Is This War Just About Iran, or Is There More to the Equation?

Iran has been threatening and/or attacking America and Americans for nearly fifty years. Every U.S. President from Jimmy Carter to Joe Biden drew red lines and then allowed Iran to cross them. Now they have formed an axis with Russia, China, and North Korea.

After trying to negotiate with Iran for months, President Donald Trump recognized that Iran was using the negotiations to stall the US while using the time to build more ballistic missiles. Trump said, “no more,” and then approved “a decisive military strike last weekend that targeted hundreds of sites and eliminated key figures in Iran’s top leadership.”

Glenn Beck and Jack Carr, former Navy SEAL and bestselling author, unpacked “what this pivotal moment truly means for the region and beyond.” A portion of the discussion is below, but you can link for more information here. 

When he first heard the news that the U.S. and Israel had launched a joint military attack on Iran, Carr’s initial reaction was one of “sadness.”

“It made me sad because diplomacy had failed,” he says, arguing that Trump’s maximum-pressure campaign against Iran was doomed to fail because acquiescence to any of the three non-negotiables – no nuclear weapons, no ballistic missiles, and no supporting terrorist proxies – would make the Iranian regime look “weak,” something it cannot suffer if it wants to stay in power.

“Any covert action we’d attempted over the last year or in previous administrations over the past decades, that has failed also, and now we’re in a full-scale military engagement with Iran,” he laments.

Glenn agrees wholeheartedly: “Jimmy Carter said, ‘This can’t stand.’ … Ronald Reagan said, ‘They got to stop.’ … H.W. Bush, ‘It’s got to stop. They got to get to the negotiating table.’ Clinton said that, W. Bush said that, Obama said that, Trump said that in the first term, Biden said that.”

“I mean, at some point you’re like, this is insane. We’ve tried giving them billions of dollars; we’ve tried holding money back; we’ve tried carrots and sticks, and nothing works,” he continues, calling Trump “the first one to say, ‘I’m not kicking the can down to the next president. It’s over.’”

“Some of [those former presidents] actually helped Iran get either more powerful or gave them more options when it came to building up these different weapons  programs, to crushing any popular uprising or protests. So I’m not surprised that we got to this point,” Carr says.

“When people declare war on you and tell you that they want to destroy you, you probably don’t want that person to have a nuclear weapon or to have options that can lead to your demise,” he adds.

But Glenn thinks this military operation against Iran is “much bigger” than preventing the terrorist regime from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

“This is about Trump redesigning the entire world and going after CRINK,” he says, arguing that Trump is aiming to “take the I” out of CRINK, “which hurts oil for China, hurts money through oil for Russia,” and weakens Iran’s supply of drones to Russia.

“To look at this just as Iran, I think you’ll never understand why we did this. Do you believe that’s true, or am I wrong?” he asks.

“You’re absolutely right,” Carr says.

He explains that Trump’s military strike on Iran disrupts China’s crucial economic and technological lifeline to the regime. China buys huge amounts of discounted Iranian oil to evade U.S. sanctions and has committed $400 billion over 25 years to Iran – including selling advanced surveillance technology that helps the Iranian government monitor and suppress its own people.

By weakening or breaking this support, the U.S. not only destabilizes Iran’s regime but also frees up American attention and resources to address bigger long-term threats – confronting China over Taiwan (the island China clams as its own) and the tiny but vital computer chips known as semiconductors (the essential “brains” powering phones, computers, cars, AI systems, and military equipment), most of which are produced in Taiwan – while also handling threats from Russia.

“So you’re exactly right. This is not just about Iran,” he says.