The Free Press

Past rounds of violence between the United States and Iran have ended with predictable choreography. After Qasem Soleimani was killed in 2020 in retaliation for the death of an American in Iraq, Iran retaliated by lobbing a volley of ballistic missiles at two American air bases in that country. No Americans were killed, the Trump administration elected not to respond, and the round was complete. It was the same story last summer after the strikes on the Iranian nuclear program. The Iranians all but submitted a permission slip before striking the largely deserted Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, causing no casualties and minimal damage.

Not this time.

Yesterday’s U.S. and Israeli strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other senior figures. Within hours, the regime launched a wave of retaliation across the region, relying largely on its stocks of ballistic missiles and drones.

When Ali Khamenei survived an assassination attempt in 1981, he said “it dawned on me that our heavenly God wanted me to survive for a reason.” If so, God withdrew his license on Saturday. The liquidation of Supreme Leader Khamenei, loathed by most Iranians and in President Donald Trump’s words “the most evil man in the world,” is a game changer, marking a new era in the region.

All over the world, but especially all over Iran as well as in Syria and Lebanon where he was responsible for so much killing, people are dancing in celebration. During the massacres of the last weeks, many Iranians had begged America to intervene and attack the regime. Trump answered that call.

This is the great gamble of the greatest gambler of all the commanders in chief in American history. Its stakes are regional if not planetary; its cause is admirable and noble; its opportunity may be unique and providential; its prizes are desirable and constructive; but its risks are colossal; its perils eye-watering, and its consequences uncertain not just in the Middle East but for the world game—and American democracy itself.

Operation Epic Fury’s early successes are impressive, but once the dogs of war are unleashed, who knows where they will run? “War is the realm of uncertainty,” said Carl von Clausewitz. “Three-quarters of the factors on which action is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.”

The most urgent question now is whether the Iranian people—without arms or organization—will be able to exploit this moment to overthrow the regime. We must pray that somehow they can—though the trajectory from today’s first strikes to that moment of deliverance is so far unclear. Will Khamenei be the last Supreme Leader? Is there a preordained heir? Will the regime collapse now? Will a strong potentate like Ali Larijani, a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander, now take power? If so, could he be more radical and more dangerous? Will a new leader fight on or seek a deal?

I recall lying on my stomach on my parents’ bed sometime in 1980 and watching CBS anchor Walter Cronkite report that it was Day 100 or 200 or whatever it was of the Iranian hostage crisis. Cronkite had started keeping track of the crisis on Day 50, in January, and now it was part of his nightly broadcast, and my father had just come home from the office and was untying his tie and changing out of his suit, and my mother was about to call everyone for dinner.

This was the first thing that slipped through my mind late Friday night in LA as I was scrolling through my news feed and learned that the United States and Israel had attacked the mullahs.

Mullahs is the operative word. Not Iran or the Iranians, but the Islamists who seized power in 1979 and have been waging a holy war against the West—the United States, the Anglosphere, Europe and, of course, the only truly Western outpost in the Middle East, Israel—ever since.

By Saturday morning, everyone was yammering about Donald Trump, and the fact that this self-proclaimed ender of forever wars was starting a war. It’s true, Trump started this particular battle. But let’s not pretend—at least, those of us old enough to remember—that this is the beginning of the war.

Instead, one hopes, this is the beginning of the end of the war.

They say there is nothing worse in the world than war. But in fact, there is. It is a peace beneath whose facade a nation’s hope dies a thousand deaths every day. It is a peace that pleases the global anti-war community but is oblivious to the infinite suffering of a people. It is a peace whose advocates flood the streets when a bomb falls from the sky but keep silent when all the military might of a regime targets its own citizens and murders countless unarmed demonstrators.

That peace is a righteous lie many in the West have been peddling to themselves and others. And as of January 2026, it is the peace that Iranians reject. No, they don’t want war, either. What they want is an end to a regime that can only lead them to war; a regime that has been, from its inception, preparing them for “martyrdom” and funneling the scarce national resources to fund its proxies in the region.

Black smoke rises from the rubble of Ali Khamenei’s compound in Tehran. Officially, the Supreme Leader’s fate remains unknown—no televised address, no formal communiqué, only Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s cautious assurance that Ayatollah Khamenei and President Masoud Pezeshkian are, “as far as I know, alive.” Israeli intelligence, for its part, assesses that the opening strikes, launched by the United States and Israel this morning, likely killed the ayatollah.

Whether dead or sheltering deep underground, his status has changed irrevocably. He is now a target rather than a negotiating partner. President Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have moved from a strategy of coercion to one of decapitation.

Missiles streaked across the skies of the Middle East on Saturday morning as the United States and Israel began “Operation Epic Fury,” a joint operation targeting the Iranian regime—and one that President Donald Trump hopes will not only destroy the Iranian ballistic missile and nuclear program, but deliver regime change itself.

After months of moving American military assets into the region, the Americans and Israelis began their attack by striking regime infrastructure. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Tehran palace was turned to rubble, killing the Supreme Leader, according to officials. Additional reports said that the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, had been targeted. Iranian defense minister Aziz Nasirzadeh and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Mohammad Pakpour are believed to have been killed in Israeli attacks.

“The hour of your freedom is at hand,” President Trump said, addressing the Iranian people. “It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations.”

John Bolton, a former ambassador to the United Nations and national security adviser to President Trump in his first term, has long advocated for military strikes against the Iranian regime and implored the president to conduct regime change during his tenure. A frequent critic of his former boss, Bolton said on X that the mission is “completely justifiable and necessary” and “the most consequential decision of Donald Trump’s presidency.”

Early Saturday morning, air strikes rained down on Iran, as the United States and Israel launched a joint operation against military installations across the country. The attack follows weeks of indirect negotiations that ended in stalemate. “They’ve rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions,” President Donald Trump proclaimed this morning. “We can’t take it anymore.” On Saturday afternoon, Trump announced that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had been killed.

Earlier today, The Free Press’s Rafaela Siewert spoke live with Douglas Murray, Michael Oren, and others to unpack the latest developments and what they mean for an already fragile global order. Watch the full livestream here. And don’t miss the rest of our coverage of this extraordinary moment, including Haviv Rettig Gur on how the Islamic Republic will fall, and Eli Lake on why this is the biggest gamble of Trump’s presidency. But first, Niall Ferguson explains why this is not a replay of the 2003 invasion of Iraq—and why America is more interested in “regime alteration” than regime change. —The Editors

Since the news of the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran this morning, I have been thinking a lot about a song in the 2004 movie Team America:World Police. The movie was co-written by the creators of South Park and follows a group of heroic American puppets waging kinetic war on Islamic terrorists, the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, and liberal Hollywood, leaving cataclysmic collateral damage (the Eiffel Tower, Cairo, the Sphinx) in their wake. But the real highlight is a song called “America, Fuck Yeah.” Here’s how it goes:

America, fuck yeah
Comin’ again to save the motherfuckin’ day, yeah
America, fuck yeah
Freedom is the only way, yeah
Terrorists, your game is through
’Cause now you have to answer to …
America, fuck yeah
So lick my butt and suck on my balls
America, fuck yeah
What you gonna do when we come for you now?
It’s the dream that we all share
It’s the hope for tomorrow
Fuck yeah

Team America was an ambivalent movie at the time. That was what made it funny. It simultaneously mocked the liberal opponents of an aggressive foreign policy and the neoconservatives who advocated policies such as regime change in Iraq. The South Park team understood before many commentators that the United States has a track record of coming to save the day and leaving a trail of devastation.

For the habitual critics of U.S. foreign policy in general and Donald Trump’s in particular, the analogy between today’s air raids against Iran and the invasion of Iraq nearly 23 years ago is too obvious to be resisted.

“The hour of your freedom is at hand.” So said President Donald Trump to the people of Iran, in an early morning address announcing a joint military attack by the U.S. and Israel against the Islamic Republic. Overnight, waves of air strikes pounded military installations across Iran. According to initial reports from Israel, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei …

On Saturday morning, the U.S. attacked Iran. American and Israeli forces targeted the infrastructure of the Islamic Republic in air strikes. President Donald Trump said that he started his campaign to allow the Iranian people to “unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach.”

The strikes come after weeks of talks with Tehran. Last week, when the threat to Iran was beginning to build, U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff told Fox News that President Donald Trump was “curious” about Iran’s failure to accede to American demands over its nuclear and missile programs, even as vast American naval forces and airpower was being moved into the region. The president was articulating a frustration that has haunted Western strategic thinking about the Middle East for years.

The Iranian regime, it is assumed, is a rational state actor that can be deterred by the threat of “unbearable costs.” Yet Islamic revolutionary movements and regimes don’t seem to behave rationally, in the sense that Western analysts typically understand.

“The hour of your freedom is at hand.”

So said President Donald Trump to the people of Iran, in an early morning address announcing a joint military attack by the U.S. and Israel against the Islamic Republic. Overnight, waves of air strikes pounded military installations across Iran. According to initial reports from Israel, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has been killed.

“For 47 years, the Iranian regime has chanted ‘Death to America’ and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder,” Trump said. “It’s been mass terror, and we’re not going to put up with it any longer.”

“They will never have a nuclear weapon,” he continued. “We’re going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground.”

Iran has responded with a barrage of strikes targeting Israel, as well as sites across the Middle East, including in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Qatar. Israeli authorities have instructed residents to remain in bomb shelters until further notice.

“When we are finished,” Trump said to the Iranians, “take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations.”

This is a region on the brink. What happens next will reshape the Middle East—and the world. Today at 11 a.m. ET, a slate of experts including Douglas Murray, Michael Oren, Haviv Rettig Gur, and more will join The Free Press live to help us understand what this all means, and how it will play out in the coming hours and days.

Tune in here

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