The United States launched Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28, initiating hostilities against Iran's military infrastructure in coordinated strikes alongside ally Israel. Former Vice President Mike Pence, writing in support of the operation, called it the decisive end to 47 years of Iranian terror and credited President Trump with the willingness to act when the moment demanded it.
According to Pence, U.S. forces struck while the ayatollah and some 40 senior Iranian officials and commanders were assembled. The Iranian navy, he wrote, now sits at the bottom of the ocean. Air superiority has been established. Iran's leadership has been scattered or killed, and the regime's capacity to launch missiles has been diminished.
The operation has not come without cost. Pence acknowledged that seven brave Americans have already been lost.
According to Fox News, Pence framed Operation Epic Fury as the culmination of a long arc that began with the Islamic Republic's founding in 1979. For 47 years, Iran exported violence across the Middle East, funded proxy wars, and destabilized the region. The operation follows last year's Operation Midnight Hammer, which Pence described as striking a devastating blow to Iran's nuclear program.
The coalition backing the current strikes extends beyond Israel. Pence referenced American, Israeli, and Gulf nations' militaries working in concert. That alignment is worth noting. For years, the conventional wisdom held that Arab states would never openly cooperate with Israel on a military operation against a fellow Muslim-majority nation. That conventional wisdom is now obsolete.
The killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in U.S.-Israeli strikes, referenced in reporting dated March 5, 2026, from Tehran, represents a decapitation of the regime's spiritual and political authority. Regimes built around singular figures of theocratic power do not transfer authority smoothly. The clerical establishment in Tehran now faces a succession crisis during active military operations against its infrastructure. That is not a position any government recovers from easily.
Pence drew a direct line between the erosion of American deterrence and the violence that followed. He pointed to the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan under former President Joe Biden as the moment deterrence was squandered. What came after was predictable to anyone paying attention:
The pattern is not complicated. When American adversaries perceive weakness, they act. When they perceive strength, they calculate. The Biden administration gave them nothing to calculate about.
Trump's decision to launch Operation Epic Fury sends a different message entirely. Pence credited the president's willingness to ignore what he called the voices of isolationism. That willingness, paired with the operational reality of a regime whose navy is destroyed and whose supreme leader is dead, reconstitutes the deterrence that was frittered away over the previous four years.
Pence argued that Operation Epic Fury could enable regime change in Iran. That word, "regime change," carries heavy baggage in American foreign policy debates, and Pence is aware of it. But the circumstances here differ materially from Iraq in 2003. There is no talk of occupation. There is no ground invasion being described. The operation, as Pence presented it, is a systematic dismantling of military infrastructure and leadership, conducted from the air and sea with coalition partners who have their own strategic interests in Iran's collapse.
The question is whether Iran's internal opposition, long suppressed by the Revolutionary Guard and the clerical establishment, can capitalize on the power vacuum. The regime's coercive apparatus has been degraded. Its figurehead is dead. Its senior military leadership has been scattered or killed. If there was ever a window for the Iranian people to reclaim their country, this is it.
The Gulf states' participation signals something else: the region is ready for a post-Iran order. These are not nations acting out of charity. They are acting out of self-interest, which makes the coalition more durable than any alliance built on sentiment.
Seven American service members have given their lives. That fact demands gravity, not rhetoric. Every military operation carries risk, and the families of those seven Americans are living the sharpest edge of that reality right now.
But Pence's broader argument is sound: the cost of inaction over 47 years has been staggering. Iranian-backed proxies have killed American soldiers, destabilized entire nations, and kept the Middle East locked in a cycle of violence that no diplomatic process has been able to break. After the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, American forces returned to the region within a decade. The problems kept compounding because the source of the problems was never addressed.
The source is now being addressed.
Pence, as the founder of Advancing American Freedom, has positioned himself as a voice for muscular American engagement abroad. His endorsement of Trump's operation is notable not because it is surprising but because it represents a unified front among mainstream conservatives on the use of force against Iran. The isolationist wing of the party will have its objections. But with a coalition holding, air superiority established, and the regime's command structure in ruins, the argument for restraint sounds less like prudence and more like permission for the next 47 years to look like the last.
Tehran's theocrats spent four decades betting that America would never come for them directly. On Feb. 28, that bet came due.