Editor’s note: This column was written before U.S. forces bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities over the weekend.
It could just be me, but 2025 is starting to look like 1980. If you’re old enough to remember back that far, my father was campaigning against Jimmy Carter and Iran was in the headlines.
In November 1979, Iranian students had seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and were still holding 66 Americans hostage.
President Carter was under intense pressure to get the Americans freed, but negotiations and a military rescue mission failed.
Carter looked weak and ineffective, which he was. The mainstream media of the time – just three TV networks, PBS and the establishment print press – were leading with the hostage story every day.
The hostage crisis in Iran turned out to be the central issue of the 1980 election. My father capitalized on it and domestic issues like high inflation to roll to an easy win.
In that 1980 campaign, my father was in many ways a more dignified, more conservative prequel to Donald Trump and the messages Trump would run on in 2016, 2020 and 2024.
My father talked about making America great again and peace through strength, and the liberal media was united against him for his anti-communism.
They smeared him incessantly as a scary, trigger-happy warmonger who was itching to start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union or bomb Iran into a parking lot.
But my father was clever in the 1980 race. He made sure to never spell out exactly what he planned to do about the hostages or what he planned to do to Iran if he became president.
He was asked about the hostages all the time by the media, but he kept the country – and, more importantly, the Iranians – guessing.
He just stood back and let the left’s wild claims about all the military things he might do to Iran do the scaring for him.
Not being specific paid off.
On the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, the nervous Iranian mullahs released the hostages – and for the next eight years my father never blew up the world a single time.
Now look at what’s happening. Iran is again the big story overseas and we again have a president who everyone on the left thinks is going to start World War III tomorrow.
The left is terrified about what Trump might do militarily to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
Will he OK the direct use of our air force or airborne troops to help Israel win its preemptive war with Iran? Will he use one of our bombers to drop a 30,000-pound bunker buster or two on Iran’s underground nuclear facilities?
Who knows?
You don’t hear Trump denying anything, right? He just keeps everyone guessing – especially the Iranians.
Is his dogged public uncertainty one of his “art of the deal” tactics to get Iran to come to the negotiating table? Probably.
In 1980, not saying anything and allowing the liberal media and the left to sell the Iranian mullahs the idea that their country might soon become a parking lot worked very well for my father.
Today we’ve got the media selling the similar idea that Trump is dangerously out of control and is going to bomb Tehran back to the Stone Age.
Whether Trump is inadvertently lifting a page from the Reagan playbook, or doing it deliberately, doesn’t matter.
Presidential uncertainty worked well for my father. It helped to get the hostages free.
Let’s hope and pray that Trump’s infamous unpredictability ends this crisis so Iran becomes nuke-free.
Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. His column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.
