Bret Stephens, a New York Times columnist not known for carrying water for the current White House, told his readers Tuesday that President Trump's war against Iran is "going better than you think." The message landed on the opinion pages of the most influential liberal newspaper in the country, and it landed hard.
Stephens didn't bury the concession in caveats. He laid out casualty figures, equipment losses, oil prices, and coalition support, then measured them against prior American conflicts. His conclusion: the critics screaming about catastrophe have no sense of history and no grip on the numbers.
That a Times columnist felt compelled to say so tells you something about how wide the gap has grown between the left's apocalyptic narrative and the facts on the ground.
As Fox News Digital reported, Stephens walked readers through a set of comparisons that should embarrass every Democrat who has rushed to a microphone to call the campaign a disaster. Operation Desert Storm in 1991 destroyed dozens of U.S. aircraft in a six-week span. The current war with Iran has led to just four destroyed within four weeks.
The invasion of Panama in 1989 killed 23 American soldiers and wounded 325. The Iran campaign so far has seen 13 killed and 230 wounded, and Stephens noted most of the wounded had "swiftly returned to duty."
Then there's oil. In 2012, Brent crude closed the month around $123 a barrel. Adjusted for inflation, Stephens wrote, that would be $175 a barrel today. The current price is hovering around $100. Not cheap, but a far cry from the economic meltdown the left has been predicting since the first strike.
Stephens put it plainly:
"That ought to provide some perspective on the panic over the war in the Middle East."
Perspective is exactly what critics like Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., have been avoiding. Murphy told NBC's Kristen Welker on Sunday that "we've never seen this level of incompetence in war-making in this country's history." Never? Not the early disasters of the Iraq occupation? Not the withdrawal from Afghanistan? Murphy's claim is the kind of statement that sounds powerful on a Sunday show and collapses the moment anyone checks a history book.
Stephens acknowledged the opposition's framing before dismantling it. He described the critics' version of events this way:
"To hear the critics' version of events, an unprovoked and unnecessary attack on Iran, launched at Israel's behest, is already a foreign-policy fiasco that has put the global economy at risk without any clear objective or endgame."
His one-word response: "Really?"
That single word carries weight precisely because Stephens is not a reflexive Trump defender. He has disagreed with this administration before and said so in his column. He admitted he is "not blind to the Trump administration's failures in planning, particularly its unwillingness to make a stronger public case for war and get more allies on our side before the campaign began."
But he refused to let legitimate criticism slide into dishonest catastrophism. And he drew a contrast that should sting anyone old enough to remember what real wartime sacrifice looked like:
"Still, if past generations could see how well this war has gone compared with the ones they were compelled to fight at a frightening cost, they would marvel at their posterity's comparative good fortune. They would marvel, too, at our inability to appreciate the advantages we now possess."
That's not cheerleading. It's a rebuke aimed squarely at a political class that has decided to treat every Trump action as a catastrophe before the evidence is in.
Stephens wasn't alone. An Al Jazeera op-ed published last week offered a strikingly similar assessment. Muhanad Seloom, an assistant professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, praised the effectiveness of U.S. and Israeli military actions in terms that would make most Al Jazeera editors flinch:
"When you look at what has actually happened to Iran's principal instruments of power, its ballistic missile arsenal, its nuclear infrastructure, its air defenses, its navy and its proxy command architecture, the picture is not one of US failure. It is one of systematic, phased degradation of a threat that previous administrations allowed to grow for four decades."
Four decades. That's the part Democrats never want to discuss. The Iranian threat didn't materialize overnight. It grew under administrations of both parties, but it metastasized most dangerously during the years when Washington's preferred strategy was appeasement dressed up as diplomacy. The Obama-era nuclear deal. The pallets of cash. The refusal to hold Tehran accountable for its proxy wars across the Middle East.
Now an administration is actually confronting the problem, and the same voices that enabled Iran's rise are calling the response incompetent.
Stephens also highlighted a coalition advantage that undercuts the "going it alone" criticism. When President George W. Bush launched the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he had minimal support from Arab nations. The current situation is different. Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is urging Trump to continue the war against Iran, according to reporting by Stephens' own Times colleagues.
That's a significant shift in regional alignment. Arab states that once hedged or stayed silent are now openly backing the campaign. The administration's broader approach to building alliances in the region echoes the kind of decisive action that has repeatedly caught Democrats flat-footed on both domestic and foreign policy fronts.
Trump himself has signaled that negotiations are underway with Iran, and his administration has entered talks with the regime. Whether those talks produce results remains to be seen. But the combination of military pressure and diplomatic engagement is a textbook application of leverage, the kind of strategy that works when backed by demonstrated willingness to act.
The broader pattern here is familiar. Democrats and their allies in media declared Trump's approach to North Korea would start World War III. They said his trade policies would crash the economy. They said his border enforcement was a humanitarian disaster while ignoring the humanitarian disaster of open borders. Each time, the predictions of doom ran ahead of the evidence.
The same dynamic is playing out with Iran. Murphy's claim of unprecedented incompetence doesn't survive contact with the actual casualty figures. The economic apocalypse hasn't arrived. And the coalition is stronger than what Bush assembled for Iraq.
None of this means the war is won or that hard days aren't ahead. Stephens himself acknowledged planning failures. War is unpredictable, and Iran remains a dangerous adversary. But the gap between what Democrats are saying and what the numbers show has become too wide for even the New York Times opinion page to ignore.
The administration's willingness to confront threats directly rather than manage them through half-measures reflects a governing philosophy visible across multiple fronts. The same instinct to act drives efforts like the new fraud task force led by Vice President Vance and the push to dismantle bloated federal bureaucracies like the Department of Education. Whether the arena is foreign policy or domestic reform, the approach is the same: identify the problem, stop pretending it will fix itself, and move.
Stephens' column matters not because one center-right columnist at a liberal paper changed his mind. It matters because the factual case he laid out is available to anyone willing to look. Four aircraft lost versus dozens. Thirteen killed versus twenty-three in tiny Panama. Oil at $100 instead of an inflation-adjusted $175.
These are not cherry-picked statistics. They are the basic scoreboard of a military campaign measured against recent American history. And they tell a story that contradicts the narrative Democrats have staked their credibility on.
The Al Jazeera assessment adds another layer. When a Qatar-based academic writing for a publication that rarely praises American military action describes "systematic, phased degradation" of Iran's power, the left's incompetence narrative has a serious problem. Even voices with every incentive to criticize Washington are conceding that the campaign is working.
Sen. Murphy and his colleagues face a choice. They can keep insisting this is the worst-run war in American history and hope voters don't check the math. Or they can engage honestly with the evidence and offer constructive criticism where it's warranted. The first option is easier. The second would require admitting that an administration they despise is getting something right, a concession that Bret Stephens, to his credit, was willing to make on the pages of the New York Times.
When even the Gray Lady's own columnists are telling liberal readers to calm down, maybe it's time for Democrats to listen to the numbers instead of their own hysteria.
