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There are a handful of phrases from national security crises of the past 50 years that stand out.
President Donald Trump has now added his signature line to that list.
On May 22, 1977 President Carter declared to the graduates of Notre Dame University that “we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear.”
On June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan stood near the Brandenburg Gate and declared: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
“This will not stand,” President George H.W. Bush said on August 5, 1990 of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait three days earlier.
“I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon,” declared President George W. Bush declared on September 14 from amid the rubble where the World Trade Centers had fallen on 9/11.
Then Senator Barack Obama in Berlin on July 22, 2008: “I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen — a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.”
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Another comes from President Obama on August 20, 2012: “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”
President Biden’s entry comes from his first year in office, on July 8, 2021: “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the—of the United States from Afghanistan.”
Now President Trump has his quote:
“They should have done the deal.”
That’s what President Trump told reporters on Air Force One on June 17, 2025.
INSIDE THE SITUATION ROOM WHERE TRUMP MONITORED ‘SPECTACULAR’ SUCCESS ON IRAN
The president has repeated that phrase in the last week almost as much as he said “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon” in the years before the actual American strikes on at least three sites in Iran’s nuclear weapons chain-of-production.
Note that the list doesn’t include anything positive from Presidents Carter, Obama and Biden. Rather, they are remembered already and will be forever as failures on the world stage and as failures as Commanders-in-Chief of the greatest military in the history of the world. The single significant achievement of 16 years of Democrat presidential governance that covers the Carter, Obama, and Biden years was the Camp David Accords over which President Carter presided, but those breakthrough agreements rest on the shoulders of Menacham Begin and Anwar Sadat.
President Clinton presided over America’s “holiday from history” after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and thus over the “peace dividend,” the hollowing out of our military, the failure to take out Osama bin Laden when it was possible, and the breakout to nuclear power status of North Korea (in which then former President Carter also had a hand.) But President Clinton doesn’t have an entry in the notable presidential quotations about national security.
Clinton boosters might point to Operation Allied Force, was a NATO military operation conducted from March 24 to June 10, 1999, during the Kosovo War, but few people are going to hold that up as a memorable moment, much less President Obama’s “leading from behind” strategy in the air strikes he ordered on Libya in March of 2011 or the subsequent developments there.
If we focus on just this century, the Obama-Biden record of 12 years in office is a record of national security malpractice unrivaled by any other 12 years, including the eight years which span the Kennedy-Johnson initiation and escalation of the Vietnam War and Carter’s four awful years.
President Trump’s long-standing policy towards, and now attack on Iran seems likely to me to be going into the column of decisive successes of the employment of American political force. Indeed it may end up completing the mission of Operation Iraqi Freedom launched by President George W. Bush as a neutered Iran could well spell long-lasting stability for an Iraq free of the malign machinations of the mullahs.
“Trump has always been committed to addressing the weaknessess of the JCPOA, either by strengthening it or undoing it,” Omri Ceran posted on X Sunday. Ceran is the national security advisor for U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and one of Beltway’s leading authorities on the Islamic Republic of Iran. “Iran keep[ing] Fordow open was one of the foundational weaknesses.”
“In 2017, [Trump] tried to negotiate a stronger deal but couldn’t find partners, so he withdrew and imposed maximum pressure,” Ceran continued:
Biden functionally implemented the deal: he terminated U.N. sanctions, issued waivers to prevent application of Congressional anti-nuclear sanctions, and allowed Iran to sell oil at JCPOA levels. By the end of his administration Iran was cash-flush and within reach of a nuclear arsenal.
Trump again tried to negotiate a stronger deal that would diplomatically address the updated situation, and again there was no partner. After 60 days of negotiating, Iran announced they would install even more advanced centrifuges in Fordow. So Trump did it the other way.
President Trump already looked to cement a large part of the true, central narrative of American history for having won the biggest upset in presidential campaign annals in 2016 and then the greatest comeback in American political history in 2024.
President Trump has now indelibly impacted America’s national security in the same, deep, impossible-to-miss way as he did American Constitutional law with three Supreme Court appointments in his first term and in American public health history with Operation Warp Speed which Trump created to discover the vaccine for Covid, an unprecedented success for the U.S. and the world.
Even if Trump had not returned to the Oval Office in 2025, the Abraham Accords from his first term would have matched any diplomatic achievement of the post World War II era.
Now, though, there is a “Trump Doctrine” and it cannot be missed: An American president can and should use overwhelming military force to prevent rogue states from producing nuclear weapons.
The corollary to the Trump Doctrine is also clear: “Regime change” need not be a focus of the use of overwhelming American military might. The Trump Doctrine repudiates the “Powell Doctrine” of “So if you break it, you own it.”
That “break/own” formula need not dictate American national security policy. The United States military can be tasked with destroying nuclear weapons production facilities and not buy a reconstruction plan or an open-ended effort to overthrow a regime. The Trump Doctrine proves again that American military force can be applied surgically.
The devastation of Iran’s nuclear weapons production facilities has changed not just American history but quite obviously world history too.
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