fascist, and that Kelly made factually incorrect claims about American and Israeli forces striking a water supply in the greater Tehran region, both of which he said illustrate how far that faction has drifted from defensible analysis.
Tobin pointed to a piece by Greg Carlstrom, the Middle East correspondent for The Economist, as an example of more clear-eyed outside analysis of the regime’s actual position. Carlstrom argued that the survival-equals-victory framing for Iran ignores material conditions on the ground, including a currency that was already nearly worthless before the campaign began, runaway inflation, deep public anger over economic failures, and the ongoing erosion of both the IRGC’s economic base and its defense industrial capacity. Tobin said the portrait of an infinitely resilient Iranian regime capable of indefinitely sustaining the current conflict reflects either ignorance of Iran’s internal dynamics or willful disregard of them in service of an anti-Trump political narrative.
The conversation closed on a separate but related dimension of the domestic political picture. Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic candidate for United States Senate in Michigan, was recorded expressing reluctance to comment on the death of the Ayatollah Khamenei out of sensitivity to residents of Dearborn, a city he said includes many people who are sad about the Supreme Leader’s passing. Tobin noted that Dearborn is approximately thirty miles from the West Bloomfield synagogue that was attacked several weeks ago, and said El-Sayed’s response is representative of a faction within the Democratic Party that has moved from the margins to a position of genuine influence, openly sympathetic to America’s adversaries and visibly hostile to Jewish interests. He said leading Democrats have been far more focused on competing with each other in opposition to Trump than on confronting the anti-Semitism and pro-Iran sentiment that has taken root in a significant portion of their coalition, and that failure to do so represents a genuine threat that deserves to be named directly rather than treated as a fringe phenomenon that will resolve itself.