Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. 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. Her previous book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only They Can Save It, was published in 2025. Access her work at: melaniephillips.substack.com.
( JNS ) As the clock ticks away toward U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest “negotiate or I unleash hell" deadline, the Iranian regime thinks that it’s winning.
In the West, the serried ranks of “experts" also think that America and Israel are heading either for a deepening quagmire or a humiliating retreat. It’s not possible to predict how the war against Iran will end-or even what the next day will bring.
But on the face of it, Tehran’s claim that it has the upper hand-echoed by Western commentators who said before the war even started that it would be a disaster, have kept saying that it is a disaster and predict that it will undoubtedly end in disaster-is demonstrably absurd.
On every available metric of war, the regime is clearly losing. Its air defenses are all but obliterated, its navy is largely sunk, its stocks of missiles and launchers have been decimated, its senior ranks are being progressively eliminated, and its nuclear program has been further damaged.
In these respects, the United States and Israel have had so far a spectacularly successful war.
Yet despite all this, not only is the regime not yet defeated, but it still presents fearsome challenges. It has turned the Strait of Hormuz into a lethal weapon by choking off most of its normal shipping channels. And Israel and the United Arab Emirates are still being bombarded by missiles every day, causing damage, injury and death.
Washington is reportedly chewing over the likely costs to its own forces if it tries to seize Kharg Island to gain control over Iran’s oil production or free the Straits of Hormuz. Trump is likely weighing up the damage to his own political future from a domestically unpopular war that may start drawing American blood.
The stakes are enormous. If the Iranian regime isn’t totally defanged but survives to recover and rearm, it will not only continue to menace the region. Such an outcome will also advertise that the leader of the free world is a paper tiger.
That will hugely embolden China, Russia and North Korea. Israeli defense expert professor Dan Schueftan says that if America doesn’t prevail in this war, it will be the beginning of the end for the West.
“These processes don’t happen overnight," he told the Israeli commentator Haviv Rettig Gur. “But if the United States is incapable of dealing with the Iranian challenge, the ability of the Chinese to change the world order will be much stronger than before."
So why can’t the West see this? Why do so many Americans and Brits view Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as their greatest threat rather than Iran, the world’s No. 1 terrorist state, exporter of violence and cultural destabilization to the West, and crucial hinge of the world’s axis of evil powers?
Partly, this is because the Trump administration has never properly made the case for war to the American public, while governments in Britain and Europe are actively hostile.
Partly it’s because of the belief that whenever the West ventures into the Middle East cauldron, the outcome is disastrous.
While the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ended in a debacle, the obdurate refusal by the West to take commensurate action against Iran has resulted in a conflict that is now infinitely more difficult and damaging than it would otherwise have been had the threat from Tehran been countered earlier.
Richard Williams, a former commander of Britain’s SAS commando force in Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote in Britain’s Mail that he witnessed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps up close as they and Iranian proxies killed hundreds of British and American soldiers.
Saying that this gave him an understanding of the “utter evil that is the Iranian regime," he wrote: “We have let the regime fester and grow since the revolution in 1979 as a result of the cowardice and indecision of our political leaders."
By doing everything it could to avoid war with Iran, the West made this terrifying and now desperate war inevitable. The catastrophic 2015 nuclear deal brokered by former President Barack Obama allowed Iran to cheat and make steady progress over the years towards building nuclear weapons.
Some 440 kilograms of enriched uranium-enough to make 11 nuclear bombs in two weeks-is reportedly still in Tehran’s hands.
Sanctions were also nearly useless because the regime simply bypassed them and sold its oil to China.
It did not use this revenue to look after the basic needs of the Iranian people. It used it instead to construct missile cities below ground-some buried deep inside mountains, apparently out of reach even of America’s most powerful bombs, and from where the regime continues to fire missiles at Israel and its neighbors in the Gulf.
The death and destruction being inflicted as a result-not least upon the oppressed Iranian people-is the real disaster. This should be laid at the door of a West that has sung the siren song of appeasement for decades.
It’s done so largely because it subscribes to the dogma that war is pointless, and all conflicts can and should be settled by negotiation and compromise. No longer valuing its own historic identity, which it has dismembered through multiculturalism and victim culture, it has become suicidally defeatist, believing there is nothing to fight or die for.
The reason Israel survives and thrives as it does is because it is never defeatist and believes there is everything to fight or die for.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE also understand the mortal threat posed to them by the Tehran regime. That’s why they are urgently pressing Trump to finish it off rather than declare a totally false victory and walk away.
Trump is incredulous that the regime won’t accept that it has lost the war. This may be merely Trumpian rhetoric designed to humiliate Tehran. More ominously, it may be that he’s trying to reshape reality to what he wants it to be, but isn’t.
But on another level, he’s applying the wrong metric. It may well be that in terms of conventional warfare, the regime can’t possibly win. But fanatical Islamists like this think in completely different terms. To them, mere survival is victory.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Aragchi, gloated this week: “No nation in history has stood for nearly a month against the greatest nuclear-armed power on earth and stopped them from achieving a single goal. This is a point of pride for all of humanity."
The West simply doesn’t understand religious fanaticism.
It doesn’t understand that for the Islamists of Tehran, who believe that causing an apocalypse will bring the Shia messiah to earth, “martyrdom"-their mass deaths-is accordingly to be embraced with ecstasy.
The West also fails to grasp something Israel has been forced to accept for decades. The Iranian regime may be outgunned by America’s superior military might, but it can outfox it through its use of “asymmetric warfare," which refuses to recognize the conventions of war laid down by the international community.
This means that while the West takes care not to target civilians or hit the essential civilian infrastructure of electricity or water supplies, the Iranians will not only target all such enemy lifelines but will unhesitatingly sacrifice all their own people, too.
Accordingly, they think that the more missiles they continue to fire, the more they’ll demonstrate defiantly that they hold all the cards, and so America must “negotiate" on the terms they have laid down.
The only acceptable response to that is to redouble the effort to defeat them utterly and completely.
Let’s hope Trump has come to the same conclusion.