For days, Donald Trump — impetuous, intuitive, instinctive, but not known for introspection — grappled with the path forward in Iran, and with his historical legacy.
Would he unleash the GBU-57 bunker-buster to penetrate the mountain covering the vital elements of Iran’s nuclear program, thereby allying himself more closely to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and risk drawing the United States into a wider war? Or would he use his trademark bluster and bargaining to force Iran to the negotiating table and buttress his peacemaker self-image?
Would he heed the call to unleash an attack to put an end to the nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over the Jewish state and, in future years, over the United States, which eventually would be in the range of nuclear-tipped Iranian missiles? Or would he heed the MAGA theology that is chary of “forever wars” and regards, not without reason, the conflict in the Middle East as a war that has lasted forever, or at least a modern approximation of forever? As he debated his history-altering decision, out of the fog of Middle Eastern war emerged an alternative version of modern history.
Perhaps the main theme of America as a superpower might not only be one of the elements of the “long twilight struggle, year in and year out” that John F. Kennedy spoke of in his landmark 1961 inaugural address: the Cold War battle with Soviet communism. A longer theme, and a competitive sub-theme, is an even longer twilight struggle, year in and year out: Iran.
On first blush, a struggle with a minor power like Iran shrinks in comparison with what we for decades regarded as the main event: the U.S. versus the USSR, capitalism versus communism, NATO versus the Warsaw Pact, the washing machines and TVs of American 1950s prosperity versus the empty shelves of the department store in Moscow, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin versus astronaut John H. Glenn Jr., the Soviet hockey team and goalie Vladislav Tretiak versus the American “Miracle on Ice” team of Mike Eruzione, Jim Craig and Neal Broten.
No one who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, when nuclear obliteration wasn’t out of the question — no one who sat at a Red Sox game, as I did in 1963 and, hearing the rumble of the Boston subway, worried that it was the sound of Russian bombers bearing down on Fenway Park — can minimize the magnitude of the Soviet-American confrontation.
That struggle began with the silencing of the World War II guns in 1945 and crashed to a conclusion with the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 — from the Harry Truman presidency to the George H.W. Bush presidency: 44 years.
The struggle over Iran began with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who in 1943 considered Iran the “bridge to victory” in World War II, all the way to Trump, who called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender”: 82 years.
In that time, the United States, with Great Britain, toppled Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh (presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, 1953); promoted the Pahlavi family for the country’s leadership (Eisenhower through Jimmy Carter, 1953 to 1979); provocatively described Iran as an “island of stability in one of the most troubled areas of the world” (Carter, 1977); endured the Iran hostage crisis (Carter through the early hours of Ronald Reagan, 1979-1981); quietly sided with Iraq in its war against Iran (Carter through Reagan, 1980-1988); sold weapons to Iran as part of the Iran-Contra scheme (Reagan, 1981); mistakenly shot down a civilian Iranian airliner (Reagan, 1988); and grew concerned about Iran’s nuclear program (Bill Clinton though Trump, 1998-2025).
This alternate view of history — which omits what University of Southern California scholar Jeffrey Fields called, in an illuminating discussion of U.S./Iran involvement in the online publication The Conversation, “real opportunities for reconciliation” — has several elements in common with the Cold War struggle. One is the ultimate safety of Americans and the survival of democratic ideals, even in this tumultuous season in the United States.
Another is the Trump call for “unconditional surrender.” At the January 1943 Casablanca Conference with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Roosevelt — perhaps channeling the spirit of “unconditional surrender” that Ulysses S. Grant demanded in America’s Civil War — called for the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers.
Trump had several models from post-1945 anti-communism agonies in this, the latest chapter of Iranian agonistes.
One was the old cold warrior himself, Richard Nixon. It is often forgotten that the 37th president’s first inaugural address, in 1969, was in many ways as eloquent as the Kennedy address. In those remarks, Nixon uttered a sentence that now is chiseled on his tombstone: “The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.” He also unleashed merciless bombing, at Christmastime 1972, of Hanoi and Haiphong in North Vietnam.
Trump’s critics long played down one of his most fervent desires: to acquire the tombstone legacy that Nixon won not with his failure to redeem his pledge to bring the Vietnam War to a swift conclusion, but instead with his outreach to China and the Soviet Union.
With a Massive Ordnance Penetrator bunker-busting bomb in his pocket, and a fleet of B-2 bombers capable of delivering it on the runway, Trump pondered his choices. For once, he wasn’t impulsive. He was told this was a Churchillian moment. It was the British wartime prime minister who, all but begging for armament assistance, told FDR in a 1941 broadcast from London, “Give us the tools and we will finish the job.” In the past several days, Netanyahu essentially was saying to Trump: Give us a few bomber sorties and that will finish the job.
Trump’s conundrum also is a matter of two presidents Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt responded to the Churchill “give-us-the-tools” entreaty with the 1941 Lend-Lease program, a rough analog to Netanyahu’s request. Theodore Roosevelt convened warring Russia and Japan and crafted the Peace of Portsmouth in 1905 that brought the 26th president the garland Trump covets: the Nobel Peace Prize.
“President Trump gets advice, but these kinds of decisions are his,” Simone Ledeen, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East in the first Trump administration, said in an interview. One decision, however, is out of his hands: how to bring an end to America’s Iran preoccupation. No president apparently has the power to do that.
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
