Agreeing President Trump scored a major coup on Thursday with the airstrike on Iran that killed the notorious General Qasem Soleimani, three Middle Eastern experts who spoke to Newsmax the following day all agreed that the Tehran regime means it when it says it will hit back.
“President Trump’s administration has gained an historic victory,” Cynthia Farahat Higgins, senior fellow at the Middle East Forum, told us.
Higgins said that the strike killing Soleimani means “Middle East politics has changed drastically. Qassem Soleimani was the most dangerous man in the Middle East. He wasn’t only working with Shiites, but also with Sunni militants. His death pulled the rug from under the feet of the mullas in Iran and now they know they are weak and exposed.”
However, she also agreed that Iran “will attempt to retaliate with terrorist attacks out of fear of losing their jihadist base. But I don’t see them recovering from this.”
“The impact depends on the aftermath,” said Lawrence Haas, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Association and onetime communications director to Vice President Al Gore, “Do the Iranians retaliate by killing Americans or, in some other way high-profile way, damaging our interests, thus making Americans more nervous about Trump as commander in chief?
"Only time will tell on that one.”
According to Richard V. Allen, foreign policy adviser to Ronald Reagan in his 1980 campaign and his first national security advisor, killing Soleimani may appear to be a dramatic, lethal gesture by Donald Trump, and it is considerably more than a gesture. But it’s not a knockout blow. It invites counterattacks on a grander scale. at times and places of Iran’s choosing.”
Voicing a view increasing heard in official Washington Friday, Allen said that “some may target the U.S., even more likely allied interests in the region, perhaps in and around Israel, and quite possibly in vulnerable Europe.”