'Dealing with the devil' by Steve

For more than four decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has held its perch atop the U.S. State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation purchased with American blood. The regime’s shadow stretches across the gravest attacks on U.S. citizens in modern history: the 1983 truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 servicemembers, the 1996 Khobar Towers attack that murdered 19 Americans, and the years during the Iraq War when Iranian-manufactured explosively formed penetrators shredded American armored vehicles. Through its Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Quds Force, Tehran has fed money, missiles, and ideology to Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, and a constellation of Iraqi militias, transforming proxy terror into a pillar of Iranian statecraft.

This legacy of violence defined the U.S.-Iran relationship as a seemingly permanent low-grade war. Sanctions under multiple presidents slowed but never stopped the machinery, while Iran’s nuclear program advanced in defiance of international agreements. Then came the second Trump administration. National Security Presidential Memorandum 2, signed weeks after the 2025 inauguration, reinstated a campaign of “maximum pressure.” That pressure turned kinetic during the twelve-day Iran-Israel war in 2025, when U.S. bombers struck the Natanz enrichment site. Strikes persisted into 2026, with American forces hitting targets in the Parchin military complex and other facilities tied to missile and drone production. Paradoxically, this bruising military campaign has run parallel to the most serious diplomacy in years. Five rounds of talks in 2025 gave way to ongoing negotiations in 2026, with Trump insisting that a “Verified Nuclear Peace Agreement” is preferable to endless conflict. The underlying wager is that after decades of proxy terror and American deaths, direct force has finally compelled Iran’s clerical regime to calculate survival differently. If Iran’s nuclear infrastructure can be dismantled and its capacity to fund terror networks choked, the logic goes, the era of Tehran as the world’s terror banker might finally end.

Still, any declaration of “peace in our time” remains premature. As of July 2026, Iranian centrifuges continue spinning near weapons-grade levels, and the regime is racing to bury new facilities under concrete at Pickaxe Mountain. Two weeks of recent U.S. strikes have not yet produced clear capitulation, and Trump has simultaneously threatened to destroy Iranian civilian infrastructure if attacks in the Strait of Hormuz continue. Iran’s support for terrorism is not merely a policy but an institutional feature of the Islamic Republic, embedded in the IRGC’s identity. True peace will require not just a signed agreement, but verifiable demilitarization of a regime built on forty years of anti-American militancy. The bombing may have forced Tehran to listen, but whether the killing is truly “all done now” depends on whether Iran chooses to become a normal nation—or merely waits for the explosions to stop.

Editorial comments expressed in this column are the sole opinion of the writer