Nazi Germany and the Iranian Mullahs, similar dangers, same isolationist excuses - opinion

Once again, the United States faces an enemy openly committed to its destruction. And once again, some American leaders respond with isolationism, partisanship, and moral confusion.

Before America entered World War II, the isolationist case rested on four pillars: this is not our fight, the threat is exaggerated, intervention serves special interests rather than American ones, and the cure (war) is worse than the disease. Each of those arguments is being made today about Operation Epic Fury against Iran, often in nearly identical language.

But this framing misses a critical reality that makes the arguments moot: Iran has long been a direct and dangerous adversary of the United States, responsible for attacks against American personnel and interests for decades.

In 1940, Charles Lindbergh told audiences that Hitler and his campaign to conquer Europe was a European problem. America had oceans for protection and no obligation to bleed for foreign quarrels. 

Today, the same geographic and moral distancing is applied by critics to Iran. The conflict is framed as a Middle Eastern dispute, an Israeli problem, something happening "over there." 

Never mind that during the US transitional occupation of Iraq, Iranian-backed militias armed and trained by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were responsible for the deaths of at least 600 US service members, according to Pentagon assessments. Iranian-designed explosively formed penetrators alone killed close to 200 American troops and wounded nearly 900 more. 

Never mind that since October 2023, Iranian proxy groups have carried out more than 200 attacks on US bases and personnel in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan, including the January 2024 drone strike on a US base in Jordan that killed three American soldiers. Iran also launched direct missile strikes on US forces at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar in June 2025. Never mind that the Iran-backed Houthis’ Red Sea shipping attacks disrupted global trade and cyber operations targeting US banks. 

Iran may cast Israel as the “small devil,” but in reality, the regime has viewed the United States of America as the “Great Satan,” the true force it has been committed to destroying for decades. 

Isolationists of the 1930s consistently argued that Hitler's rhetoric was bluster, that no leader would actually pursue the ambitions he had stated openly in print. Those who warned otherwise were accused of warmongering, of seeing monsters where there were merely grievances. 

Iran's leadership has spent four decades stating its intentions with unmistakable clarity. It does not hide its support for groups committed to killing Americans and Israelis. In fact, Iran’s campaign against the United States has increasingly moved onto American soil.

In 2022, the US Department of Justice charged an Iranian Revolutionary Guard operative in a plot to assassinate former National Security Advisor John Bolton. In 2024, federal prosecutors unsealed charges against an Iranian-linked operative accused of planning the assassination of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. The plot involved recruiting individuals to surveil and potentially carry out the killing at a political rally. 

The Iranian Mullahs are radical Muslim fanatics whose "Death to America" is theological doctrine, not rhetoric. Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, equated the phrase to seeking refuge from Satan. Plots include the near-miss 2022 Pompeo assassination attempt in Paris, the US-soil Masih Alinejad attempted kidnapping by the IRGC, and targeting Joe Biden and Nikki Haley. 

Despite these attempts, the response from a significant portion of Western commentary is the same: don't take the rhetoric literally, look for the moderates, give diplomacy more time. The moderates have been waited for before. 

The ugliest strand of 1930s isolationism was conspiratorial. A vocal faction insisted that the push toward involvement in Europe was being driven not by genuine American interests, but by Jewish influence. 

This has been carefully laundered and returned. Today, when politicians insinuate that Benjamin Netanyahu manipulated President Trump, or when commentators suggest that pro-Israel lobbying, uniquely among all lobbying, somehow overrides the American national interest, they are recycling the same logic in more acceptable vocabulary. The insinuation is the same: American soldiers would not be in danger if not for Jewish pressure. But the truth is that American soldiers’ lives have already been taken by Iranian aggression. 

Insinuating this as “Israel’s war” is at best a distraction from reality, and at worst an antisemitic dog whistle.

The isolationists' final argument was consequentialist: entering the war would cost more than staying out. War, they argued, was the escalation, not the aggression that preceded it. 

Listen to the critics of the current war, and the structure is identical. Any military response is "destabilizing." But this argument does not hold up under scrutiny. 

For forty years, Iran has carried out attacks through a coordinated regional network directed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Relying on these proxy forces, the network includes an estimated 200,000 fighters across Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, all operating within what Tehran calls the “Axis of Resistance.” Iran's IRGC pursues global jihad per its constitution, and messianic Mahdism; Strait of Hormuz closures are economic jihad. 

In the eyes of Iran apologists, Iran never acts; America only overreacts.

The isolationists of the 1930s were wrong. They weren’t wrong because war is never good, but because the alternative to confronting Hitler earlier was confronting him later, at far greater cost, after the commission of far greater atrocities. 

The argument for patience and restraint sounds like wisdom. But there is a version of restraint that is not wisdom. It is the flattering name we give to the refusal to accept an uncomfortable reality. 

Iran is not Nazi Germany. But the rhetorical playbook being used to argue against confronting Iran is, clause by clause, the same one used to argue against confronting Hitler. That should at minimum give pause to those confident that restraint, this time, will work out differently. 

History does not repeat. But it does, as the saying goes, rhyme. And anyone who has read history will recognize the melody.

Adam Milstein is an Israeli-American “Strategic Venture Philanthropist.” He can be reached at adam@milsteinff.org, on Twitter @AdamMilstein, and on Facebook www.facebook.com/AdamMilsteinCP.

This op-ed is published in partnership with a coalition of organizations that fight antisemitism across the world. Read the previous article by Roni Brunn.