JAMES CARTER And JACOB CHOE: Trump’s Doctrine, Rubio’s Moment And How America Got Serious About Iran

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Washington has a habit of dressing up failure as sophistication.

Thirty years of engagement with Iran — the diplomacy, the frameworks, the endless European intermediaries — produced a regime with more centrifuges, more proxies, and more confidence than when the process started. The foreign policy establishment responded to each setback by calling for more of the same, with better manners.

Trump looked at that record and didn’t find it complicated. He found it embarrassing.

That instinct — blunt, impatient with credentialed excuse-making — drove the maximum pressure campaign, the JCPOA withdrawal, and ultimately Operation Midnight Hammer. You can argue about the sequencing or the risks. What’s harder to argue with, at this point, is the trajectory. Iran’s nuclear sites are rubble. Its proxy network is the weakest it’s been in a decade. The regime that spent years believing it could outlast American attention is now having a different conversation. (RELATED: Trump Aims To End Iran’s War On America — On His Terms)

None of that happened because the establishment came around. It........

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