Over the last two weeks, we have seen the war expand far beyond a limited exchange of strikes and counterstrikes. What we are witnessing now is not simply a campaign to degrade Iranian military capability. It is becoming, in very real terms, a campaign designed to push the regime toward collapse and replacement. That does not mean the outcome is guaranteed, and it certainly does not mean the road ahead will be simple, but the center of gravity in this war is clearly changing.

For days now, I have been listening to what I call the black-pill conservatives, the people who always seem to predict disaster, who have spent this conflict insisting that Israel is on the verge of destruction, that the United States is walking blindly into catastrophe, and that any effort to break the back of the Iranian regime will end in humiliation. I have very little patience for that kind of fatalism, especially when it is delivered from a safe distance by men who have no skin in the game and no real feel for what is happening on the ground. That is why I wanted to hear directly from somebody who is actually there, so I reached out to Chris Mitchell, the Jerusalem bureau chief for CBN, and asked him to give me a quick, straightforward assessment of what life looks like in Israel right now.

What Chris described was not an image of a country collapsing under unbearable pressure. He described a nation that is still taking fire, still hearing sirens, still seeing interceptions overhead, and still dealing with shrapnel falling dangerously close to homes and historic neighborhoods, but he also described a society that remains remarkably resilient. The missile volume is down from where it was at the outset of the war, even though the attacks have not stopped. Interceptions continue over Jerusalem, debris still lands in populated areas, and cluster munitions remain a very real danger, but the spirit of the Israeli people has not broken. In fact, the mood he described was exactly what you would expect from a country that understands the stakes. Israelis do not want this war ended prematurely. They want it prosecuted to a real conclusion, one in which the regime in Tehran is either removed or reduced to the point that it no longer poses a threat to Israel or to its neighbors.

That matters, because there are a great many people online trying to sell the fantasy that Israel is secretly being devastated, that casualty numbers are being hidden, and that the public is on the verge of demanding surrender. Chris dismissed that outright, and from everything else I’m seeing, he is right to do so. Israel has taken some damage, and every death is a tragedy, but this idea that the country is being brought to its knees is nonsense. He pointed out something else that is worth paying attention to as well: the Israeli stock market is doing extremely well. That may sound like a side note, but it is not. Markets are not perfect moral indicators, but they do tell you something about confidence, and right now confidence inside Israel is not collapsing. It is growing.

The reason for that confidence is straightforward. Israel and the United States are not merely reacting anymore. They are shaping the battlefield, and President Trump in particular has spent the last twenty-four hours sending a very clear message to Tehran that the war can still get far worse for them. Up until now, the overwhelming majority of the strikes have been focused on military targets, command nodes, launch sites, production capacity, and the infrastructure of repression. But Trump has made it clear that if Iran continues trying to choke off the Strait of Hormuz and weaponize the global energy market, the next phase of pressure may extend to critical infrastructure that the regime desperately needs in order to function.

This conflict has already moved beyond the region where it began. It is no longer just a story about missile launches over Israel, strikes on Iranian military infrastructure, or tension in the Strait of Hormuz. It has now reached into Europe, and it has reached into the United States. In other words, the war has come home.

Over the last twenty-four hours alone, we saw two terror attacks inside the United States, both tied to jihadi lone-wolf actors. Investigators are still sorting out whether those incidents were coordinated in any meaningful operational sense, and my own suspicion is that they probably were not, but they occurred close enough together in time to create understandable concern. The larger point is not whether those two attacks were centrally directed from some bunker halfway around the world. The larger point is that the ideological fire has already spread, and we should expect more sparks before this is over.

One of those attacks took place at Old Dominion University, where a man entered an ROTC class, confirmed that it was indeed the ROTC class, and then opened fire on the instructor, Lieutenant Colonel Brandon Shaw. I do not name mass shooters, because I refuse to give evil free publicity, but I will absolutely name the victims, because they are the ones whose memory deserves honor. Lieutenant Colonel Shaw was a combat veteran who had served with the 82nd Airborne, and he was murdered in that classroom.

What happened next says a great deal about the kind of courage America desperately needs to recover. Rather than scatter, hide, and pray the violence would pass them by, the students in that room converged on the shooter. They tackled him, subdued him, and, in the words of the police chief, rendered him “no longer alive.” Additional reporting later indicated that one of the students had a pocketknife and used it repeatedly until the threat was over. It was brutal, and it was tragic, but it was also the kind of response that actually stops evil instead of cowering in the face of it.

I have said for years that I do not like the way we train people to respond to mass casualty events. We tell them to “run, hide, fight,” as though fighting were some regrettable last resort rather than the morally necessary thing to do when someone is murdering innocent people in front of you. My view is very simple: if a shooter is in a room full of people and he is the only one with a weapon, then every able-bodied man in that room should turn and converge on him. Yes, some people may get hurt in the process. That is awful, but if we make a habit of meeting evil with decisive force, we will eventually see less of it.

I remember once being on a military installation during the Obama years and seeing a poster instructing soldiers that in the event of a mass shooting they should run away, hide, and only fight as a last resort. Underneath all of that was the phrase, “Don’t be a hero.” I remember standing there thinking that if there is one place on earth where we ought to be cultivating heroism, it is on an American military base. The idea that we would tell our soldiers not to be heroes is the kind of moral confusion that only a very soft and very unserious culture could produce. At Old Dominion, those students rejected that message instinctively, and I thank God they did. May the memory of Lieutenant Colonel Brandon Shaw be a blessing.

The second attack took place at what was described as the nation’s largest synagogue, located in Detroit. An assailant rammed his vehicle into the entrance and opened fire through the windows at security personnel. In that case, the outcome was different for one very important reason: the synagogue had prepared. Security had recently conducted active-shooter training, they were already on high alert, and they were equipped to respond. The guards neutralized the threat before the attacker managed to kill anyone inside. That is not luck. That is what preparation looks like, and it is the kind of sober realism more institutions in the West are going to need in the months and years ahead.

According to the information I cited in the live, both of these attackers were American citizens, but both had been radicalized. In the case of the Old Dominion shooter, I noted that he had previously been arrested in 2013 for material support to ISIS, imprisoned, and then released in 2024. Whatever the final public record says about every detail in that case, the broader pattern is not hard to see. The threat is not theoretical, and it is not entirely external. Radicalization is already present inside our own borders, and wartime conditions only make that more dangerous.

Nor were these the only incidents worth noting. There was a thwarted synagogue attack in Norway, additional attacks in Israel including a stabbing and an attempted vehicle ramming, and the grim reality that in Israel these kinds of attacks have become so common they barely make international news anymore. That fact alone ought to tell us something. One side in this broader conflict has normalized violence against civilians to such a degree that the outside world has become numb to it. When attacks pile up in this many countries within such a short period of time, and when the same ideological slogans accompany them over and over again, it becomes absurd to pretend we do not recognize the common denominator.

If you’ve been watching the headlines over the last couple of weeks, you might think the war with Iran is already winding down. The airstrikes have been relentless, the Iranian military has taken serious losses, and the regime’s ability to strike back has clearly been degraded. From a distance it might look like the coalition campaign has already accomplished most of its objectives.

But that would be a dangerous misunderstanding.

Because in reality, what we’ve seen so far is only the first phase of the war. And if the strategic assessments coming out of Washington and Tel Aviv are correct, the part that comes next could be far more complicated—and far more consequential.

For nearly two weeks now, coalition forces have been carrying out a massive air campaign against Iran’s military infrastructure. Missile launchers have been destroyed, naval vessels sunk, air defense systems wiped out, and command-and-control facilities systematically dismantled. The goal has been clear: strip Iran of the ability to project power across the region and cripple its ability to threaten Israel and America’s allies.

By most military measures, that part of the mission has been working.

Iran’s air defense network has been heavily degraded, allowing coalition aircraft to operate with increasing freedom inside Iranian airspace. Their naval forces have taken devastating losses, particularly in the Persian Gulf where several key vessels have been destroyed or damaged. And the missile launch systems that once allowed Iran to fire large salvos across the region are being hunted down and eliminated one after another.

From a tactical standpoint, the air campaign has been effective.

But wars are rarely decided by airpower alone.

The Real Strategic Problem

Airstrikes can destroy equipment. They can blind radar systems and cripple infrastructure. They can eliminate missile batteries and sink ships. But they cannot solve every problem that exists inside a conflict this complex.

The deeper challenge lies in what remains after those strikes.