Was Eliminating the Iran Nuclear Threat Worth the Political Price?

Politicians and presidents sometimes make Faustian bargains. They make trade-offs. The stereotypical Faustian bargain is one in which someone sells his or her soul to the devil in exchange for money or fame.

But let’s say you’re the president of the United States, and the two options before you are to keep your country safe or to better position you and your party to hold onto power.

It all centers on a country that has been chanting “Death to America" since 1979, and that is very close to obtaining nuclear weapons and delivery systems that could wipe out its neighbors, and perhaps even some of your major cities.

Given how the regime that runs the country treats its own people, killing them en masse if they dare to protest, this really isn’t a country or a leadership you can bargain with in good faith. Diplomacy is always tried and always fails. One of your predecessors tried buying them off with cold, hard cash as a means to make the nuclear question the next president’s problem. You’re that next president.

You campaigned on an anti-war platform, and your history shows it. But now here you are. Your intelligence is telling you that this country is about to finish the job of joining the group of countries that have nuclear capabilities.

Then there is the sticky political issue of this being an election year. The fate of everything you want to accomplish rests on your ability to hold power and for your party to hold power.

You decide, after much deliberation, to put a plan together and to try to surgically dismantle the country’s nuclear capabilities. Still, the plan is a war plan, complete with all of the messiness and uncertainty that war brings.

🚨 BREAKING: President Trump announces that the situation with Iran is moving along "RAPIDLY" "We're doing what has to be done. Could've been done by a LOT of different people that chose not to do it. They are a nation of terror and hate, and are paying a BIG PRICE!" 🔥 https://t.co/VEmnYxmrfd

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) March 12, 2026

The plan is designed to eliminate or gravely damage the country’s nuclear capabilities and its military strength. In the process, this also means taking out key leaders through strategic bombing. And so, you give the order.

As with all things war-related, nothing ever goes completely as planned, and exit strategies are always messy and drawn out. In the course of this, the hostilities you instigated to save your country from a nuclear threat are now costing millions of your citizens dearly at home. They are having trouble paying for gas, food, clothing, and other things. Month after month goes by, and you have nothing definitive to report to them on how this war is going, when it might end, and what your plan is to get the cost of living back down.

Still, you know it’s not that simple. Before the Iran War, you instituted aggressive tariffs to penalize countries that export to your own country, taking advantage of your country's past generosity, but the tariffs drive up consumer prices, which your own voters have to pay, once again.

You try telling the people that this is not as simple as ending a war so oil prices can come down. You try to talk about refinery capacity, and the effects of another conflict between Russia and Ukraine and how it is reducing the supply of oil to the global marketplace, keeping prices high, especially for diesel.

The people are in no mood to hear this. All they know is that you instituted tariffs that cost them their own hard-earned money. You started a war that cost them even more money, and they don’t know enough to judge whether this nuclear threat was as real as you claimed it to be.

Election season hits full-steam, and your opposition party is triangulating. They are taking one data point (high prices) and tying it to you and your decisions and then attaching all of this to anyone from your party who’s running for office. They frame your party's candidates as enablers of your “failed strategy,” and they never let go. They beat this message over and over again to anyone who will listen.

Gallons of gas or gallons of milk...it's all way too expensive. I'm running to lighten the load. https://t.co/HU6SvWJkRv

— Dr. Abdul El-Sayed (@AbdulElSayed) October 27, 2026

Soon enough, voters want “change,” and they’re not too picky about what kind of change. They want relief, and since you’re not giving it to them, they’re listening to anyone who will make that promise.

Back in 2008, Barack Obama ran for president on a platform of “hope and change.” This latest group of socialist political jihadis running for office aren’t even bothering to include the “hope” part. Just change. That’s all the voters need to hear. They’ve got fatigue.

They don’t know what you know. They don’t know that when it all comes down to it, you really only had two options: take out a nuclear threat and save the world, at least for now, or ignore that threat to improve the odds of you and your party retaining political power.

You choose to do the hard thing, the messy thing, the ugly thing, the right thing. You know that you and your party will pay a price. This isn’t a Faustian bargain. You’re not trading your principles or your future for personal gain or power. You’re accepting the cost so you can put your people first.

Given the top-secret nature of nuclear gamesmanship on the world stage, we’ll probably never know how close Iran was to joining the league of nuclear nations, but that’s a good sign unto itself. For those of us who consider ourselves patriots and America-loving conservatives, the price we had to pay, along with our president, was the bitter pill the socialists forced us to swallow Tuesday night. But the work is not done.

You know that these socialists who won the 2026 midterms would make, and have made, that deal with the devil and would gladly sell out the safety and security of every American if it means more power for them.

What would you do if you were president? Would you make that bargain with the devil, or would you risk using up all of your political capital to keep Americans safe?

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