I did not see this coming. Has any New York Times pundit ever written anything regarding Donald Trump that wasn’t pure venom? Has there ever been a Times opinion piece that said, “Wow! President Trump handled this problem perfectly”? If so, I must have missed it.
True, if any one of the Axis-biased Times stable of progressives, Democrats and the Trump Deranged were capable of such a composition, it would have to have been Stephens. Along with David Brooks he is one of the token sort-of conservatives on the staff usually displaying symptoms of the Stockholm Syndrome. Brooks is beyond hope now, but Stephens is at least unpredictable. He’s a weird sort of conservative, having opined once that the Second Amendment should be repealed, and he takes part in annoying transcribed anti-Trump snark-fests with Gail Collins, which reads a bit like what the old “Point-Counterpoint” would have been like if Shauna Alexander and James J. Kilpatrick were secretly boinking each other. (Gotta get THAT image out of my brain, quick.) Still, I am pledged to give credit where credit is due.
Today Stephens’ name was under a column headlined, “Trump’s Courageous and Correct Decision.” It begins,
For decades, a succession of American presidents pledged that they were willing to use force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But it was President Trump who, by bombing three of Iran’s key nuclear sites on Sunday morning, was willing to demonstrate that those pledges were not hollow and that Tehran could not simply tunnel its way to a bomb because no country other than Israel dared confront it.
That’s a courageous and correct decision that deserves respect, no matter how one feels about this president and the rest of his policies. Politically, the easier course would have been to delay a strike to appease his party’s isolationist voices, whose views about the Middle East (and antipathies toward the Jewish state) increasingly resemble those of the progressive left. In the meantime, Trump could have continued to outsource the dirty work of hitting Iran’s nuclear capabilities to Israel, hoping that it could at least buy the West some diplomatic leverage and breathing room.
Trump chose otherwise, despite obvious risks. Those include Iranian strikes on U.S. military assets and diplomatic facilities in the region and terrorist attacks against American targets worldwide, possibly through proxies and possibly over a long period. One grim model is the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which was carried out by Muammar el-Qaddafi’s regime most likely in retaliation for President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 bombing of Libya. In the Lockerbie atrocity, 270 people lost their lives.
But one set of risks must be weighed against another, and there are few greater risks to American security than a nuclear Iran.
Yikes. Read it all: here’s a gift link. Stephens will probably have to join the equivalent of a witness protection program now; I assume the Times woke staffers will make him a pariah, and that Times readers have flamed the piece all day….let’s see…Ha! There are no comments! The Times editors are cowards.
Nonetheless, it cannot be denied or minimized that there has been an integrity sighting in the New York Times. We may never see the like in our lifetime. Let us pause in wonder and gratitude.
There is hope.
Ethics Alarms 
“There are no comments! The Times editors are cowards.”
Has that changed, or did they completely disallow commenting on the article?
There an Over-Under on how long it takes AF to sneak on to inform us the benighted that this is further evidence of the NYT’s dedicated commitment to All The News That’s Fit To Print…?
PWS
Many news sites are reserving the right to disable comments for specific articles that, I assume, they realize will likely cause their commentariat to melt down.
I am not sure this position by the NYT rises to “ethics hero” status. Only the isolationslsts and the heavily invested Marxist/antiwar advocates are opposed to bombing Iranian nuclear sites. It just may rise to the “Broken Clock” state but, if the NYT were really interested in discourse, it would have allowed comments. They didn’t for fear that their readership would hoise the “Trump did something impeachable, let’s see what he did today” flag.
I find the argument “you poked the bear, now our blood is on your hands” impressive. The argument clearly acknowledges that the Iranian mullahs running the country are dangerous, fanatic, open terrorists and supporting other proxy terrorists.
I watched an interview with the leading liberal Israeli prime minister candidate, challenging Netanyahu. Even he praised Trump for his decision and leadership, explaining that hitting Iran’s nuclear facilities changed the face of Middle East politics for at least a generation.
Now, Trump needs to declare open support and solidarity with Iranian resistance movements, not like Obama’s tepid response to Iranian Green Movement. Had Obama supported them in 2009, it would have had a seimic effect on Iranian politics. But, no, Obama was a coward.
jvb
Remember, the hero is Stephens, not the Times. The Times is cowardly, biased, and untrustworthy.
Indeed. Apologize for the lack of clarity.
jvb
There has never been a genocide of people that fits the definition of genocide more than the ongoing Palestinian genocide by Jews. Jews are and have been violent beasts who have committed many genocides in human history. Violence and corruption are ingrained in the Jews’ genetic makeup. For at least a century, the extermination of the Palestinian people has been a policy openly implemented by the Jews, supported by the U.S., Britain and Germany.
In Palestine, the Jews are using crude methods, including deliberate mass killings of women and children sheltering in hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and large gatherings of civilians receiving water and food (so-called aid). There were no prior warnings. Indeed, Palestinians were forced to gather in one place in order to be killed, i.e., schools, hospitals, and aid distribution centres.
There is no such thing as the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza. The so-called “Palestinian Health Ministry” is a UN-managed pro-Israel propaganda outlet aimed at minimizing Palestinian deaths with an inaccurate and very low estimate. Several accurate reports, including one from the reputable British Journal, The Lancet, in July 2024, showed that Jews have murdered hundreds of thousands of Palestinian women and children. It is reported that the death toll of the ongoing genocide is already greater than 200,000 civilians, with 75% being unarmed women and children. Ralph Nader (mentioned above) estimated back in March 2025 that the number was closer to 400,000. Recently, Yaakov Garb, a professor at Ben-Gurion University, published a report for Harvard Dataverse that analyzed the Israeli military’s data and combined it with careful spatial mapping to reveal a demographic horror story: almost 400,000 Palestinian civilians, overwhelmingly children, at least 377,000, have disappeared from Gaza’s pre-genocide population of 2.227 million due to Jewish attacks, reducing it to 1.85 million when measured for the study.
The author has failed to state that Bret Stephens is a goy and dirty pro-genocide propagandist; otherwise, he would not have a job at the New York Times, a Zionist Jewish-owned propaganda outlet.
Thank-you for sharing!