It was time for an administration to break foreign-policy ‘rules’
What follows next is unclear, but by killing Iranian arch-terrorist Qassem Soleimani, Trump has broken the wheel of appeasement that enabled Tehran's ongoing aggression.
For 20 years, he had sowed terror and confusion throughout the Middle East with impunity. As head of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Qassem Soleimani was the mastermind of the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, as well as the second most powerful person within that oppressive Islamist theocracy. No matter how much mayhem he spread, he believed that he was untouchable. And three American administrations run by both Democrats and Republicans validated that belief, forgoing opportunities to kill the man who had the blood of many Americans and countless Syrians, Lebanese, Israelis and others on his hands.
But following the orchestration of attacks on American forces in Iraq and the staging of an assault on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Soleimani's get-out-of-jail free card that he had been given by the international community and successive American presidents expired.