In Tehran and cities throughout Iran, Iranians are today chanting enthusiastically about the anticipated fall of the “Islamic Republic” regime and the potential return of the Crown Prince, heir to the ancient throne of Persia.

While it is unclear exactly the extent of the damage Israel has inflicted on Iran and whether or not the current genocidal regime will fall because of it, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi confirmed that Iranian soldiers and officials have reached out to him, and he urged the Iranian people to rise up, announcing he already has a plan for renewing Iran should he come to power again.

In his message above, Pahlavi condemned the violence, cowardice, and destructiveness of Ayatollah Khamenei and co., and confidently predicted that the collapse of the regime there is irreversible. “We are prepared for the first hundred days after the fall, for the transitional period, and for the establishment of a national and democratic government — by the Iranian people and for the Iranian people,” he vowed.

Pahlavi is an advocate for a Westernized, secularized government in Iran. Think of what that would mean for the Middle East. And indeed the world.

While chess originated in India, the game as we know it came from Persia (now known as Iran).

It was from Persia that the term for the final, winning move came: “Checkmate.”

The original Farsi phrase is “shāh māt,” which literally means “the king is dead.”

No matter how fast or slow a chess game, whether it takes minutes or weeks, it ends when the king is dead.

Israel has taken note of that fact and has decided to fight a new type of warfare, ignoring the pawns and killing the king in the first instance.

Of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, about 7-10% of them are “in it to win it.”

While 10% is a small percentage, 160,000,000 fanatics are still a good-sized global army, and many of them are troops in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

They will fight to the death, buoyed up by promises of martyrdom’s rich rewards (mostly creepy sex but, perhaps, a glut of fine raisins).

But no matter how fanatic your troops are, they still need leaders.

Think of them as savage sheep.

If led to battle, they’ll fight fiercely, but if there is no shepherd, they lose the plot, often becoming frightened or disheartened, and almost all will scatter.

It’s this savage sheep concept that gets me to my chess metaphor.

Strains of the pathogen Fusarium graminearum confiscated from Liu Zunyong. (Source: U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan)

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has a long history of engaging in agricultural espionage and, potentially, sabotage in the United States.

On Tuesday, June 3rd, two citizens of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), both specialists in the fungus and its modes of transmission and infection in crops, Jian Yunqing (简云青), 33, and Liu Zunyong (刘尊永), 34, were charged in a criminal complaint for conspiracy, smuggling goods into the United States, false statements, and visa fraud.

The pair is accused of conspiring to smuggle samples of the crop-destroying fungus Fusarium graminearum—which the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) describes as “a potential agroterrorism weapon”—into the United States (DOJ, June 3). Consumption of grain contaminated by this fungal blight can cause vomiting and liver damage in humans and livestock.

This is far from the first attempt of Communist China, which may now have a strategy of agroterrorism on America’s food supply.

Iran bet on bluff and delay—but lost its proxies, deterrence, and leverage, leaving a regime rich in threats but bankrupt in power.

Iran apparently had not adjusted to its new 2025 status—or maybe it had.

Most of its bought terrorists are currently either destroyed or anemic.

There is no more ascendant Iranian “Shia crescent” in the Middle East.

Russia is no longer a Middle East power, patron, and protector.

The Assad dynasty imploded, flipping Syria from an Iranian proxy into a likely Iranian enemy.

Hezbollah, once supposedly the most fearsome of all the Iranian terrorist tentacles, was humiliated and neutered by a series of surreal Israeli operations.

With the end of the Biden administration and Obama a distant memory, Iran lost all hope that it could bluster, bluff, and negotiate itself out of sanctions and embargoes—and into nuclear weapons.

There are no more John Kerrys or Antony Blinkens in charge, eager to meet Iranian demands. Ben Rhodes’s “echo chamber” Iran Deal is ancient history.

Israel had done more than all of America’s Middle East wars or all of NATO’s global presence to end Iran’s claims on power and the ability to project its brand of terror and fear throughout the Middle East.

So why did a neutered Iran still sound like the fiery Iran of old, when it once terrorized the Middle East and sent its assassination teams worldwide, with its nearly weekly loud threats to wipe out the one-bomb “Zionist entity?”

What was Iran thinking in refusing to negotiate seriously with the Trump administration to disband its nuclear weapons program and “normalize” its role in the Middle East?

The moment Israeli fighter jets cracked open Iran’s air-defense umbrella last week, the professional panic class—President Trump aptly calls them the “Panicans”—went straight to Defcon Twitter, wailing that World War III had begun and demanding that America stay out of it.

As if we weren’t already in it.

The Pentagon has been clear: our forces are in a defensive posture, which means active radar, ready launchers, and iron in the sky—not a bunch of soldiers sitting around waiting to be target practice.

And now, for anyone still half-asleep, the President just announced that we hold “complete and total control over Iranian skies.”

That is not mission creep; that is mission accomplished at thirty-thousand feet.

First, a little memory‑jog for the amnesiacs.

Candidate Trump never promised monastic isolation. What he promised—and delivered—was an end to feckless, open‑ended nation‑building while preserving America’s right to strike quickly, decisively, and overwhelmingly when genuine threats emerged.

In 2017 he unleashed new rules of engagement that collapsed the Islamic State’s “caliphate” in weeks—something Washington’s polite war managers had failed to do for three long years.

Then came January 3, 2020.

Qassem Soleimani, the terror architect who had American blood on his hands from Baghdad to Beirut, learned in a flash of white light that presidential red lines are real.

Trump’s surgical order saved untold American and allied lives and stunned Tehran into recalculating its aggression.

The strike was not the beginning of a new war; it was the punctuation mark that prevented one.

Nothing about this week’s move contradicts that record.