On Sunday, President Trump issued a blunt warning to the theocratic tyrants in Tehran.

“If we are attacked in any way, shape, or form by Iran,” he posted on social media, “the full strength and might of the United States Armed Forces will come down on you.”

Just a few hours later, the US embassy branch in Tel Aviv was damaged during an Iranian missile barrage targeting Israeli population centers. Ayatollah Khamenei, it seemed, was daring the American president to make good on his threat.

Israel’s Operation Rising Lion has so far unfolded brilliantly. Within two days, Israel achieved control of the skies over western Iran, including Tehran. It destroyed dozens of Iranian surface-to-air missiles and launchers and killed high-ranking officials empowered to deploy them. Oil facilities, natural gas refineries, police headquarters, the Ministry of Intelligence building, the government-controlled broadcast network — Israel destroyed or damaged them all.

The goal of Israel’s military campaign is to disable Iran’s illicit nuclear weapons program once and for all. It waited to strike until after the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog, reported that Iran was in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has been lying about its nuclear operations for 20 years. Israeli leaders since Yitzhak Rabin have been warning that nuclear weapons in Iran’s hands would pose an intolerable existential crisis for the Jewish state. Ever since the Islamic revolution of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979, the Iranian regime has called for Israel’s destruction.

But it isn’t only Israel that has an overwhelming justification to act against Iran. The United States does, too.

The radical and apocalyptic Islamists who rule Iran hate America as much as they hate Israel. They have been waging war against the United States for 45 years, a war that began when they invaded the US embassy in Tehran and abducted dozens of American diplomats. In the decades since, the Iranian regime has killed many Americans, attacked US targets, and repeatedly proclaimed its aspiration of “Death to America.”

Start with the body count. Iran is responsible — directly or through proxies — for the deaths of many hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans. In 1983, Iran-backed terrorists bombed the US Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American servicemen. A few weeks later, another terror bombing by avowed supporters of Khomeini claimed 17 American lives at the US Embassy in Lebanon. In 1985, Hezbollah — a terrorist organization long connected to, and supported by, Iran — hijacked TWA Flight 847 and brutally murdered Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem. Marine Colonel William Higgins, kidnapped in 1988, was tortured and executed by Iranian proxies. In 1996, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was involved in the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, in which 19 American servicemen were killed and many others wounded. A federal court ruled that Iran bankrolled the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, which left 17 US Navy sailors dead.

During the Iraq War, Tehran armed Shiite militias, training them to attack US troops with devastating roadside explosives that, as The Washington Post put it, left “a trail of dead and wounded service members.” And decades of atrocities carried out by Iran’s anti-Israel proxies Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad have sent scores of American citizens to early graves, including more than 40 in the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre.

These weren’t random acts of violence. They were the fruit of a long-standing Iranian strategy to sap American willpower and intimidate its allies. And they have been accompanied, time and again, by explicit calls from Iranian leaders to attack and destroy America.

In the 1980s, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Hashemi Rafsanjani, publicly encouraged Islamists to hijack airplanes and blow up Western infrastructure. Khomeini, Iran’s founding supreme leader, called for a “fully fledged war against America and its surrogates.” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president, regularly forecast the coming of “a world without America and Zionism.”

On at least a dozen occasions, Iranian government spokespersons or media outlets have called for the assassination of Trump.

Given that history of hatred, fanaticism, and slaughter, can anyone disagree with Trump’s repeated declarations this week that “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon”? Some voices on the far right and left insist that America has no vested interest in ensuring that Iran loses this war, but the truth is exactly the opposite. Trump has been emphasizing that the fighting should end not with a cease-fire but rather a “real end” to Iran’s nuclear-weapons quest — or with the regime “giving up entirely.” He’s right. The brilliance of Israel’s operation has handed the president the chance to achieve a permanent solution to one of the longest-festering sores in international affairs. He must not squander it.

Trump likes to describe himself as a peacemaker. At this hour, the best hope for peace lies in shattering Iran’s nuclear threat — for good.