Gary Berntsen is a retired CIA Operations Officer, former Iraq Desk Officer, former Chief of Hezbollah Operations, three-time CIA Station Chief, and author.
I entered the Central Intelligence Agency in 1982 as part of the Career Service Trainee Program. By 1983 I was a trainee in the Near East Division’s Arab North section, responsible for Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. I became the Iraq Desk Officer the day after Iranian-backed and directed Hezbollah terrorists blew up our embassy in Beirut, killing half a dozen of my CIA colleagues.
I was present at the creation of Hezbollah as a lethal force. For the next three decades my home base remained the Near East Division, covering the Middle East and South Asia. I studied Persian, served in an Iranian Operations Group dedicated to countering the regime, and later became Chief of Hezbollah Operations in the Counterterrorism Center. I served as CIA Station Chief three times. Throughout those years I had a front-row seat to the murderous operations of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. What I witnessed across Republican and Democratic administrations was the same recurring failure: presidents unwilling to confront this self-avowed enemy for fear of “expanding the conflict.”
After Iran and Hezbollah slaughtered 241 U.S. Marines in Beirut in 1983, President Reagan ordered Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger to strike the IRGC at the Sheikh Abdullah Barracks in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Weinberger balked. Reagan did not overrule him. The signal to Tehran was unmistakable: murder Americans and pay no price. George H.W. Bush refused to hold Iran accountable for its continuing terrorism. The Clintons suppressed intelligence implicating Iran and Hezbollah in the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing that killed 19 U.S. airmen in Saudi Arabia. George W. Bush never confronted Iran over the deadly explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) its Quds Force supplied to Shia militias that killed and maimed hundreds of American troops in Iraq.
Then came the deepest betrayal: Barack Obama and Joe Biden sought to realign the Middle East by accommodating and legitimizing this murderous regime through the disastrous JCPOA nuclear deal and its successor policies. For fifty years, from Reagan to Biden, both parties chose restraint, diplomacy, and wishful thinking over decisive action.
Only one president in that half-century has shown the courage and fortitude to face this enemy head-on: Donald J. Trump. Trump’s decision to align fully with Israel in a sustained offensive has gutted the Islamic Republic of Iran in ways previous administrations could only imagine.
The regime that once projected power through Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Shia militias across the region now finds its proxies shattered, its nuclear infrastructure crippled, and its ability to hold the world hostage with atomic weapons permanently defanged. Iran’s enrichment facilities, missile production lines, and command-and-control nodes have been systematically degraded through coordinated Israeli strikes backed by American intelligence, logistics, and political will. The IRGC has been badly weakened defending a collapsing axis of resistance.
The media attacks Trump for having “no end game.” They miss—or deliberately obscure—the point. The end game is clear and has been since 1979: an Iranian regime that is either fundamentally anti-American or pro-American, but in either case stripped of the capacity to threaten the civilized world with nuclear weapons. That is the only acceptable outcome. Trump understood what every predecessor refused to accept: Iran is not a rational actor pursuing legitimate interests. It is a revolutionary theocracy whose charter demands the export of jihad and the destruction of the “Great Satan.” Negotiation with such an entity is not diplomacy; it is surrender.
I have spent my adult life watching this regime kill Americans and our allies with impunity. I stood in the rubble of multiple bombings against our country. I read the raw intelligence on the Marine barracks massacre. I tracked the EFPs that tore through our armored vehicles in Iraq. I watched as Obama flew pallets of cash to Tehran while the regime’s death squads continued their work. The pattern was always the same: project weakness, invite more aggression. Trump reversed that pattern. He restored maximum pressure, eliminated the delusional “restraint” doctrine, and empowered Israel to finish what decades of American hesitation left undone.
The results are undeniable. Hezbollah, once Iran’s most potent forward force, has been decapitated and reduced to a shadow. Its leadership is largely eliminated, its rocket arsenal depleted, its command fractured. The Houthis are in a defensive crouch. Iranian nuclear breakout time, once measured in weeks under the previous administration, has been pushed back by years—if not rendered impossible—through destroyed facilities and eliminated personnel. The Islamic Republic is hollowed out. Its economy is in freefall, its military leadership demoralized, its population increasingly restive. The gutting is real and deep.
Critics whine that Trump “escalated.” Good. Escalation against an enemy that has spent forty-five years escalating against us is called leadership. The American people elected Trump to protect our interests, deter adversaries, and stand unequivocally with democratic ally Israel. He has done exactly that.
Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Caine have executed this strategy with precision and moral clarity. Their leadership, combined with Trump’s resolve, has restored deterrence across the globe. Adversaries from Beijing to Moscow now understand that America under Trump does not negotiate from weakness.
To freedom-loving nations—Israel first among them, the Gulf states that have quietly cheered every strike, European democracies spared Iranian-sponsored terrorism, and the Iranian people who deserve a future free from the mullahs—I say: you owe Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and General Caine a debt of gratitude. They did what fifty years of bipartisan timidity refused to do. They confronted evil instead of appeasing it.
History will record that Donald Trump was the only leader in half a century with the courage to finish the job.
About The Author
Gary Berntsen is a Veteran of the United States Air Force, a Retired CIA Operations Officer, and a three-time Chief of Station. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Intelligence Medal and the Intelligence Star. He is the bestselling author of “Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA’s Key Field Commander.” He speaks Farsi and Spanish and served as the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center Chief, where he led efforts to combat Hizballah.
