The Atlantic published “Trump’s Fundamental Misunderstanding in Iran — What makes the nation suffer helps the regime thrive” by Karim Sadjadpour on April 7, 2026. Sadjapour’s central argument: The architects dictating the strategies behind Trump’s instigation and conduct of this war against Iran display a fundamental ignorance of both the battle they are fighting and any method to win it. In that author’s expert dissection of the “arc of history” of America’s opponent — Iran’s Shiite regime, which has ruled since 1979 — any military victory over that regime, Trump’s proclaimed enemy, by the U.S. is an existential impossibility. This is because the very definition of the regime’s existence is (1) diametric opposition to the United States and (2) absolute rejection of the right of Israel to exist.
For Iran’s current regime, there is no “peaceful negotiation” on these points, no ambiguity of commitment, no possibility of give-and-take. If the options that their enemies present to these men are (1) negotiated capitulation vs. (2) being wiped out of existence, they will choose the latter. Why? Because that existence is based on the intractable belief in, and commitment to, unlimited defiance to the will of either American or Israeli leaders, or to any possibility that either enemy has a say in Iran’s methods of government. (As Sadjapour says, previous cooperation with Obama did not require them to reduce this defiance, only provide technical cooperation.)
Fine, so Iran’s current political/military regime chooses destruction over cooperation. Are these the options that the American people actually want to offer them? My answer is “No,” and the history of the American union, and its stance on human ethics and morality since our own Revolution, also answers “No.”
Then who is giving Iran’s regime this “Abandon your thinking or die” choice? Many domestic political analysts will tell you that the dictators of this choice offered to Iran is a group of reactionary think-tank operatives from, or aligned with, the Heritage Foundation. These are the same sociopolitical ideologues who authored Project 2025 and Mandate for Leadership 2025, a new edition of the 1979 version that helped rend the fabric of American life under Reagan in the 1980s. The Heritage Foundation was instrumental in putting Ronald Reagan in the White House, and the group was instrumental in putting Donald Trump in the White House twice.
Now, as they were with Reagan, the Heritage Foundation has been instrumental in dictating American policy through two Trump administrations, filling dozens of staff positions. Yet its chief operatives, despite their power, are fully insulated from the reach of any part of the American electoral system. American voters did not knowingly or willingly give them the power they now exercise.
The fundamental, geopolitical irony in this situation is that our war with Iran is not about oil or abuse of Iranian citizens or threats to other nations in the region (Israel being the exception, due to its own actions). It’s a war of ideologies, arguably a religious war, arguably a 21st-century renewal of the Islamic vs. Christian Crusades. It’s about crucifixes and turbans and headscarves. Both sides, Iran and the U.S., believe they are on a mission for their gods. An exaggeration? Not if you believe that Project 2025 was authored, and is being executed, through the influence of the Heritage Foundation. A grade-school-level web search will allow you to connect those dots. Try The Legacy of the Catholic New Right in Project 2025.
At the Heritage Foundation’s webpage for Catholicism and the American Founding, I find this quote:
“To what extent can the natural law tradition, central to Catholic teaching, be seen in the Founders’ understanding of liberty, human dignity, and self-government? Revisit and clarify the principles upon which this nation is built and the relationship between those principles and Catholic thought.”
This is the polar opposite of the Founders’ extensive warnings against religious influence in the politics of our Republic. But strict, even reactionary Catholic thinkers have been instrumental in the Heritage Foundation’s origins, as that group’s own publications will attest, including its current president Kevin Roberts, and down through the chain of command.
So now you have an unelected American think tank, heavily influenced by — some would say — dogmatic American religious beliefs, with powerful influence over a presidential administration that is conducting a war against Iranian religious fanatics, who already have a powerful antipathy against another highly religious regime, Israel.
For those who ask, “Why are we fighting a war in Iran?” I can reply that there is an ideological parallel-of-negatives between the “true believers” of Project 2025 and the “true believers” of the Islamic State in Iran. Both sides are on a mission from their gods, as if in a reassertion of the Crusades, with elements of oil and hyper-capitalism standing in the wings, and Trump playing pattycake with Netanyahu, his partner in crime.
Lance Mason is a born, baptized, and bred Roman Catholic, with 15 years of Catholic grade school, high school, and college.
