In a recorded interview, journalist Caroline Glick argues that U.S. policy toward Iran has been fundamentally flawed for the past four decades. She contends that from the 1979 hostage crisis onward, successive American administrations—both Republican and Democratic—refused to acknowledge that the Iranian revolutionary regime was directly responsible for acts of war and terrorism, instead treating attacks as the work of independent proxies. Glick cites the 1979 embassy hostage taking, the 1983 Hezbollah bombings of the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, and subsequent kidnappings and killings as examples where the U.S. pretended Iran was not involved. She claims this “fantasy” of Iranian deniability persisted through Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama, shaping a policy of non‑confrontation. According to Glick, President Trump broke this 40‑year pattern, openly confronting Iran and labeling its actions as state‑sponsored, thereby ending the long‑standing policy of denial. The interview ends with the host noting that the current president is finally calling out the Iranian regime’s aggression.
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So, that's right. I read your article, your latest. I read you regularly, and your latest piece is of tremendous interest to Americans. This president has undone the Iranian policies of 41 years. That is since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Is that correct?
That's correct. That's correct. It's been a policy that— in fact, what I wrote about in my article, which I called Trump and the Mischief Makers, I explained that Trump has really undone 40 years or 41 years of American foreign policy related to Iran and Israel. And these were policies that were initiated by Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s, in 1978 and 1979. And then even though His successors, particularly Reagan and the Bushes, were highly critical of his policies, at least from a rhetorical perspective. Substantively, they maintained them throughout their presidencies, as of course did Bill Clinton and Obama.
Right. And so how would you characterize all of those presidents, Republican and Democratic, attitudes and policies vis-à-vis Iran?
They were based on this fantasy. You see, in November of 1979, as you know, the Iranian revolutionary regime committed an act of war against the United States when it, uh, when it took over the U.S. embassy and took the Americans on the premises hostage and held them hostage for 444 days. That's 52 Americans. And that was an act of war. And generally speaking, it would have— if the United States had acknowledged that it was in fact an act of war, which of course it was by any definition, they would have had to respond with force of some kind to make Iran stand down and perhaps overthrow the new revolutionary regime that had just declared war on the United States. But Jimmy Carter didn't want to do that for a host of reasons. One of them was that he didn't— I think he had some sort of an ideological affinity with the revolutionaries in the sense that he shared with his advisers a sense of guilt over American policies and thought that perhaps America had in fact been an imperialist power, and therefore it was getting its comeuppance. But whatever the case, he chose not to recognize what was happening. So when the Iranians said, oh, no, no, it's not Ayatollah Khomeini. The Supreme Leader of Iran that's behind this, but it's just a group of students, students they called them, who were acting independently of the Ayatollah and his entire apparatus of power. And they were really just helpless to take action to free the American hostages from these students. And therefore, they were kept in central Tehran as hostages of the students, who are, of course, independent actors, for nearly 2 years, for a year and a half. And that was on its face insane. Of course, Ayatollah Khomeini was in charge of them. And of course they weren't students. They were soldiers of the Ayatollah. But if America recognized this, then again, they were going to have to do something. So from the very outset, the American policy was to pretend, along with the Iranians, that the Iranian regime was not responsible for its aggression and acts of war against the United States that were carried out by proxies or by thinly disguised soldiers. So, for instance, in 1983, Iran's Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, which was a creation of the regime, they bombed the American embassy in Beirut in April of '83. And then in November of '83, they bombed the Marine barracks in Beirut, and they killed 241 American Marines. And again, the Reagan administration, which, you know, is considered to have been much stronger on Iran than Carter, actually wasn't. Rather than recognizing that this, again, was an act of war against the United States with the embassy bombing and the Marine barracks bombing, the Americans pretended it away, pretended that it was carried out by independent actors inside of Lebanon that had no relationship to any state supporters, and removed the Marines from Beirut, never took action against Iran for those two acts of war against Americans in Beirut. In Beirut, or subsequent kidnappings and tortures and killings of American embassy personnel, including the CIA station chief in Beirut. So the Americans and Reagan, then Bush, both Bushes, Clinton, Obama, all of them pretended to believe the denials of the Iranian regime while they knew full well that all of these terrorist attacks against America, against its allies, against other countries were being carried out, directed, sponsored, paid for, and commanded by the Iranian regime. Because they just didn't want to deal with it. They never wanted to acknowledge what was happening. And so for 41 years, America has based its policy on the fantasy that the Iranian regime wasn't responsible for its own actions.
Wow. That's all I could say. And now? A president has said the emperor is naked. This is the— exactly, this is the emperor, and we will confront him.
