US President Donald Trump is a villain, no doubt about it. The list of all the awful things that he’s done as president, as candidate for president, and in earlier life, can fill books, which it has done already, but the most unforgivable is his refusal to accept his loss to Joe Biden in 2020 and the resulting riots on January 6 of the following year that caused ten deaths (including four by suicide as a result of the riots) and hundreds of injuries. Trump has never accepted responsibility for this, nor has he ever paid a price. For this reason alone, he should never have been re-elected in 2024, and yet.

Yet, as we see the developments in the Middle East today, that villain is also the hero against much worse villains, the band of ruthless murderers that constitute the Iranian regime.

Until Trump became president, no country other than Israel had dared to stand up to those criminals. Not the Obama administration which signed with them a nuclear deal that, in the words of Robert Satloff in 2015, mapped “Iran’s emergence as a regional power, with the full blessing — even support — of the United States and the international community.” Not Western countries, which routinely criticized Israel and imposed various sanctions on it while not taking any effective action against the Iranian criminals. Not Gulf countries, which kept appeasing the Iranian regime, at least until the Iranian regime’s own irrational desperation forced them to act.

Until I woke up on February 28 to the news of the joint Israel and US attacks on the criminals of Iran, I was sure that Trump too would find a way to not act. I was convinced that the June attack by the US against the Natanz, Fordo and Isfahan nuclear sites was a low-risk one-time event that fit Trump’s short attention span. I was convinced that when Trump promised to Iranian protesters that “help is on its way”, it was just empty words.

Obviously, I, like many other people, was wrong about this. I was sure that Trump would only do what was popular and expedient, not what was wise and essential. But on March 2, Trump said that he “didn’t care about polling” and that “leaders sometimes must act without clear public backing”. I had to pinch myself while reading this.

The outcome of the war is still unclear, but it has the potential to change the face of the Middle East, to finally create the conditions for durable peace between Israel and the Arab world, and to bring Lebanon back from many years of nightmares. Israel and the Trump administration have already achieved something remarkable: they have given the Iranian people hope for a better future. Iranians asked for Israel’s and US’s help, and they are thrilled that they got it.

If Israel and the Trump administration succeed, the Middle East will not be alone in reaping the rewards. The Iranian regime and their proxies have their criminal tentacles all over the planet, and they assist the dangerous regimes of Russia and China. The West, which is now taking cowardly positions on the war, will suddenly have new reasons to be optimistic for the future.

Regardless of whether ultimately this attempt at eliminating the huge threat posed to the world by the criminal Islamist regime of Iran succeeds or fails, Trump will be remembered as having done something that needed to be done and that no one else had the courage to do. In other words, he will be remembered as a hero of history.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)