Ron Agam

There is a mistake many still make when speaking about Iran. They turn the argument into theology, as if the central question were a religious word like taqiyya. 

The first falsehood to clear away is this: what Israel and the United States are doing is not a war on Iran. It is a confrontation with the Islamic Republic, the dictatorship that has ruled Iran since 1979, oppressed its own citizens, and turned a civilization of enormous depth and distinction into the instrument of a theocratic project.

What the United States and Israel are doing in Iran in 2026 is driven by a lesson written in blood: never again.

Alliances are easy in times of comfort. Governments sign papers. Leaders shake hands. Speeches are made about friendship and partnership.

For too long, the West treated Iran’s nuclear program as a negotiable irritant and its missile arsenal as a manageable nuisance. That fiction is over. 

For decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has said, loudly and repeatedly, that it wants Israel wiped from the face of the earth. The world mostly nodded, filed the rhetoric away, and moved on. Israel could not afford to.

The strategic intimacy between Xi Jinping and Iran is not an accident of diplomacy. It is a feature of a far more brutal design: a global system where massive Chinese trade surpluses weaken Western economies while financing instability abroad.

The history of L’Oréal stands as one of the most complex corporate narratives of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 

For more than four decades, the United States has struggled to develop a coherent strategy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets President Donald Trump on Wednesday, the agenda will be formally “Iran.” 

For years, Western policy toward Iran has been built on a quiet assumption: that the Islamic Republic can be managed, delayed, contained, but not fundamentally confronted. 

For years, the Iran debate has been trapped in a lazy binary: deal or war, diplomacy or regime change, restraint or strike.