Trump’s Operation Epic Fury proves Reagan-style peace through strength is back
In just a few days, Operation Epic Fury has eliminated Iran’s leadership, degraded its capacity to terrorize the West, and — for the moment — united the Middle East and most of the world around a vital American interest.
It’s still early, of course. But so far, President Donald Trump has achieved a strategic masterstroke. He has done so by reviving America’s oldest, simplest and best national security policy: peace through strength.
Yet Washington Democrats are blasting the president for ordering the attacks at all. They still cling, bitterly, to President Barack Obama’s delusion of pacifying the Ayatollahs through diplomacy and appeasement, not only lifting sanctions but literally delivering pallets of cash to one of America’s most dangerous enemies. On the other side of the aisle, some principled MAGA conservatives are understandably wary of another forever war in the Middle East.
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But both critiques misapprehend this mission, this commander-in-chief, and his national security strategy.
First, the president’s Go order Friday morning was not a rejection of diplomacy. It was an acknowledgment that diplomacy with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was impossible. Eight American presidents have tried to deal with Iran since the 1979 revolution. After 47 years of theft, murder, and terror, even Donald Trump was forced to acknowledge there was no deal there for America to make.
Diplomacy that isn’t ultimately backstopped by force isn’t diplomacy. It’s weakness — the kind that invites rather than prevents wars.
Once Trump decided to act, he ensured our troops would work hand-in-glove with the region’s most lethal military and best intelligence, courtesy of our friends in Israel.
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Second, Donald Trump is neither a Messianic crusader nor a naive nation-builder. He has been president for five years, and the closest thing to a “forever war” he has ever started was his boycott of the White House Correspondents Dinner – and even that is coming to an end. Trump has been a peaceable president and, indeed, a peace. His military interventions have been uniformly swift, decisive and effective.
Peace through strength is most associated with Ronald Reagan’s approach during the Cold War. But its principles can be seen in the foreign policies — however diverse in application — of Richard Nixon, Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt, and the Founding generation.
George Washington said, “To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.” So is applying overwhelming force to quickly resolve discrete, urgent national threats diplomacy cannot. Trump has hewn closer to both rules than any president in a generation.
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As the Heritage Foundation documents in our new , President Trump has built his administration, our Armed Forces, and his global strategy around the defense of America’s vital interests. Remnants of his predecessors’ globalism and politicization still rattle around the federal budget and nat-sec bureaucracy. But Trump is reforming our military more rapidly and comprehensively than most experts give him credit for.
It’s not luck.
Trump’s pragmatic peace-through-strength approach protects himself, our troops, and our nation from potential quagmires. Even as spirits are running high this week, Trump speaks humbly about the narrow, modest goals of the Iran war: decapitateIran war: decapitate and defang the regime and then hand the country over to the Iranian people.
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No chest-thumping about a New World Order. No cringy, “Islam means peace” pandering. No “cakewalk” hubris. Just a straightforward settling of accounts with the beating heart of global terrorism and the oil-rich co-conspirator in Russian and Chinese mischief.
In a just world, Epic Fury would put an end to the GOP Establishment’s habit of smearing the America First Right as “isolationist.” Conservative critics of Bush-era adventurism were never any such thing. That is why most of us are cheering Trump’s leadership in Iran today.
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A targeted, overwhelming military response to decades of violent aggression and years of diplomatic stonewalling is what peace through strength looks like. So does President Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s reforms of the Pentagon budget. So do Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s frank, but friendly speeches, at the last two Munich Security Conferences.
Operation Epic Fury, like President Trump’s prior interventions in Iran and Venezuela, do not contradict his peace-brokering in Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere. They are all applications of peace through strength, the only American foreign policy that has ever really worked.
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Iranian regime spreading anti-Israel propaganda across dozens of social media accounts: report
A new Clemson University report found dozens of social media accounts associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) pushing anti-Israel and anti-U.S. content to sow online discord during the ongoing Iran-U.S. war.
According to a report released Wednesday, at least 62 accounts across X, Bluesky and Instagram were found to have connections to the IRGC despite claiming to be users from the Americas, England, Scotland or Ireland. Though most accounts were less than 1 year old, some were created as far back as December 2023.
“All these accounts systematically amplify politically divisive content and disinformation aligned with IRGC narratives, and they are designed to exploit regional fault lines to advance Iranian regime interests,” the report said.
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Prior to President Donald Trump and Israel’s military strikes against Iran, most accounts largely focused on divisive domestic positions. However, after Feb. 28, once Israel and the U.S. launched surprise airstrikes against Iran, they began pushing pro-Tehran messages in favor of the regime.
“There is a coordinated inauthentic social-media campaign targeting online discourse around the war between Israel, the United States, and Iran,” the report noted.
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The accounts also used several AI-generated images and false videos pushing inaccurate reports on the ongoing strikes.
“It will be important to continue to monitor communities found to be at particular risk of foreign influence to mitigate potential harms to authentic discourse. This is particularly true at times of global crisis,” the report concluded.
In a response to Fox News Digital, Bluesky confirmed that all the accounts listed in the report were taken down for violating community guidelines.
A Meta spokesperson reiterated the company’s stance against content promoting terrorism and pointed out that, of the accounts listed in the report, one third of them were not active during the war while the remaining accounts have fewer than 2,000 followers combined.
“Meta prohibits coordinated inauthentic behavior and individuals and organizations tied to terrorism, and we remove violating accounts once we become aware of them,” a Meta spokesperson said.
Fox News Digital also reached out to X for comment.
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Clemson University located 47 X accounts, nine Instagram accounts and five Bluesky accounts that fell into the IRGC “network.”
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The university found that X accounts alone created 59,403 original posts that were reposted thousands of times with organic engagement by thousands of followers, potentially reaching millions.
Karoline Leavitt demands retraction of ABC News story claiming FBI warned Iran could attack California
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt demanded Thursday that ABC News retract a story claiming that the FBI has officially warned Iran may try to attack California with drones.
ABC News posted on Wednesday, “BREAKING: The FBI has warned police departments in California that Iran wants to retaliate for American attacks by launching offensive drones against the West Coast, according to an alert reviewed by @ABC News.”
Leavitt blasted the post, writing, “This post and story should be immediately retracted by ABC News for providing false information to intentionally alarm the American people.”
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She added further, “They wrote this based on one email that was sent to local law enforcement in California about a single, unverified tip. The email even states the tip was based on *unverified* intelligence. Yet ABC News left out this critical fact in their story! WHY?”
“TO BE CLEAR: No such threat from Iran to our homeland exists, and it never did,” she wrote.
She followed up by retweeting a post with side-by-side screenshots of the story ABC wrote and the FBI alert actually sent out. The post from Assistant Director for Public Affairs at the FBI Ben Williamson read, “On the left is the way ABC (or their source) reported the FBI alert. On the right is the actual FBI alert that went to JTFF partners. You will notice the word left out —’Unverified.’”
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ABC News has since updated its story with an editor’s note declaring, “The FBI has posted a fuller version of its alert to California authorities, which includes that the information was unverified. The latest version of this story has been updated with the full statement.”
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Asked about the unverified report in the alert, President Donald Trump said Wednesday, “It’s being investigated. But you have a lot of things happening, and all we can do is take them as they come, and the war itself is being prosecuted as well as anybody has ever seen.”
Trump says Iran’s World Cup participation may not be ‘appropriate,’ while adding men’s team is still ‘welcome’
Iran’s participation in the 2026 FIFA World Cup remained in doubt this week after the country’s sports minister reportedly threatened to pull the men’s soccer team from the tournament largely taking place in the United States this summer.
Iranian Sports Minister Ahmad Donyamali reportedly told state television this week that it’s “not possible” for the country to take part in the highly anticipated tournament after the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed amid the U.S. and Israeli joint military operations against Iran, which began on Feb. 28.
President Donald Trump has spoken about Iran’s status for the World Cup previously, but suggested Thursday that while the men’s squad is “welcome” to compete in the U.S. after qualifying, it might not be “appropriate.”
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“The Iran National Soccer Team is welcome to The World Cup, but I really don’t believe it is appropriate that they be there, for their own life and safety,” Trump wrote in a post to Truth Social post on Thursday.
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Iran is slated to play in Inglewood, California, against New Zealand on June 15. It is also scheduled to face Belgium on June 21 before finishing group play against Egypt in Seattle on June 26. The U.S. is hosting the tournament with Canada and Mexico from June 11 to July 19.
Last week, Trump said “I really don’t care” if Iran takes part in the 48-nation tournament.
On Tuesday, FIFA President Gianni Infantino said Trump “reiterated” to him that Iran’s men’s national soccer team would be “welcome to compete” at this summer’s World Cup.
Infantino shared the details of his conversation with the president in a lengthy post on Instagram on Tuesday. “This evening, I met with the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump to discuss the status of preparations for the upcoming FIFA World Cup, and the growing excitement as we are set to kick off in just 93 days.”
Infantino also acknowledged that Iran has met all requirements to qualify for the tournament.
“We also discussed the current situation in Iran and the team’s qualification for the 2026 FIFA World Cup,” he said. “During those talks, President Trump reiterated that the Iranian team is welcome to compete in the tournament in the United States.”
FIFA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
The geopolitical crisis has also cast uncertainty over the Iranian women’s national soccer team.
Earlier this week, Australia granted asylum to five members of the women’s team who were visiting the country for a tournament when the Iran war began, a government minister confirmed.
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The team drew speculation and news coverage in Australia when players didn’t sing the Iranian anthem before their match against South Korea on March 2.
Pentagon estimates Iran war cost $11.3B in the first six days in closed-door congressional hearing: report
Pentagon officials on Tuesday told legislators during a closed-door briefing that they estimated that the cost of the Iran war was more than $11.3 billion during the initial six days of the conflict, the New York Times reported, citing three unnamed individuals familiar with the briefing.
That estimate did not encompass many expenses tied to the effort, such as buildup of military assets and personnel prior to the first strikes, the outlet added.
Other reports indicate that the briefing involved senators.
A Senate Armed Services Committee staffer, who noted that he could only speak for the minority staff and Ranking Member Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., referred Fox News Digital to a March 10 letter that the senator sent to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, pressing for information about the costs of the war.
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“Since the initial strikes on February 28, 2026, how much has the Department spent on these operations? How much are the daily costs of these operations? What are the costs to readiness? How much funding does the Department need to replenish munitions and aircraft combat losses?” Reed asked in part of the letter.
No comment was provided by the GOP side of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Fox News Digital also reached out to the Department of War and the House Armed Services Committee Republican communications office on Thursday.
The war-related outlays come as the ever-expanding U.S. national debt nears the $39 trillion mark.
And while President Donald Trump has been waging the costly war in conjunction with Israel, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East, Americans have been seeing a significant surge in gas prices at home.
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“The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money. BUT, of far greater interest and importance to me, as President, is stoping [sic] an evil Empire, Iran, from having Nuclear Weapons, and destroying the Middle East and, indeed, the World. I won’t ever let that happen!” Trump said in a Thursday Truth Social post.