This Is The War That Ends The Endless Wars

 President Trump said this week he was contemplating taking "decisive action" against Iran, a move he said he would discuss with Arab Gulf allies when they visit New York next week for the UN General Assembly.

"Do I want to annihilate them or do I not?" he said, referring to the Iranian regime.

Sure, the President is responding to the growing unpopularity of the war. A FoxNews poll on Thursday showed that 71% of registered voters think we don't have a strategy to end the war.

Sure, I get it that Democrats would give that answer. The war, affordability, and scare-me-about-AI are their national talking points. But 43% of Republicans? And 83% of Independents? 

I don't know how the pollsters chose their sample, but if you ask me, what it really shows is that 71% of Americans aren't paying attention. Or that they are economically illiterate. Or that they have zero knowledge of history.

Let's stick with not paying attention, which is easy to understand. As my good friend Morgan Murphy said on Newsmax yesterday, "Americans are pretty simple. We want to be able to fill up our F-150 for less than $150. We want to be able to buy our wives and girlfriends pumpkin spice lattes."

(You can watch our whole segment at Newsmax here).

And so high prices, which are the daily reminders of the war, have overpowered any serious analysis of what is actually going on.

By every measurable metric, we are winning this war and the Iranian regime is losing. The fact that they can still fire off missiles, or get their proxies in Yemen to fire missiles, does not mean they are winning, as the Panicans claim. It just means they are alive.

Every day their economy is growing weaker. And every day what they thought was their trump card -- the Strait of Hormuz -- becomes increasingly irrelevant.

We are now getting on average ten million barrels of oil through the Strait every day, thanks to U.S. Navy escorts. That is more than half the amount transiting the Strait before the war.

When you add the seven million barrels the Saudis and Emiratis have diverted to the Red Sea, that is a net reduction of just three million b/d -- and two million of that is the Iranian oil that we have prevented from reaching the market through our blockade.

Thousands of Iranian trucks are backed up at the Pakistani border because the Pakistanis have joined the blockade, making the resupply of daily goods next to impossible.

The regime has even lost its rail line to China, thanks to Scott Bessent's efforts to get the governments in Tajikistan and Kazakhstan to join our economic blockade.

The regime is panicking. They can no longer pay government salaries. They can no longer even pay the Revolutionary Guards and bassijis except with promissory notes.

Fearing imminent U.S. strikes, this week they paraded new IRGC recruits through the streets of Tehran. The regime claimed they were all "volunteers" in their Janfaday-e Iran ("Sacrifice for Iran") initiative.

If you watch the video, they are decidedly a very unwarlike lot. Most of them look like they have just been dragged out of their homes at gunpoint and put in uniforms. They don't even know how to march. Maybe the regime goons promised them lunch.

President Trump is the one with options, not the Iranians. He could allow the economic pressure to continue to build until, as I believe it will, the regime collapses in on itself and the top leaders flee to Russia in their private jets.

In the meantime, Centcom can continue its three-for-two rule: we sink three of your ships if you target two of ours.

Or the President could authorize devastating decapitation strikes against the regime and the Revolutionary Guards so locals can seize the armories and government buildings.

The only way the Iranians win this war is if enough Republicans join Democrats in voting to end funding it.

The Iranians had been banking that the Democrats and their media mouthpieces would make the war so unpopular that Trump would order our forces to withdraw before the November midterms.

That hasn't happened. The President has shown he has a spine. Now Republicans need to show they have a spine as well.

President Trump is the first American leader to say enough is enough to an Iranian regime that has spread terror through the region -- and the world -- for the past forty-seven years.

Remember, this is a regime that began with an act of terror: seizing the U.S. embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979 and keeping them hostage for 444 days. They blew up our Embassy in Beirut in April 1983, and murdered 241 Marines that October. (I tell those stories in And the Rest is History).

All during the 1980s, they took Americans hostage in Lebanon, which led President Reagan to secretly ransom them with arms shipments in what became the Iran/Contra scandal.

In the early 1990s, they joined forces with al Qaeda in Khartoum, Sudan, and together attacked us in Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Tanzania, Yemen, and ultimately in New York, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, PA on 9/11.

During the Iraq War, they sent explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) as roadside bombs into Iraq, killing over 800 U.S. servicemen. And on, and on.

President Trump campaigned on ending the endless wars in the Middle East. But that doesn't happen by magic.

This is the war that ends them.

Republicans, grow a spine and explain to your constituents what this war is all about. 

A Nobel Peace Prize nominee in 2006, Kenneth R. Timmerman is the author of The Iran House: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue, and thirteen other books of non-fiction. His website is kentimmerman.com.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/this-is-the-war-that-ends-the-endless-wars/