Trump’s Civilizational Moment

As we try to make sense of the nerve-shredding on-off-on war with Iran, and in particular, attempt to reconcile U.S. President Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts with each other, one question keeps reasserting itself.

How is the Iranian regime able to remain in the game? Its leadership has been decapitated. Its economy has been devastated by America’s naval blockade. Its air defenses have been obliterated (twice). Its missile stocks are degraded. It is rationing electricity supplies.

By conventional standards, it should have thrown in the towel well before now.

The main reason why Iran is still able to fire missiles and drones and keep the Strait of Hormuz hostage is not because it’s strong. It’s because America is weak.

Its far superior force is beside the point. The United States refuses to do what is required to win this war decisively because it refuses to bear any military losses. Trump’s strategy is to force Tehran into what he has termed “unconditional surrender” without risking American military lives.

The idea, however, that war can be waged successfully without your own side getting hurt is absurd. It means that America isn’t prepared to bear the potential cost of winning. So it doesn’t have the will to see this through.

The Iranian regime understands this only too well, and its whole strategy is based on this insight. The reason the mullahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are so confident that they’re on course to defeat mighty America is that they are prepared to sacrifice their entire country, its people and themselves. They will bear unlimited pain. They know that America will not.

Why not?

Trump, as everyone knows, is constitutionally transactional. He believes that there isn’t a conflict in the world that he can’t bring to an end through his unrivaled “art of the deal.”

Even now, the purpose of attacking Iranian targets following the downing of the U.S. Army helicopter by an Iranian drone is not to wipe out the regime but to bomb it back to the negotiating table.

Most alarmingly, the terms that Washington is reportedly offering amount to little more than the disastrous 2015 nuclear deal brokered by former President Barack Obama, which gave the regime an eventual pathway to the bomb.

But any deal that might emerge from that negotiating table will be worthless. The Iranians have never kept the terms of any agreement. They will always cheat and lie.

These endless, manipulative negotiations — with Tehran dangling concessions in front of the desperate Americans and then snatching them away again — are designed to buy time and wear Trump down until he gives up or leaves office.

Trump’s obsessive faith in making deals may be particular to him, but it rests on a core belief in the West — that people are always motivated by calculating where their own interests lie. That, in turn, rests on the assumption that people always make a rational calculation.

This is what also underlies the parallel progressive belief that all conflict can be resolved through negotiation, compromise and “peace processes.” The belief in universal rational self-interest is terribly misjudged. Yet it’s so deeply embedded in the West that its leaders just can’t process what they are facing.

Indeed, the main reason Trump so confidently assumed, weeks ago, that the Iranian regime would give up was that it was self-evident that otherwise it wouldn’t have a country left at all.

He didn’t seem to realize that the fanatics of Tehran don’t care if that happens. As Shia “Twelvers,” they believe that producing the apocalypse will bring the Shia messiah — the Mahdi — to Earth.

Arrogantly assuming that everyone in the world behaves like themselves, Western leaders simply can’t see what’s in front of their eyes.

Tehran has made no secret of its strategy. In his 2025 book, “The Power of Negotiation,” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, advocated endlessly repeating Iran’s demands until its opponent “gets numb” and surrenders on the grounds that “he who gets tired and bored quickly will lose.”

The same Western blindness has been on display towards the Palestinian Arabs for even longer. Even though they’ve consistently stated their intention to destroy Israel and to use a state of Palestine as a means of bringing that about, much of the West continues to declare that the conflict with Israel can only be ended through a “two-state solution.”

And having forced Israel into a ceasefire in Gaza, thus enabling Hamas to regroup and bide its time until it can attack Israel again, the Trump administration has produced the farce of the Board of Peace. This is based on the fantasy that the genocidal lion of Hamas will lie down with the Israeli lamb, and instead of tearing it apart, as it declares it will do, will turn Gaza into the Trump Riviera.

This lethal blindness is not just endangering the West in foreign wars, but is doing so at home in the refusal to face the reality of Islamization.

Britain refuses to ban the Muslim Brotherhood, jail or deport jihadi preachers, ban sharia courts or stop immigration from countries posing an Islamist threat.

In America, although Trump has taken measures against extremism, an Islamist beachhead has been created in New York with its sectarian Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and with sharia enclaves expanding in Texas and elsewhere.

The reason all of this has been allowed to grow is wider and deeper than the promotion of multiculturalism and the intersectional dogma that holds the West is innately bad because it is white. At the core of these secular ideologies is a loss of belief in the biblical norms that underpin Western culture, and the replacement of what is held to be irrational Christian and Jewish mumbo-jumbo by the superior power of the Western mind.

The West has told itself that it is the acme of reason — by which it means that its core principle is the pursuit of individual happiness, prosperity and self-realization.

Accordingly, war is always totally dumb because people get killed; ranking different cultures in any kind of hierarchy is a form of bigotry that is not only evil but proof of imbecility; and everyone in the world is assumed only to want to have a nice life.

Believing that only universal values are moral and rational, Westerners can’t see the catastrophic results of failing to fight for their own. They refuse to acknowledge that there is no brotherhood of man; there are instead people who believe in civilization, and other people who intend to destroy it.

The paradox is that in making a fetish of reason and self-interest, the West repudiates reason by inventing its own reality.

Meanwhile, the Islamists have grasped all this. They understand that without a religious scaffolding, a society eventually collapses. They have watched the West steadily destroying that religious core and, in the vacuum that’s been created, giving them the opportunity to strike.

This is why Britain, which has led the retreat from Christianity in the West, is ground zero for the Islamist onslaught. Islamization has penetrated throughout Britain’s political and civic architecture, with British leaders absolutely refusing to push back.

Now there’s a rapidly rising sectarian Islamic bloc, aided by the left, increasingly focusing British politics on the jihadi agenda of destroying Israel and the Jews as an essential precursor to conquering the West.

We are currently, and rightly, transfixed by Iran. If America doesn’t neutralize the Islamic revolutionary regime and instead allows it to regenerate, this will be catastrophic for America and the West.

It all depends on one mercurial and imperfect man in the White House. But whether he succeeds or fails, he is leading a free world, much of which no longer understands what it needs to do to survive.

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her new book, “Fighting the Hate: A Handbook for Jews Under Siege,” has just been published by Wicked Son.