President Trump has devised a brilliant method of securing and enforcing the strategic requirements of America instantly and without casualties. Mr. Trump’s deluded enemies in the American press should pause to notice what has happened. The world has. 

Yet the Democrats are clinging to each other like the last players in “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” clutching rejected nostrums and embracing criminals. There has been practically no recognition of the triumph of the enforcement and execution of American and allied policy that Trump has achieved, almost instantaneously and with no serious casualties.

The United States has only gone to war when provoked, though with Mexico it was a stretch. Lincoln’s effort to resupply Fort Sumter in 1861 induced the South to attack. The Spanish-American war was precipitated by the destruction of the battleship Maine at Havana harbor in 1898 and even then it is not clear how this happened, and, in their insanity, the Spanish started the war. The German emperor’s attack on American merchant ships in 1917, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 brought America into war in united righteous determination (and were the two most disastrous strategic decisions of modern times).

Presidents Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt, unlike Madison (War of 1812), and Lyndon Johnson, understood the absolute necessity of the unity of American opinion behind a successful national war effort.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt outlined what became the strategic doctrine of the United States in two speeches that he made to the Congress and the nation at the beginning and the end of 1941. In the State of the Union message in January, he said: “We must always be wary of those who ‘with sounding brass and tinkling cymbal’ would preach the ‘ism’ of appeasement.” FDR, in his war message on December 8, in addition to promising to defeat the new enemy, declared that “we will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.”

This was the essence of American national security policy for 80 years: it was too powerful to be attacked directly. And it would not appease anyone, though it has made practical concessions like retention of the Japanese emperor and continuation of North Korea, because Truman and Eisenhower and Secretary George Marshall, contrary to General Douglas MacArthur, President Nixon, and Secretary John Foster Dulles, believed that it was better to tolerate the continuation of North Korea than to take the necessary steps to expel Communist China from the Korean Peninsula. (That debate continues.)

America’s enemies finally settled upon the stratagem of the guerrilla war, along with spin-offs like terrorist attacks and lethal drug-smuggling. These aggressions are only engaged in by those not militarily capable of winning a confrontational war. In Vietnam, there were tragic mistakes of analysis. Johnson did not understand that you could not send, as MacArthur warned, a conscript army across the world to risk its life for an objective less than victory and a cause that did not clearly engage the national interest.

Presidents Kennedy and Johnson did not heed the advice of the country’s greatest military commanders since the Civil War, Eisenhower and MacArthur, to stay out of ground combat on the East Asian mainland. The Vietnam theatre commander, General William Westmoreland, also ignored their advice that if war in Vietnam became necessary, the demilitarized zone had to be extended across Laos to stop the penetration of the theater by the North Vietnamese, while training and supplying the South Vietnamese to regain complete control of their country.

It would have been better, if the Americans were not prepared to finish the job properly, to cut Vietnam loose after the Communists had been defeated in 1966 in Indonesia and 500,000 of them massacred.

Nixon, who had been a consistent critic of previous Vietnam policy, prescribed a possible winning formula, as American opinion was too inflamed to support the invasion of Laos, of pounding North Vietnam from the air and training and arming the South Vietnamese to suppress the domestic communists, the Viet Cong. This officially ended the war and enabled an American withdrawal. When the North Vietnamese did invade and violate the agreement as everyone knew that they would, the Democrats pretended that this was the Republicans’ hopeless war.

The Democrats withheld support of a bombing campaign such as Nixon ordered in 1972 to defeat the North Vietnamese invasion that occurred between his historic visits to Beijing and Moscow.  The sacrifice of 58,000 dead Americans, 304,000 wounded, and total military and civilian South Vietnamese dead of about 700,000 and 1.7 million wounded and captured was squandered and America was almost traumatized.

America sleep-walked through the last quarter of the 20th century except for the skillfully assembled and overwhelmingly powerful operation that flung Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait at a cost of 292 Allied dead against perhaps 50,000 dead Iraqis, and 150,000 wounded, including many civilian dissidents.

The United States was emboldened to put a toe in the water again. The Iraq war of 2003 to 2008 effectively delivered control of most of Iraq to Iran, the worst of all possible Western outcomes. About 500,000 people died and approximately three quarters of a million were injured. Trillions of dollars were scattered over the sands and palm trees of the Middle East for absolutely no discernible achievement. If Mr. Trump instead of George W. Bush had been president, Saddam could have been extracted and dealt with like Maduro, in one day and with minimal loss of life. Readers will recall the Bosnian and ISIL and Afghan fiascoes.

Mr. Trump was elected in 2016 in part to end these feckless involvements and absurd wars and one year into his second term it is clear that he has discovered the means to update Roosevelt’s formula and to enforce American interests at a minimum cost in American and allied lives. The elimination of the Iranian nuclear military capability and the seizure and removal of the president of Venezuela took a total of only a few hours and incurred no American combat deaths.

The whole world is waiting to see if the president will turn American and allied precision missiles on the barracks and other targets of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, as they try once more to strangle the will of the ancient people of Persia and continue their terrorist regime, in the name of misplaced piety. There would not be a single groan of sincere regret if the president assisted the people of Iran in disposing of this hateful and completely failed regime.