Monday, June 23, 2025
From Ian:
Jake Wallis Simons: Trump has just secured the best chance for global peace
Jake Wallis Simons: Trump has just secured the best chance for global peace
Thank God somebody hasn’t forgotten their courage. In civil society, meanwhile, we were yesterday treated to the embarrassing spectacle of crowds protesting in London in support of the Ayatollah. Women who enjoyed equal rights and men who took free expression for granted raised placards showing the face of the tyrant, along with the slogan, “choose the right side of history”. It is tempting to conclude that Britain is lost.Eli Lake: What Happens If Iran’s Regime Collapses?
As I wrote in these pages last week, this is Israel’s century. The countries that will not only survive but thrive will be those with conviction in their values and the courage and resilience to defend them. Now is the time to rouse ourselves from the post-Cold War torpor of identity politics and self-hatred. Yet our bankrupt leaders refuse to release us. Israel and the United States can hold their heads high today, while we must hang ours in shame.
How must the airmen of the RAF feel as they watch this great victory unfold from the sidelines? What about all the decent Britons? Oh, for the chance to feel proud of our country again. So much for us. This morning, however, we should spare a thought for the Israeli people.
Over the last one-and-a-half years, they have suffered trauma, fear, uncertainty and bereavement, not to mention the hatred of the world. Hundreds of thousands of men from all walks of life have served on the frontlines and many have failed to return home. The propaganda against them has been overwhelming. Yet the country has refused to be defeated.
Even after more than 600 days of war in Gaza, when Netanyahu ordered the attacks on Iran, public support stood at more than 90 per cent, despite knowing that life would be horribly disrupted, missiles would fall on their homes and some of their people would die.
While European leaders wagged their fingers and quivered in their beds, the citizens of the Middle East’s only democracy demonstrated what may be achieved in a country that has not discarded its old loves of flag, faith and family, as we have done. This is a lesson for the West either to learn or to ignore. As the Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky put it: “We were not created in order to teach morals and manners to our enemies.”
For our own sakes, however, and for those of our children, we must learn this lesson fast. The centrist fundamentalism that has so disfigured our societies since the Cold War has run its course. Those who persist in pursuing it – Starmer, Macron and the rest – have been outstripped by history, even if they do not yet know it. Israel’s pride is our shame. This is Jerusalem’s century and we must decide where to plant our feet.
Mariam Memarsadeghi, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the founder and director of the Cyrus Forum for Iran’s Future, also sees very little hope in a democratic transition as Israel wages war in Iran. “The opposition, unfortunately, is not ready,” she said. “I don’t like saying that but it’s the truth. Pahlavi talks about having a plan to maintain security and stability, but I just don’t see how that can be possible. At the very least, he is going to need foreign help.”Seth Mandel: Iran Brought This On Itself
That foreign help will not be coming from America. Despite the president’s MIGA post, there is no serious conversation inside the Trump administration about another nation-building war in the Middle East. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Sunday told reporters that America’s war aims did not include “regime change.” As one Trump administration official told me, “There is no chance we go in for nation-building when this thing is done.”
For different reasons, Israel will also not be stabilizing a post-Khamenei Iran. Israel would welcome a democratic Iran but will settle for a weakened one. The Jewish state is far too small—with a population of just over 10 million—to put significant boots on the ground in a country of more than 90 million people if Khamenei was deposed. Nonetheless, its intelligence service, Mossad, has cultivated networks now being used for targeting nuclear and military sites and other kinds of sabotage. Two former U.S. national security officials who worked closely with Israel while in government said those networks can be repurposed to support an Iranian uprising should the need arise.
Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Free Press, “What is going to get Iranians back to the streets in great numbers will be support from the West; that means Israel. The security apparatus is weakened. There is an internet blackout. It’s early days. I think the opportunity is there.”
Dave Wurmser, a former national security council staffer in Trump’s first term who also worked at the Pentagon and State Department under George W. Bush, said Israeli war planners were aware that a byproduct of the campaign could “destabilize the regime to the point where it could fall.”
Some former U.S. intelligence analysts, however, see the prospects of a democratic uprising in the near term to be slim. Jonathan Panikoff, the former deputy national intelligence officer for the Middle East, told me that even if Iran’s supreme leader was taken out, the regime may not collapse. “I would love nothing more than democracy in Iran, but it’s much more likely that you get IRGC-istan,” he said, a reference to the Revolutionary Guard Corps that has amassed extraordinary domestic power over the last 25 years. “At the end of the day, guns trump words. We’ve seen that play out in 2009, in 2017 in the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. It’s more likely it’s a different kind of authoritarian state, a military junta with a fig leaf government, a Pakistan on steroids.”
Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Iranian targets officer for the CIA, also said he was not expecting a democratic transition in Iran in the near term. “I would expect some form of anarchy; that is always the case in Iran when the central government goes down,” he said. One of the problems for the internal opposition is that “the regime has done an excellent job of locating individuals who have charisma and neutralizing them. The opposition is there, but it’s not cohesive,” Gerecht added. That said, he stressed that there were too many factors that were unknown to really predict what would come next if Khamenei was toppled.
The most salient factor that will determine if a democratic transition in Iran is possible is how many mid-level officers in the internal security agencies of the state, like the Basij militia and the intelligence ministry, are willing to break ranks with their superiors and refuse to fire on protesters.
Gerecht said that the apparatus that arrested and killed demonstrators in the Woman, Life, Freedom demonstrations in 2022 and 2023 will likely carry out such orders. Sazegara, the former deputy prime minister, is optimistic that at least some of them can be turned. “Our strategy is, as much as possible, to support dissidents inside the IRGC and the army and the intelligence services to join the people,” he said. But any chance for such an uprising will have to wait until the war is over.
On January 28, 2024, Iran killed three American soldiers on a base in Jordan, injuring more than 40. On October 19, 2023, an Iranian militia in Yemen engaged the USS Carney destroyer in what the Wall Street Journal described as “the most intense combat a U.S. Navy warship had seen in the better part of a century, shooting down more than a dozen drones and four fast-flying cruise missiles.”True stories of espionage, sabotage—and Divine Providence.
That “10-hour engagement” came, of course, just 12 days after Iran’s militia in Gaza invaded Israel, murdering 1,200—of which 41 were Americans.
Lost in Iran’s modern slaughter was the fact that October 2023 coincided with the 40th anniversary of a kind of villainous origin story for Tehran: the October 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 American servicemembers. In the intervening decades, that killing continued. But the bookends of 1983 and 2023 served as fitting brackets for a period of history run red with the blood of Americans. Iran’s attacks—as noted above—didn’t end. But Tehran had overplayed its hand and set in motion a great American backlash, leading to President Trump’s history-making order to strike at the heart of the Iranian nuclear-weapons program.
The Iranian threat, in other words, has not subsided. American civilians and soldiers live in a world made more dangerous by Iran’s constant plotting to harm them.
And so the idea that bombing a facility in Iran that had been evacuated of people but not of weaponizable nuclear material was an “escalation” is risible. More absurd still is the belief, apparently held by a growing number of Democratic politicians and an endless supply of Republican social-media jugheads, that Trump is hereby solely responsible for future Iranian militia threats to Americans abroad.
“Donald Trump shoulders complete and total responsibility for any adverse consequences that flow from his unilateral military action,” announced Hakeem Jeffries, the highest ranking Democrat in the House.
Jeffries is therefore predicting Iranian violence against Americans while at the same time freeing Iran from culpability for that violence. This man intends to be the next speaker of the House.
Adam Smith, ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, had this to say: “The path that the President has chosen risks unleashing a wider war in the region that is both incredibly unpredictable and treacherous and that threatens the safety and security of the United States, Israel, and ultimately the world.”
That statement is somewhat more reasonable than Jeffries’s, but again—this is the path Iran has chosen. Additionally, it will not make the world a more dangerous place than it would have been with a nuclear-armed Iran. Lastly, the presumptuousness to lecture Israelis on their own safety, especially in this case when they are telling us overwhelmingly the opposite of what Smith says, is poor form—as is, of course, blaming America for Iran’s aggression.
In the aftermath of yet another stunning Israeli operation inside Iran, many are wondering: how does the Mossad keep pulling this off?
How does a tiny nation, roughly the size of New Jersey and under constant existential threat, manage to penetrate the most hostile regime in the world time and again—slipping past the Revolutionary Guard, sabotaging nuclear ambitions, and rescuing lives in ways that would make a Hollywood screenwriter blush, or seem too far-fetched even for the big screen?
Of course, the professionalism, ingenuity, and sheer courage of Israel’s agents—combined with the cutting-edge innovation of the Startup Nation—play a central role. But from a Jewish perspective, there’s another truth too essential to ignore: hashgacha pratit, Divine providence—the belief that God guides history not only in sweeping arcs but also through intimate, hidden threads. And sometimes, the outcomes are so precise, so improbable, that we’re left with no plausible explanation—at least not one that leaves God out of the story.
Much of what we know about this shadow war comes from The Secret War with Iran by veteran Israeli journalist and intelligence expert Ronen Bergman. Drawing on hundreds of sources and interviews, his research offers a rare window into the secret victories that shaped the last four decades.
Below are five real-life operations, stretching from the Islamic Revolution in 1979 to the nuclear age, that show the fingerprints of both human brilliance and something greater. 1. The Escape from Iran (1979–1981): Smuggling a Community to Safety
After the fall of the Shah in 1979, Iran’s Jews faced a terrifying new reality. The Islamic regime labeled Zionism a capital offense, executed Jewish leader Habib Elghanian, and sowed fear among the country’s ancient Jewish community.
In response, Israeli intelligence launched a quiet, high-stakes operation to help Jews flee. Agents and collaborators smuggled thousands across borders using forged documents, bribes, and covert routes through Pakistan and Turkey. In one case, a rescuer even posed as a senior Pakistani official to escort families to safety.
Roughly 10,000 Jews escaped through these clandestine efforts, while tens of thousands more fled via informal means. To protect those still inside Iran, Israel kept its role secret.
It wasn’t just a logistical feat—it was a modern-day Exodus. In a time of chaos and persecution, Jewish lives were saved by a mix of courage, ingenuity, and, perhaps, something greater moving quietly behind the scenes.
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