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Senator Ted Cruz doesn’t mince words, and when he calls President Trump’s decision to launch military action against Iran the most consequential of his presidency—as he stated in a recent interview on Fox News—you better believe he’s thought it through. According to Cruz, he spent the day before the strikes launched riding with Trump in Air Force One and the presidential limousine, discussing the weight of what was coming. The question on the table was stark: negotiate further, or strike now?
Cruz’s advice was characteristically direct, as he explained in that same Fox News appearance. The Ayatollah was negotiating in bad faith, the regime was weaker than it had ever been, and Iran had been waging war against the United States for 47 years. When you’ve got the number-one state funder of terrorism in your sights and they’re vulnerable, you don’t wait for a better moment—you seize the one you have, Cruz argued in his comments.
The results, as Cruz claims in his interview, speak for themselves: over 9,000 military strikes executed, according to his assessment based on administration briefings. One hundred forty Iranian ships sunk—the largest sinking of naval vessels since World War II, per Cruz’s recounting. The Ayatollah himself eliminated, along with virtually the entire top tier of Iranian military leadership, as Cruz noted; air defenses decimated and ballistic missile launchers destroyed, based on the details he provided. Drone manufacturing capacity wiped out. This isn’t a limited operation; it’s a systematic dismantling of a hostile power’s ability to project force, Cruz emphasized.
But Cruz isn’t just counting bodies and broken equipment, as he pointed out in his remarks. He’s looking at the bigger picture. For nearly half a century, the Iranian regime has operated under the assumption that America lacked the will to respond decisively to its provocations. They seized our embassy. They took our citizens hostage. They built proxy armies across the Middle East and attacked our troops with impunity.
What happens when that assumption proves catastrophically wrong? The senator’s assessment comes as polls from Rasmussen Reports show a partisan divide on the strikes, with many Americans expressing skepticism about military action. Cruz acknowledges the discomfort that comes with war, but he also recognizes something the pollsters might miss: leadership sometimes means making the hard call when the easy one is to do nothing, as he said in his interview. Trump didn’t seek this conflict, but he’s sure as hell finishing it.
What makes Cruz’s endorsement particularly telling is his reputation as a principled conservative who doesn’t bend for anyone. He’s not a rubber stamp for the administration, and when he says this decision will be remembered as the defining moment of Trump’s presidency—as he asserted in his Fox News comments—he’s putting his own credibility behind that judgment. And given the scope of what’s been accomplished—the decapitation of a hostile regime’s leadership, the neutralization of its military capabilities, the protection of global shipping lanes, all as per Cruz’s account—it’s hard to argue he’s wrong.
Providence watches over the bold.
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