Ep. 229: To defeat Islamist terror, it’s time to change the rules

Is it possible for America to defeat its Islamist enemies like the Iranian terror regime when they resort to asymmetrical warfare? And does President Donald Trump truly understand that diplomacy will  never convince Tehran and its terrorist proxies to give up their war on the West? Those are the questions posed by JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin about whether the United States will resume efforts to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons and spreading terror around the world.   He’s joined in this week’s episode of Think Twice by Jonathan Schanzer, the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. According to Schanzer, the “rules-based international order” created in the aftermath of World War II” appear to be “binding the hands of the United States” and preventing it from conclusively defeating enemies like Iran. The answer, he says, is that, “if our hands are tied, we're the stronger power and we have justice on our side, but yet cannot take the action that is necessary in order to win based on rules that we created,” that’s a problem. “It may be time to revise them,” he concludes.   He argues that the efforts of Trump envoys and advisers Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, backed by Vice President JD Vance, to get Iran to agree to give up its nuclear program or to persuade Hamas and Hezbollah to lay down their arms in Gaza and Lebanon is “not feasible.” They can’t be won over by diplomacy, something that was proved by the failures of the Obama and Biden administrations. Instead, they can be defeated. What Trump needs, says Schanzer, is a “new strategy” that will offset the advantages Iran has gained because of the rise in the price of oil and the American shortage of munitions.   The stakes in this conflict, Schanzer asserts, are enormous. If Iran is defeated, it will help facilitate the creation of IMEC—an Indian-Middle East energy corridor—that will connect the subcontinent to Europe via moderate Arab nations and Israel that will transform the international situation for the better. The alternative would be the advance of the so-called STEP alliance of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan, that will be an Islamist obstacle to regional stability, American influence and normalization of relations between the Arab and Muslim world with Israel.