Well intended ideals for declaring wars have a way of seducing nations into believing they will be short, decisive, and neatly concluded. History soberly teaches the opposite. Conflicts are easy to ignite and notoriously difficult to contain. You may predict how a war begins, but its trajectory and ending rarely follow the script. Now, with the current U.S.-Israeli campaign dragging on, oil markets rattled, and no sign of regime or even policy change in Tehran, a difficult question inevitably surfaces: Was this the right course of action?

Any attempt to answer that question requires at least a minimal sense of historical context. The roots of today’s confrontation stretch back to 1978, when the Iranian Islamic Revolution reshaped the Middle East and set Iran on a collision path with much of the Western world.

The Islamic Republic of Iran’s ideology is not subtle, and it is not hidden. It is openly built on Shi’a Islamic governance, unapologetic about the rejection of U.S. and Western influence, promoting the weakening of American power in the region, and calling for Israel’s destruction. The regime defines its mission through the export of Islamist and anti‑Western movements abroad, and through a doctrine that elevates resistance, martyrdom, and permanent ideological struggle. The IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is not simply a branch of the military; it is the regime’s self‑declared guardian, charged with advancing this revolutionary project both inside Iran and across the Middle East and beyond.

In official Iranian and IRGC rhetoric, Hezbollah, supported and armed by Iran is portrayed as a brother movement aligned with Iran’s revolutionary ideology. Hamas, also sponsored by Iran, is depicted as a Palestinian resistance movement that Iran supports as part of its regional “Axis of Resistance.”

In practice, the axis formed by Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas has expressed its ideology not only through........

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