Wars rarely begin where we think they do. They begin years earlier—in promises made, in warnings ignored, and in allies encouraged to stand up only to discover they are standing alone.
As the war with Iran unfolds, my hope—however thin—is that it may finally begin to correct a troubling pattern in American foreign policy. For decades the United States has urged allies and partners to take risks alongside us, only to hesitate when confronting the regimes that threaten them.
Again and again the result has been the same: unfinished confrontations and abandoned partners.
Since 1979 Iran’s revolutionary government has funded militant groups across the Middle East and beyond. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis operate with Iranian support. For more than three decades Tehran has pursued nuclear capability while destabilizing the region through proxy warfare. For much of that time the world has largely tolerated these actions.
But Iran is only part of a larger pattern.
In 1991, at the end of the First Gulf War, the United States encouraged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein. Kurdish forces in the north and Shiite rebels in the south answered that call. When Saddam’s regime retaliated with overwhelming force, the United States chose not to intervene. The result was catastrophic. Tens of thousands were killed and more than a million Kurds fled toward the Turkish border in one of the largest refugee crises of the war’s aftermath.
Three years later, in 1994, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing Ukraine’s borders in exchange for Ukraine giving up the nuclear weapons it inherited after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was an extraordinary act of trust. Yet when Russia seized Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014, the response from the West was limited and cautious. The guarantees proved weaker than the promises.
During the Iraq War, beginning in 2003, American forces faced devastating roadside bombs and shaped-charge explosives capable of penetrating armored vehicles. Many of these weapons were traced to Iranian supply networks. Hundreds of American soldiers were killed by devices that crossed the Iraqi border from Iran, yet the United States never directly confronted the Iranian government responsible for enabling those attacks.
When I served in Iraq in 2009 with 28th Combat Aviation Brigade, we flew troops to the Iran-Iraq border who were stopping smuggling where they could, but there was no retaliation against Iran.
The pattern repeated itself again during the war against ISIS. Beginning in 2015, Kurdish fighters in Iraq and Syria became some of the most effective partners the United States had on the ground. They fought and died alongside American forces to dismantle the Islamic State’s territorial caliphate. But in 2018 the United States withdrew support from Kurdish positions in northern Syria, leaving them exposed to Turkish military operations.
The pattern appeared again in Afghanistan. For two decades, beginning in 2001, Afghan soldiers, interpreters, and local allies worked alongside American forces against the Taliban. Thousands died fighting a common enemy. Yet when the United States withdrew in 2021, the Afghan government collapsed with stunning speed. Many Afghans who had worked closely with American forces were left scrambling to escape Taliban reprisals. Some were evacuated in dramatic scenes at Kabul’s airport, but many others were left behind. For those who had trusted American promises, the end of the war felt was abandonment.
Once again, allies who had taken risks alongside the United States were left vulnerable.
Meanwhile Iran has strengthened its partnership with Russia, supplying drones that have been used extensively against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. Those weapons have become one of the clearest links between Tehran’s regional ambitions and Moscow’s war against Ukraine.
If the facilities producing those drones have now been destroyed, it would represent more than a tactical success. It would be one small step toward confronting a network of aggression that stretches from Tehran to Moscow.
None of this means war should ever be welcomed lightly. Those of us who have served in the Middle East know too well the cost, uncertainty, and unintended consequences that follow military conflict.
But history also teaches the cost of hesitation.
When aggressors believe the West will protest but not act, they push further.
If this conflict weakens Iran’s ability to fund terror, slows Russia’s war against Ukraine, and gives the people of Iran even a small opening against their oppressive regime, it may begin to repair a long record of half-measures and abandoned allies.
That hope may be thin.
But after decades of watching aggressors test the limits of Western resolve, it is still worth holding.
