I am looking at the famous photograph from Yalta, February 1945, of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, visibly ravaged by illness, slumped slightly in his chair between Churchill and Stalin. FDR was one of the most consequential architects of international order the world has ever known. The United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, the very grammar of multilateral cooperation that would hold for eight decades, all of it conceived in the mind of a man who would be dead within two months of this photograph. FDR understood that the strength of a nation is measured not by its capacity to dominate, but by its willingness to build structures that outlast any single leader’s ambition.
But his admirers sometimes forget that FDR also understood that structures alone do not defend themselves. He spent the better part of his presidency trying to awaken a sleeping, isolationist America to the existential nature of the threat bearing down on Western civilization. He understood, with a clarity his contemporaries often lacked, that there are moments when negotiation reaches its limit, when an adversarial regime has demonstrated by its behavior that it will interpret patience as weakness, and when inaction carries a higher cost than action. He had watched the appeasement of Munich. He had watched the democracies hesitate. He had watched the fire spread.
Eighty-five years ago this past January, FDR stood before Congress and articulated his Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear; declaring them universal birthrights belonging to people “everywhere in the world.”
READ: The Review by Ajay Raju |The coming Civil War inside law firms (February 23, 2026)
When he made these remarks in January 1941, America was officially neutral, steeped in isolationism, and suspicious of foreign entanglements. And yet here was its president, a masterful political pragmatist, insisting that American security was inseparable from the security of human dignity across the globe, and insisting, with equal force, that those freedoms had enemies that could not be wished or negotiated away.
What would this man, this patrician radical, this wheelchair-bound colossus, say if he surveyed the world today, on this specific Saturday, February 28, 2026, as the smoke over Tehran begins to settle and the news arrives that changes everything?
He would begin, I believe, with fear. Not the abstraction, but the thing itself, and then, with a soldier’s discipline, with what comes after it.
Freedom from Fear
By the time you read these words, the landscape of the Middle East has been irrevocably altered. This morning, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury, striking military facilities, missile infrastructure, and the compound of Supreme Leader Khamenei across Tehran and cities from Isfahan to Qom to Kermanshah. By evening, the reports are confirmed: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who led Iran for thirty-five years, is dead. President Trump told NBC News that “we feel certain” Khamenei is gone, along with “most” of Iran’s senior leadership. “The people that make all the decisions,” he said, “most of them are gone.”
The IDF confirmed the deaths of top defense official Ali Shamkhani and the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Israel’s opening strikes had begun with a surprise attack after Military Intelligence identified two locations in Tehran where senior Iranian security figures had convened. Witnesses reported that loud cheers echoed across parts of Tehran and residents took to their windows to applaud and play celebratory music after reports of Khamenei’s death.
Let that image settle for a moment. In the streets of Tehran, capital of the regime that for forty-seven years organized its national identity around the phrase “Death to America,” ordinary Iranians celebrated in the night.
An Israeli security official confirmed that the operation had been planned for months, with its timing set several weeks ago. This was not improvisation. This was not the fog-of-war opportunism that dragged America into decades of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was premeditated, architecturally precise, and strategically bounded, a campaign designed not to pacify a nation but to decapitate a regime, creating the conditions under which an imprisoned people might finally seize their own destiny.
The Review by Ajay Raju: Bikini: What we don’t cover (
FDR would have recognized this immediately. He was, above all else, a student of decisive action. He did not win the war against fascism by bombing symbolic targets and hoping for behavioral change. He aimed at the command structures, the centers of decision, the arsenals of terror, the machinery of repression. And when he looked at the Iranian regime in the months preceding this morning, he would have seen something he recognized from the darkest chapters of the 1930s: a theocratic fascism that used the language of faith to enforce the mechanics of fear, that massacred its own citizens by the tens of thousands, that funded proxy armies from Lebanon to Yemen to destabilize every neighbor within reach, and that pursued nuclear weapons with the sole purpose of making itself permanently unaccountable to the civilized world.
On February 5th of this year, the New START Treaty expired, and for the first time in more than half a century, no legally binding agreement constrains the nuclear arsenals of the great powers. China is on pace to possess as many as 1,500 warheads by 2035. In this environment, a world of multiplying nuclear ambitions and dissolving verification regimes, a nuclear-armed Iran would not have been a regional threat. It would have been a civilizational one: a permanent insurance policy for a regime that funds global terror, triggering a cascade of proliferation across every neighbor unwilling to live beneath its shadow. FDR, who authorized the Manhattan Project knowing full well what he was unleashing, understood that some threats must be met before they reach maturity. He did not wait for the Wehrmacht to reach the English Channel before choosing sides.
The Iranian regime had demonstrated, through forty-seven years of consistent behavior, that it was not a state actor pursuing deterrence in the conventional sense. It was an accelerant, using proxy violence, nuclear development, and revolutionary ideology as coordinated instruments of regional destabilization. The choice this morning was not between war and peace. It was between war now and war later, on terms far more dangerous to the Western alliance.
The New American Way of War
FDR would have noticed something else this morning, something that would have given him, I believe, a measure of deeply qualified satisfaction. This operation looks nothing like the wars that scarred the first decades of this century.
The catastrophic miscalculations of Iraq and Afghanistan cast a long shadow over American strategic confidence. Those were wars launched with overwhelming initial force and no coherent theory of what came next, occupations that stretched into decades, costing trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, and ultimately producing strategic gains so modest as to be almost unmeasurable. They were wars of hubris, in which American military supremacy at the point of contact was not matched by political wisdom in the aftermath.
Operation Epic Fury is, by design and execution, a different kind of instrument. The raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on January 3rd, Operation Absolute Resolve, had already demonstrated the stunning capabilities of American special operations: the intelligence gathering that pinpointed Maduro’s location, the assault by Delta Force operators, all of it calling into question whether any other nation possesses comparable capacity to project such precise, decisive power. That operation extracted Maduro and his wife from Caracas to face narcoterrorism charges in New York, planned over months, executed in a single night.
READ: The Review by Ajay Raju | Outrage. Hashtags. Outrage. Repeat (February 16, 2026)
Iran follows the same doctrine, written larger. This is neither an occupation nor a nation-building enterprise. This is not the installation of an American proconsul in Tehran. This was a targeted, intelligence-driven campaign designed to destroy the regime’s command architecture, its nuclear infrastructure, its missile arsenals, its leadership cohort, and then step back and let the Iranian people, who have been marching and dying for their own freedom since December, determine what comes next.
A senior Israeli official stated that the killing of Khamenei “will finally make true peace possible and bring prosperity to the Middle East and beyond.” Iran’s ballistic missile facilities were taken out. The regime is being crippled. Iran’s exiled former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the most prominent face of the democratic opposition, has already called for Iranian security forces to join the nation and ensure a stable transition. The architecture of the successor state, if it comes, will be Iranian, not American.
FDR would have seen the distinction clearly. He understood the difference between destroying an enemy’s capacity for aggression and attempting to administer its civilization. He destroyed Nazi Germany’s war machine. He did not pretend he could redesign German culture by fiat. He created the Marshall Plan, investment, not occupation, to give Germany the conditions in which it could rebuild itself. He would have asked the same question of Operation Epic Fury: What comes next? Who builds the Iran that follows? And he would have insisted that the answer involve an affirmative commitment to the Iranian people, the 32,000 martyred protesters, the millions who cheered in the streets tonight, not merely a calculation of American strategic convenience.
American military supremacy, after years in which its credibility had frayed at the edges, has reasserted itself in terms the world cannot misread. From the Caribbean to the Persian Gulf, adversaries who doubted America will have been given reason to recalculate. FDR understood the strategic value of credibility, that the willingness to act, demonstrated concretely, shapes the behavior of every actor watching from the wings. Whether it is Beijing reconsidering its Taiwan calculus or Pyongyang reassessing the durability of its nuclear shield, the events of 2026 have redrawn the map of deterrence.
Freedom from Want
FDR’s third freedom, freedom from want, was the one that most directly reflected his New Deal conviction that, as he put it, “necessitous men are not free men.” He would look at the American economy of 2026 and see a nation of staggering aggregate wealth producing staggering individual insecurity.
He would see a nation whose economy has tripled in size since 1980 while the median worker’s claim on that growth has barely moved. He would have recognized this as the same instability he confronted in the 1930s: not a failure of production, but a failure of distribution so profound that it corrodes the social contract upon which democratic mobilization ultimately depends.
The Congressional Budget Office projects a federal deficit of $1.9 trillion for fiscal year 2026, with federal debt reaching 101 percent of GDP. Annual interest payments have already tripled to $1 trillion since 2021. Oil markets have spiked sharply today, the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil supply flows, sits astride an active war zone. The costs of a sustained campaign must be absorbed by an economy already carrying extraordinary fiscal weight.
The Review by Ajay Raju: Chosen underdogs — 2018 Super Bowl champs (
FDR would not have flinched from this math. He ran wartime deficits that dwarfed anything before them because he understood that the cost of not fighting fascism was immeasurably greater than the cost of fighting it. He would say the same today. But he would have insisted, with characteristic bluntness, that the economic burden of this conflict be shared equitably. The Gini coefficient for the United States has reached between 0.485 and 0.494, the highest levels in fifty years. The labor share of GDP has fallen to 53.8 percent, its lowest point in seventy-eight years. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” enacted in 2025 is estimated to add $3.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the coming decade, predominantly through tax reductions.
Roosevelt, who raised taxes on the wealthiest Americans to fund both the New Deal and the war effort, would have demanded that the defense of Western civilization not be financed on the backs of those who can least afford it. He would recall his own words from the 1944 State of the Union: “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” The war against Iranian expansionism is a war in defense of freedom. But freedom defended abroad while surrendered at home, economic freedom, the freedom from want, is a contradiction that democracies cannot long sustain.
Freedom of Speech
FDR was a creature of democratic institutions even as he bent them. But his fundamental commitment was to the proposition that democratic governance, for all its inefficiencies, represented humanity’s best mechanism for self-correction, and that the freedoms democracy protects are worth defending by force when force becomes the only remaining language an adversary understands.
The most important story of this morning is not only the strikes. It is the people in whose name they were, at least in part, justified. Beginning in December 2025, nationwide anti-regime protests erupted across Iran, the largest uprising since the 1979 revolution, spreading to over 100 cities, triggered by economic collapse, the implosion of the rial, and decades of accumulated grievance. The regime murdered approximately 32,000 of its own citizens in response. These were not combatants. They were bakers, students, mothers, engineers, people who asked for nothing more radical than the freedoms FDR articulated eighty-five years ago.
When the news of Khamenei’s death reached Tehran tonight, those same people opened their windows and cheered. This is not a small thing. History rarely offers such unambiguous testimony about the relationship between a regime and the people it claimed to represent.
FDR would have understood this instantly. He would have seen in those protesters the same flame he saw in the occupied peoples of Europe, the human refusal, however brutally suppressed, to accept permanent subjugation. And he would have insisted that American military action carry with it an affirmative obligation: to the Iranian people, to support their aspirations for self-determination; to the region, to build rather than merely destroy; to the world, to demonstrate that American power, when exercised, is exercised in service of freedom and not merely in service of American strategic convenience.
He would have been clear-eyed that a regime which slaughters its own people in such numbers, and cheers its own enemy’s democracy while crushing its own, has forfeited any claim to the protections of the international order it spent decades undermining. But he would have asked, with equal seriousness: What is America’s obligation now? Not just to destroy what was, but to support what must come next.
What FDR Would Say
So if Franklin Roosevelt were to compose an essay for the world on this Saturday, February 28, 2026, as the smoke clears over Tehran and the people of Iran open their windows to greet a future unimaginable to them this morning, I believe it would begin not with criticism, but with clarity. And with a question that contains, within it, both a warning and a mandate.
He would say: There are moments in history when the preservation of civilization requires the application of force. This is one of them.
A regime that spent forty-seven years exporting terror, massacred tens of thousands of its own citizens, funded proxy armies across an entire region, and pursued nuclear weapons while using negotiations as theater, such a regime was not a partner in the international order. It was a predator within it. FDR, who spent years fighting the appeasers of his own era, would not have flinched from that judgment.
He would say that the revisionist axis of Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea represents the defining strategic challenge of this era, and that confronting one of its pillars strengthens the defense of all the others, in Ukraine, in the Taiwan Strait, in every theater where the rules-based order is under pressure.
He would say that the cheering Iranians in the streets of Tehran tonight are not a footnote to a geopolitical operation. They are its moral justification, and its most demanding obligation. America has helped create the conditions for their freedom. It now bears a solemn responsibility to support, not manage, what they build in its wake.
He would say that American military supremacy, reasserted with clarity and precision, is not an end in itself. It is a precondition, for negotiation, for deterrence, for the kind of international order in which smaller nations are not perpetually subject to the ambitions of larger predators. But supremacy without wisdom is mere domination. And FDR was never merely a dominator. He was, above all else, a builder.
And he would close, as he always did, not with despair but with a challenge. In his 1941 speech, he declared that the Four Freedoms were “attainable in our own time and generation.” He believed this not because he was naive, no one who navigated the Depression and defeated fascism could be called naive, but because he understood that the defense of freedom, however costly, is always preferable to the surrender of it. And because he understood that history does not grade nations on their intentions. It grades them on their results.
The institutions need not be the same ones FDR built. The world of 2026 is not the world of 1945. But the principle endures: that durable peace requires binding commitments; that economic freedom requires investment in people; that democratic governance requires institutional resilience; that some threats to Western civilization, left unchecked, extinguish the very possibility of the freedoms we are trying to protect; and that the arc of human progress bends toward justice only when human hands grasp it and pull, sometimes with a diplomat’s pen, and sometimes, when history demands it, with force.
FDR knew this. He lived it. And if he could speak to us now, from across the vast distance of history, on this particular Saturday, as the Middle East realigns and the Iranian people step, tentatively, into the first hours of a morning without their jailer, he would remind us of both halves of the democratic obligation.
The willingness to act. And the wisdom to build what follows.
Both are the unfinished business of this generation. Tonight, one chapter has ended. The harder one, the one that decides whether this sacrifice meant something, begins now.
1 Comment
Well written. Let’s see what happens next.