February 28, 2026, is already in the running for the most important day of the entire 21st century. Together, America and Israel have dealt the greatest blow to Islamism and international terrorism since the September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington DC nearly a quarter-century ago.
For nearly 50 years, the Islamic Republic of Iran has spread oppression at home, terror abroad, and death everywhere. One of its first acts was to take American diplomats hostage and hold them captive for well over a year, violating the most sacred tenet of international law in the process. In the following decade, Iran deployed child soldiers in such numbers that tens of thousands of children were “martyred" while fighting for the first Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, during the Iran-Iraq war.
Iran has, since the 1979 revolution, funded and commanded terrorist proxies across the Middle East, most notably Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. These proxies have brought death and ruin everywhere they go, destroying Lebanon, massacring untold thousands in Yemen, and turning Gaza into a statelet devoted solely to death. They propped up the Assad regime in Syria, giving that regime the cover it needed to massacre hundreds of thousands of its own citizens.
Since Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, took power in 1989, Iran has been the world’s foremost exporter of global terrorism. Iran was behind the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which killed 85 people. Over the years, Argentina, Albania, Australia, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, India, Kenya, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States have all accused Iran of plotting or involvement in terrorist attacks on their soil, to say nothing of the thousands of Israelis who have murdered by Iran’s puppets in Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Iran has been responsible for the deaths of well over a thousand Americans. Iran’s Ministry of Information and Security directed the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing in which 241 American personnel were murdered, and Iran’s embassy in Lebanon spent $1 million to fund that attack. Iran’s proxy Hezbollah was also responsible for the bombing of the US embassy in Beirut that same year. In this century, Iran was behind the killings of hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iranian-backed militias were responsible for killing over 600 American soldiers in Iraq, accounting for one out of every six American fatalities during the Iraq war.
Iran has plotted numerous assassinations of American officials and other assassinations on US soil. In 2011, the American government revealed that Iran was behind a plot to assassinate Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir. Iran was behind the plot to assassinate Iranian-born journalist Masih Alinejad in New York. Iran has plotted to assassinate officials who served in the first Trump Administration, including former National Security Adviser John Bolton and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Iran was also behind at least two assassination plots against Trump himself, the most recent of which occurred in 2024 during the most recent presidential race.
Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and its slaughter of tens of thousands of its own citizens in just two days in January were a bridge too far. After decades in which presidents tolerated Iran’s repressive regime, its spread of terror, and even its nuclear weapons program, a president has finally stood up and said: “Enough is enough." A president has finally put his moment where his mouth is when he said he would not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.
The war that is raging now between America and Israel on one side, and Iran and what remains of its proxies on the other side, could be the deciding war of the 21st Century and what the Second World War was to the 20th Century. That does not mean that this war will be anywhere near as long or as bloody as the war that saw the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The recent Super Bowl was the most important American football game of the season, even if it was an entirely one-sided game. But the significance of the death of the Ayatollah and the fall of his regime, if it happens, would be similar to the fall of Hitler’s regime.
The fall of the Islamic Republic would leave Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Islamic Jihad, and many militias in Iraq without their masters. Some, like Hamas, could look to new patrons in Turkey and Qatar, but others, especially Shi’ite terror groups and militias, will be left on their own. International terrorism will lose its primary financier, and the world will be much safer as a result.
This will also be a blow to Russia, which has relied on Iran to supply it with munitions and attack drones to use in its war against Ukraine, and to China, which buys over eighty percent of Iran’s shipped oil and is close with the Ayatollah’s regime.