It’s time to bring the business in Iran to an end.

A person sits in shallow water as cargo and commercial vessels are anchored in the Strait of Hormuz off Bandar Abbas, Iran, Monday, June 8, 2026. (Amirhosein Khorgooi/ISNA via AP)

Something has to give in Iran. I believe that it was President Trump himself who said we are being “tapped along” by whomever it is who is calling the shots in that beleaguered country.

Tapping the west along is a well-worn tactic for the criminal theocrats who run Iran. They have been doing it for nearly half a century. Tapping the Obama administration along got them an airlift of pallets of euros and Swiss francs to the tune of the equivalent of about $400 million courtesy of the United States Air Force. Part of that deal was that Iran would curtail its enrichment of uranium. They did no such thing.

So, we can’t be tapped along. This thing needs to come to an acceptable conclusion.

Iran wasn’t always the theocratically-controlled despotic hellhole that it is now. Throughout history Iran was known as Persia. It was only in 1935 that Reza Shah Pahlavi, then the country’s ruler (and the father of the Shah of Iran that we all remember from 1979), asked governments around the world to start calling the country Iran.

Unlike the dark, totalitarian misery that is today’s Iran, Persia was an enlightened, accomplished society. We can credit Persia with modern algebra and the word, “algorithm.” Ancient Persia was the home of astronomer, mathematician and poet Omar Khayyam (“A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou”).

Perhaps as much as any society, it was Persia that showed the world how to govern a large, diverse civilization through administration, infrastructure, tolerance, and cultural sophistication rather than through oppressive coercion.

All to say that the 90 million people who live in Iran today are the heirs of a rich, vibrant culture that has been suppressed by the theocratic thugs who took over the country in 1979.

President Trump is therefore reluctant to reduce the country to a pile of smoking rubble, though he can easily do so. Reducing Iran to the levels of devastation visited upon Europe in World War II would certainly neutralize the threat that Iran has posed to the civilized world for nearly 50 years. But it would simultaneously impoverish the Iranian people for a generation or more and perhaps create the circumstance for the rise of a regime that’s even worse than the one we have now.

But it may come to that whether we and President Trump like it or not. For the sake of the developed world on the macro level, and for the sake of our own domestic politics on the micro level, we must bring the business in Iran to an end.

The threat it has posed for nearly a half century must be decisively neutralized and the Strait of Hormuz must be open to the free passage of maritime commerce. Prior administrations going back to Jimmy Carter have been “tapped along” by Iran. But we can be tapped along no longer.

A decisive outcome in Iran may come at a horrendously painful price. But whatever the price, it must be paid.

And right soon.