He is advancing U.S. interests without putting American lives at risk

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The violent cavalcade of events in Iran is starting to reveal the new range of aggressive-responsive policy options that U.S. President Donald Trump has developed to replace the obsolete concept of most of his recent predecessors. For 80 years from 1941 the basic framework was defined by Franklin D. Roosevelt in two addresses he gave at the beginning and end of that year in the Congress. In the State of the Union message in January, he warned against those who, “With sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal would preach the ‘ism’ of appeasement.”

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In his war message in December after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he promised that “we will make very certain that this form of treachery never again endangers us.” Succeeding presidents have followed those guidelines and the United States has not been an appeasement power and its military strength has been such that no country has dared to attack it directly.

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Eventually, the enemies of America and the West devised less traditional methods of aggressive harassment and violent opposition: luring the United States into guerrilla wars or combat quagmires, where it was impossible to detect lines of demarcation or to distinguish combatants. Easier to inflict and as anonymously, were acts of terror and narco-terrorism. These are methods of combat that are only resorted to by countries that do not have the strength to enter into direct hostilities, but as we have seen, they can be cumulatively enervating even to so immensely powerful a country as the United States.

President Lyndon Johnson had no idea what he was getting into in Vietnam and inexplicably ignored the advice of the........

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