Critics of the Trump administration's war against Iran are making a serious mistake by ignoring the scale of the threat the Islamic Republic poses - and the exhaustion of every other option, Eliot A. Cohen has argued in The Atlantic, as "Hvylya" reports.

Cohen, a professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University and a former adviser to the State Department, wrote that war opponents miss "one big thing": the Iran problem itself. The Islamic Republic's drive for nuclear weapons "has been slowed but not stopped by sabotage, diplomatic agreements, and strikes." Tehran has developed a large arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones and "was bent on expanding that arsenal to the point that no country could mount adequate defenses against it."

The regime's record of violence extends far beyond conventional warfare. Iran sponsored terrorist movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah, carried out the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996, and plotted to assassinate Trump when he was a private citizen - a plot revealed by the Biden Justice Department in 2024. Cohen recalled that in 2022, three weeks after he spoke at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, an assailant drove a knife into the eye of author Salman Rushdie - carrying out the 1989 fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, "a decree of death never formally revoked."

The United States has tried ignoring the problem, retaliatory actions, sanctions, and a diplomatic agreement that deferred but did not eliminate Iran's nuclear program while disregarding its sponsorship of terror and missile buildup. "All have failed," Cohen stated. Those who dislike Trump's approach "generally fail to provide a plausible alternative."

To simply ignore Iran is impossible because of American interests in the Persian Gulf and Israel, the analyst argued. Those who would shrug off those considerations should ponder whether a nuclear-armed Israel "would simply wait for missile attacks that it could not fend off from a country committed to the extermination of its inhabitants." Saudi Arabia and other regional powers might also turn to nuclear weapons. "From its inception, the Islamic Republic has been irrevocably hostile to the U.S. and dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel," Cohen wrote. "It is a rabid regime."

Also read: "Massive Intelligence Failure": Friedman Reveals Why Washington Misread Iran's Power Structure.