On Wednesday, July 3, 1940, Winston Churchill had a decision before him as hard as any he ever had to take in his long career of statesmanship. If the Vichy French fleet stationed at Oran in Algeria were to fall into German hands, as seemed highly likely, it would, when combined with the German and Italian navies, pose an existential threat to his country, which after the fall of France was already gearing itself up for the Battle of Britain.
The French admiral would neither hand his fleet over to the Royal Navy, nor scuttle it, or sail it to Canada. So, after some anguished heartache, the lifelong Francophile Churchill ordered it to be sunk, which it was with the loss of 1299 French sailors.
There are some moments in history when a sudden act of opportune ruthlessness readjusts the world towards a safer path.
In the Middle East, these include Israel’s surprise attacks that saved it from certain invasion in the Six-Day War of 1967 and its destruction of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility in 1981.
Going back far further, impending invasions of Britain were foiled by Francis Drake sending fireships against the Spanish Armada in August 1588 and vice admiral Horatio Nelson pre-emptively destroying the Danish fleet at Copenhagen in 1801.
Pre-emptive action sometimes works but it requires remarkable leadership qualities. Does Donald Trump have them?
For if Iran’s centrifuges are still spinning in its nuclear facility 90m underground at Fordow, then Israel will have scored only a tactical win rather than the strategic victory it needed.
The successes against the upper echelons of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, military high command and nuclear scientists are commendable but nothing like enough.
Only the US has the 14,000kg “bunker-busting” bombs necessary to shatter Iranian nuclear ambitions. So what does Trump do then?
Benjamin Netanyahu certainly feels the weight of history on his shoulders. The son of a distinguished historian and an avid reader of books by and about Churchill, he said three days ago: “Generations from now, history will record our generation stood its ground, acted in time, and secured our common future.”
He is right. And history could record that about President Trump, too, if he acts decisively.
If Trump has before him the Churchillian option, it is not hard to see who represents Neville Chamberlain in all of this.
President Barack Obama’s adamant and repeated refusal to help the Iranian opposition – overtly or covertly – during his eight years in office wrecked its brave efforts to replace the regime and gave the lie to his pretensions to be a new John F. Kennedy.
His cringing, appeasing Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action utterly failed to stop the sinister, inexorable spinning of the centrifuges, and came at the cost of lifting key sanctions and unfreezing assets.
It was neither joint (because Iran cheated) nor comprehensive (because it did not require Iran to abandon its nuclear program), or a viable plan of action, although it did produce the sickening detail of pallets being loaded with billions of dollars and transferred to the regime in Tehran.
Joe Biden then continued his master’s policy of trying to mollify Iran, unsuccessfully.
For all his obtuse, dangerous wrongheadedness throughout the 1930s, at least Chamberlain never subsidised the Nazi regime with British taxpayers’ money in the way Obama and Biden has with Americans’.
The US has suffered so much at the hands of Iran since the humiliations of the Carter administration during the US embassy hostage crisis between November 1979 and January 1981 that no one would resent it finally setting things right.
There is hardly a government in the world that would not sleep easier knowing that the theocracy in Iran had been denied the power to initiate a third world war.
Counterintuitively, perhaps, President Trump would never deserve the Nobel Peace Prize more than if he destroyed Iran’s capacity for nuclear blackmail. For once Iran goes nuclear and thus becomes inviolate, it is only a matter of time before it acquires the intercontinental delivery systems that will threaten the rest of the world, including the US.
There are grave risks attached, of course, which should not be underestimated. Iranian terrorist sleeper cells will probably be activated in the West, such as the one plotting kidnappings and assassinations recently uncovered in London.
The mullahs’ penchant for attacking soft civilian targets such as synagogues and cultural centres is well known, and indicative of their frustration and rage at their failure to devastate Israel due to the technical genius of its Iron Dome defences.
We should believe the threats of dictators. History is littered with times that the West assumed that dictators were exaggerating or merely playing to their domestic audiences but were in fact being coldly truthful.
When Adolf Hitler stated in January 1939 that a world war would destroy the Jewish race in Europe only eight months before he deliberately started it, or Joseph Stalin promised that the Comintern would strive to undermine Western democracies, or Vladimir Putin claimed there was a “historical unity of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples” while massing an army on Ukraine’s borders, the West ought to have listened rather than assuming they were bloviating.
We should similarly believe the Iranian mullahs’ considered and oft-repeated promises to use a nuclear bomb to annihilate Israel.
These threats are not idle; they are meant in cold blood. The imams of Tehran want to turn Israel into a sea of molten, irradiated glass, and even the hitherto-pussycat International Atomic Energy Agency now admits that it is ramping up efforts to obtain the means to do so.
Western leaders such as Friedrich Merz, Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer who are bleating about “de-escalating the Middle East” should recognise that easily the best way of doing that is to defang the chief exporter of terror there.
The US has never had such an opportunity to rid the world of a spectre that has haunted the Middle East for decades, and possibly may not again while what my friend Niall Ferguson calls the Axis of Ill Will – China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and their proxies – builds ever-closer ties.
Trump today has it in his power to act with Churchillian ruthlessness and wreck Iran’s nuclear – and thus regionally strategic – ambitions for a generation.
I fear he will not do this, however, for as his constant tergiversations over tariffs have shown, his bark tends to be much worse than his bite.
If he does not, he ought to remove Churchill’s bust from the Oval Office, as he should not be able to look in the eye the man who said at the time of the Munich Agreement in October 1938, “Do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year, unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”
Andrew Roberts is a historian and bestselling author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny, The Storm of War, Masters and Commanders, Napoleon and Wellington, and Waterloo. He is the Bonnie and Tom McCloskey distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a Conservative member of the House of Lords. This article was first published in The Free Press.
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