Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettingeris author of “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative.”
bit.ly/49afn1s
National security and foreign policy become self-destructive when replacing inconvenient and well-documented reality with convenient and speculative alternate reality. Eventually, hard facts assert themselves at severe cost to the alternate reality-driven policy makers.
*The Gaza arena is only one tentacle of the venomous Iranian Octopus, which has evolved - since toppling the Shah in 1979, and in cooperation with China, Russia and North Korea - into a lead epicenter of regional and global anti-US terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering and the proliferation of advanced military systems.
*The Iranian octopus has spread its tentacles from the Persian Gulf and the Middle East - aiming to topple all pro-US Arab regimes - through Africa into Latin America, including the US-Mexico border and (a growing network of sleeper cells) on US soil.
*The Ayatollah regime persists in its military, economic and diplomatic collaboration with drug cartels (trafficking drugs into the US), terror organizations and anti-US governments in Latin America, which it considers as the soft underbelly of the US.
*The Ayatollah regime considers the end of June 2025 war as an end of a single battle in a prolonged war; a temporary ceasefire, not an end of the war against the “GreatAmerican Satan” and its Middle East vanguard, Israel - “the Little Satan.”
*Since 1979, the Ayatollah regime has demonstrated the superiority of its religious ideology over “Money Talk” and negotiation. It adheres to a 1,400-year-old apocalyptic and imperialistic Twelver Shiite vision and 1979 Constitution, as underscored in its school curriculum, Friday mosque sermons, official media and overall policy.
*Hundreds of billions of dollars and maximum pressure economic sanctions (which are reversible and by-passable) have failed to induce the Ayatollah regime to embrace peaceful coexistence with the pro-US Sunni Arab countries, become good-faith negotiators, or abandon its ideology. Leopards don’t change spots, only tactics!
*Since July 2025, Iran has focused on a full-speed restoration and upgrading of its conventional, ballistic (hypersonic!) and air defense capabilities, benefitting from the interest of China, North Korea and Russia to reclaim their global strategic posture. Their global strategic posture was severely punctured bythe June 13, 2025 Israeli air offensive, that exposed the vulnerabilities of their military systems, which are deployed throughout the globe.
*Restoration can be very rapid - when assisted by global powers - as demonstrated by Egypt (with the help of the USSR) following the devastation of its military during the June 1967 Six Day War. It took Egypt a few months to launch the 3-year-War of Attrition.
*Iran has leveraged negotiation - as a time stalling tactic - to expedite the restoration and upgrading of its military capabilities, in order to recuperate and resume the pursuit of its ideology. Any agreement reached (by the Ayatollah) with an “infidel” is tenuous, until an opportunity arises to bring the “infidel” to submission.
*The clear and present threat of the Ayatollah regime has been conventional and ballistic with no nuclear capabilities. During the past 47 years, negotiation and economic sanctions have dramatically facilitatedthe Ayatollah regime’s anti-US strategic posture: from a second-third rate threat to regional and global stability to a major threat to vital US interests, including homeland security (according to the 2026 Threat Assessment by the FBI, Homeland Security Department and Director of Intelligence).
*Achieving the US goal of preventing, minimizing and ending wars and terrorism is preconditioned upon the eliminationof the Ayatollah regime, which is the leading epicenter of regional and global wars and terrorism. Moreover, US-initiated regime changes in Iran occurred in 1953 (restoring the Shah) and 1979 (abandoning the Shah); but, during the 2009 and 2022 attempted uprising, the US stayed on the sidelines, letting down most Iranians, whose uprising was crashed brutally, deterring future similar grassroots attempts.
*Refraining from regime change could pave the road to the first ever apocalyptic nuclear power, which would afflict humanity with catastrophic cost, that would exponentially exceed the current costs of regime change.