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Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg’s recent interviews make plain what many of us already suspected: the United States needs clarity, resolve, and a plan that ends Iran’s decades-long menace rather than managing it. Kellogg praised President Donald Trump’s willingness to act and told Newsmax the world is finally learning that this administration means what it says. His blunt talk about confronting Iran’s leadership and military apparatus should wake up every policymaker still clinging to wishful thinking.
Kellogg didn’t offer platitudes; he called the president “a living action verb,” and he wasn’t speaking in code. That assessment matters because deterrence only works when our adversaries believe we will follow through, not when they write us off as saber-rattlers. Conservatives who value peace through strength should welcome a commander-in-chief who understands that talk must be backed by capability and will.
More than rhetoric, Kellogg laid out concrete pressure points — from choking Iran’s oil revenue to seizing strategic terrain like Kharg Island and Bandar Abbas to disrupt the regime’s lifeline. He argued for limited, targeted operations and economic strangulation designed to achieve political change without a full occupation, a practical approach that stops short of endless nation-building. Those who claim any discussion of force is reckless are ignoring decades of Iranian aggression that have left the region and American interests less secure.
If you wonder whom to hit, Kellogg’s warning about the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its hardline leaders is important intelligence, not warmongering. The IRGC is the backbone of Tehran’s malign activities across the Middle East, and targeting its command-and-control structure is a rational military objective when diplomatic and economic tools have been exhausted. Anyone truly concerned with American lives and global stability should back decisive actions that degrade the IRGC’s ability to wage proxy war and develop weapons.
Strategic control of the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian export hubs isn’t abstract geopolitics — it’s energy security, allied safety, and protection for global trade that keeps grocery prices and fuel affordable here at home. Kellogg’s endorsement of seizing key maritime chokepoints is about denying the ayatollahs the leverage they use to blackmail the world, not gratuitous violence. We must think like strategists, not moralizers — and our priorities should be American stability and the defeat of regimes that fund terror.
Meanwhile, the usual suspects on the left will howl that firmness equals escalation, but their reflexive appeasement has only emboldened Tehran for decades. It’s time to stop rewarding bad behavior and start imposing real costs until the regime’s calculus changes or its power structures crumble from within. Kellogg’s call for “playing all the cards” is exactly the kind of full-spectrum pressure realists have been urging for years.
President Trump deserves credit for restoring American credibility on the world stage, and field voices like Lt. Gen. Kellogg’s should be listened to, not silenced. Hard choices are preferable to white-knuckled dithering when the stakes are this high; let the policymakers who love this country act with the ferocity and prudence needed to secure it. The country that won two world wars should not flinch now — it should finish the job and ensure the peace that follows is real and lasting.
