In his infamous guide to ruling, Niccolò Machiavelli also offers a warning to ambitious advisers: Power belongs to the prince. Those who attempt to channel that power for their own purposes may not be able to control the outcome — and won't last long in court. During President Donald Trump's first term, numerous foreign policy aides learned this lesson the hard way, including George W. Bush-era neoconservative holdovers who sought to channel the mercurial president's instincts into a more familiar orthodoxy. They could not. Trump jettisoned adviser after adviser, and by the end of 2020 we still didn't have a clear MAGA foreign policy vision — aside from a consistent opposition to the post-World War II consensus.

President Trump's regime-change war in Iran is already remaking the Middle East — and will have global ramifications whose scale and severity we can barely comprehend in these early hours. The Iran war also marks a similarly consequential turn at the level of ideas inside the Trump administration and the American Right more broadly: seemingly against all odds, it is the neoconservative hawks who have emerged as the winners of the Trump era, with the Trumpian intellectuals left holding the bag.

There is so much to say as an Iranian American who has devoted my entire career to the promise of a moment like this. And, now, it is finally here. Watching Iranians pour into the streets waving the lion and sun flag, singing old freedom songs and crying tears of disbelief feels surreal. These are people who have literally buried their children for a chance at freedom. Their joy is over a day they never thought they'd experience after 47 years of suffocation. It is hard to fathom a people so desperate for justice, so hungry for liberty, that they are cheering military strikes on their own soil as the price of liberation. They know the cost of freedom better than anyone.

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