War is expensive.
Soldiers wounded or killed, the incredible expense of aircraft, tanks and ships, the destruction of property as buildings, roads, and other infrastructure are bombed, not to mention the incredible price of every missile fired – every volley has a high cost, even if there are no casualties, and infinitely higher if there are.
For this reason, we are not a warlike people; we resist war when we can, and we honor and thank those valiant men and women who are patriotic enough to serve in that capacity.
Watching the press and the political class today, in their responses to recent US action against marxist Venezuela and jihadist Iran, these costs are said to be among the top concerns of the anti-war Left.
They shout about the cost of global redeployment to put this massive operation on location, the cost of firing and replacing every missile we use, and the tragic human cost of anyone on our side who is wounded or killed by the enemy’s retaliatory fire.
These costs are not exaggerated; they are real.
But they must be viewed, not in a vacuum, but in comparison to other possible choices.
To do it by a ground invasion, for example, would cost much less in expensive missiles but put far more lives in jeopardy. To attempt it by the quiet support of political change through radio and social media, as we long attempted elsewhere with Voice of America, might take decades, or even generations, before bearing fruit.
And to do nothing at all has costs too, which may be even greater than the cost of war.
When we consider the costs of this latest action – or indeed the costs of any action – we must weigh those costs against the ongoing cost of the status quo.
And what was the status quo before, while we left the jihadists in control of the once great nation of Persia?
For 47 years, Iran trained and funded terror cells all over the world. For much of that period, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union, Iran was the world’s primary financier and trainer of terrorists (though Saddam Hussein’s Iraq rivalled them for that title for a while).
For 47 years, Iran heavily destabilized the middle east, by supporting insurgencies in their fellow muslim nations, like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Houthis in Yemen; their Hezbollah utterly destroyed the once peaceful garden of Eden that was Lebanon.
For 47 years, Iran attacked Israel and the United States, more often through middlemen than directly, but they did have their direct attacks as well. Many such attacks made the news; many more were successfully repelled without incident, but such defenses have a cost too.
The jihadists of Iran never stopped trying to build nuclear weapons; no matter how often Israel or the United States would destroy a facility, they would doggedly return to the effort. Such dedication sounds inspiring, until one realizes what it means: this dedication to getting nuclear bombs couldn’t have been about deterrence or energy. They kept desperately trying to get nuclear bombs because they so desperately wanted to use them.
And we must never forget the single highest-dollar issue of them all: The Suez Canal was built a century and a half ago to benefit the entire world with a commercial shortcut between Asia and Europe. Its tolls traditionally fund much of the impoverished nation of Egypt. The entire global supply chain benefits from how its convenience cuts two weeks off the transit of containerships, tankers, bulkers and other vessels that would otherwise have to travel all the way around the continent of Africa.
At Iran’s command, their puppets, the Yemenese Houthi pirates, have closed off the Suez Canal to all international commerce for over two years now. The cost of this one extended closure, from basic transportation costs to the resulting global supply chain’s extended transit times, has already surpassed a trillion dollars.
In wartime, we talk of the multimillion dollar costs of missiles and flight time, of dangers and casualties, and these issues are real and undeniable.
But it’s easy to forget, in the heat of the moment, the cost of doing nothing, the cost of continuing to just shrug one’s shoulders and live with the status quo.
Leaving the jihadi regime in charge of Iran has cost the world trillions of dollars, and thousands of lives already. The number of deaths directly attributed to the mullahs’ regime is certainly in the six figures if not seven. And the people impoverished, the businesses ruined, the nations crippled and terrorized by the mullahs and their puppets are literally beyond count.
So when we consider military action, and the faux-peacenik opposition starts screaming about the cost of such action, never forget to raise the cost of inaction for comparison.
There are times – and the Iran situation is definitely, exactly such a time – when the cost of inaction is infinitely greater… financially, ethically, and consequentially.
Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon. He’s recently begun an eponymous podcast, and his business consulting / trade compliance training practice is available either in person or by webinar.
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