There comes a moment in every long struggle when the vocabulary of diplomacy collapses under the weight of atrocity. Iran may now be at that precipice. A regime that has answered the pleas of its people with bullets, mass arrests, and a nationwide blackout is no longer merely authoritarian; it is engaged in the systematic erasure of civic life itself. If diplomacy fails, the United States must be prepared—not reluctantly, not apologetically, but resolutely—to act.

What is unfolding across Iran is not a transient spasm of unrest. It is the most expansive and existential revolt the Islamic Republic has faced in years. What began as protests over economic ruin—soaring prices, a collapsing currency, the hollowing out of the middle class—has metastasized into something far more dangerous to Tehran: a direct repudiation of clerical rule. The response has been medieval. Hundreds are reportedly dead. The internet has been severed, an act of digital collective punishment designed to blind the world and isolate the victims.

President Donald Trump has made no secret of his concern, or of his willingness to consider intervention should the killing continue. His administration is now examining a range of options—from cyber pressure to sanctions to limited military action—designed to degrade the regime’s ability to terrorize its own citizens. Critics will recoil at such language, invoking the ghosts of Iraq and Afghanistan. But history, when properly consulted, is not a cautionary tale against action; it is an indictment of timidity.

The Iranian regime is not a misunderstood theocracy struggling with reform. It is a draconian system whose survival depends on repression at home and destabilization abroad. Its Revolutionary Guards act as a praetorian cult, crushing dissent with industrial efficiency. Its foreign policy is not diplomacy but proxy warfare, exporting terror from Beirut to Sana’a while pleading victimhood in international forums.

To insist that such a system be indulged indefinitely in the name of “stability” is to confuse order with justice. Stability purchased through slaughter is not peace; it is merely the silence of the grave.

Those urging restraint often argue that intervention would provoke retaliation—against U.S. assets, regional energy infrastructure, or allied states. This risk is real, but it is not dispositive. Tyrannies do not moderate when appeased; they escalate. Tehran’s leaders already operate under the assumption that the West lacks the fortitude to confront them directly. That assumption has become the cornerstone of their impunity.

Nor is intervention synonymous with occupation. The false dichotomy between doing nothing and launching a ground war is a relic of a bygone strategic imagination. Modern statecraft offers a spectrum of calibrated pressure: cyber operations that paralyze command systems, precision strikes that dismantle the regime’s instruments of coercion, economic measures that isolate the ruling elite from their financial oxygen. These are not acts of conquest. They are acts of containment, designed to give an embattled people the breathing room they have been denied.

Most importantly, intervention would not be an imposition of American will but a recognition of Iranian agency. The streets of Tehran, Mashhad, and Shiraz are not filled with foreign operatives; they are filled with Iranians—students, workers, shopkeepers—who have concluded that the status quo is intolerable. They chant not for Western patronage but for dignity. To ignore them now would be to confirm the regime’s most corrosive propaganda: that the world’s democracies speak of human rights only when it is convenient.

President Trump has said that Iran is “looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before.” Those words must be more than a slogan. They must be a promise that the United States will not avert its gaze while a nation is bludgeoned into submission. Diplomacy is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end. When that end—basic human liberty—is annihilated by the very party with whom we negotiate, diplomacy ceases to be virtuous and becomes complicit.

There is no romance in the use of force. It is a grim instrument, to be wielded only when all others have failed. But the greater immorality is to allow a draconian regime to massacre its citizens under the cover of international paralysis. If Tehran persists in this campaign of blood and blackout, the United States should act—not as a conqueror, but as a liberator of last resort.

In the moral arithmetic of our age, neutrality in the face of such cruelty is not prudence. It is abdication.