Victory in Iran, and A Note to Our Readers
What the President has dubbed "The Twelve Day War" is over as suddenly as it began. And The Rod Martin Report called every detail right, from beginning to end.
by Rod D. Martin
June 24, 2025, 8:16 a.m.
And just like that, it’s over.
What the President has dubbed The Twelve Day War has ended, in “a complete and total ceasefire”.
Now is it really “complete and total”? Maybe. As Trump’s post clearly states, both sides had several hours to finish their in-progress attacks, and they’ve used them, infuriating one another in the process. But that’s always how these things work.
The bigger point is this: Iran wasn’t supposed to want a ceasefire. It was supposed to be some kind of regional superpower, with impenetrable air defenses (that Israel destroyed without losing a plane), and impenetrable nuclear enrichment sites (that Trump wiped out without Iran even knowing our planes were in their airspace). Attacking them was supposed to mean World War Three, because somehow the most isolated power on Earth has all these powerful allies (who sat on their hands). The retaliation was supposed to be devastating (though in fact, when Iran did fire missiles at U.S. bases, it warned Trump in advance to make sure no one got hurt).
In the real world, continued war would mean the continued degradation and destruction of Iran’s military and police state apparatus, the sinking of the entire Iranian Navy, and the probable destruction of Iran’s capacity to export oil. And while the mullahs do not reason within a framework recognizable to most Westerners, they are not actually irrational, and they can count.
The “Panicans” were wrong. But we weren’t.
If you followed the war with us, you know that The Rod Martin Report nailed all of this, in every particular and in real time. And that’s because we understood certain things that are seemingly lost on many in the chattering class. Among those are lessons our nerdy, soft friends might have picked up on the playground if they’d ever stood up to a bully, or defended someone else from one, rather than timidly submitting to his abuse:
That the fear of the thing is almost always worse than the thing feared.
That terrorists, like criminals, are a cowardly and superstitious lot.
That bullies run when you hit them hard, fast, and unexpectedly.
That the kid who punches the bully instantly earns the respect of his whole class.
Too many of our friends rightly understood that Biden’s open border posed — and continues to pose — an enormous security risk; but extrapolated that into a sleeper cell in every strip mall. And who knows: maybe they’re there, and maybe they’ll strike this afternoon, perhaps with the suitcase nukes we were constantly warned of in the 1990s.
And yet they haven’t. Not in the 1990s, and not in the last two days. Instead, the bully begged for mercy.
A good many of our friends showed themselves not to understand the history of the Middle East, or even its most basic geography. They don’t seem to understand logistics. They don’t appear to understand the relationships between the powers, or the relationships of those powers to their domestic audiences.
Too many shouted “World War Three!” in a hysteria that actually does make sense if, for instance, NATO were to cross certain red lines in Ukraine (which many of the same people ignore, or can’t fathom), but make no sense at all with Iran.
One friend — one of America’s more prominent podcast hosts — suggested that Pakistan would give Iran the Bomb, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Pakistan has had the Bomb since 1998 — and the ability to mass produce it — and yet Iran has needed to expensively build its own complete nuclear infrastructure and face the wrath of the West to do so. Are we supposed to believe Iran never tried this easier way? Why would Sunni Pakistan suddenly hand Shiite terrorists the Bomb? And why now?
Countless others warned of the allegedly terrifying BRICS alliance, and the extreme risk that Russia and China would nuke us over Fordow. And yet, I asked, if that alliance is so solid, why does it not contain a single mutual defense guarantee, such as that contained in NATO’s Article 5? And why is it that the bulk of Iran’s air force — now destroyed — was last state-of-the-art in the 1960s and 1970s? Both Russia and Iran are among the world’s foremost arms merchants, and God knows Russia needs the money. And yet they refused to sell Iran a single modern fighter jet for 46 years?
Tell me about that alliance again? (And don’t get me started on its “threat” to the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency.)
I could go on. But I will sum up this line of thought with perhaps the most important of the list. Too many of our friends simply did not have the measure of the men leading each of the nations involved. Not Netanyahu, though he’s been a constant presence in the American consciousness since I was not yet a teenager. Not the Ayatollah, despite his having been one of our principal adversaries for decades. Certainly not Putin or Xi, who are reduced to caricature on the best of days.
And above all others, not Donald Trump. And the irony of this is particularly pronounced, because after twelve published books (one for each day of this war, many of them number one bestsellers), fifteen seasons of the former top-rated show on television, the whole 2015-2016 campaign, an entire presidential term, the exile, the comeback, and now months of the whirlwind that is his second term, they do not know him. They do not take him seriously. They believe him stupid and chaotic. They are not interested in the roadmap he’s made entirely clear for years, if not decades, or the lessons he’s painstakingly taught anyone who’d listen, for my entire lifetime. They refuse to do the homework.
At The Rod Martin Report, we’ve done the homework. And not just on Donald J. Trump.
We’ve had a great several days, personally and professionally, and also as a nation and as a part of humanity. The war was Donald Trump’s carefully stage-managed affair from the very first. He was not dragged into it by anyone. He chose the time and place, the tempo, the targets, and the time for America to show its hand and openly strike. He succeeded, in a manner reminiscent of Reagan in Grenada and Libya, lessons he deeply imbibed.
Libya in the 1980s terrified the “Panicans” too: Reagan bopped the bully in the nose and almost completely eliminated the problem for a generation. Official Washington and the Enemedia freaked out in fear. In his speech announcing the bombing, Reagan said (in words that made their way into a Def Leppard song, in Reagan’s voice): “Today we have done what we had to do. They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong.”
Donald Trump is a Boomer by generation, but he’s an Xer at heart. His experience of the 1980s was as formative as ours. It was just a bit more plush.
At The Rod Martin Report, we don’t just tell you about events. We tell you why they’re happening and what they mean. We tell you what’s going to happen. We get it right a lot more than not, because we understand things about how the world works that most of our competitors never considered in the first place.
Is that arrogant? Maybe. But as my grandfather used to say, “It ain’t bragging if you can do it.”
We can do it. We just did it. We do it all the time.
Is the war over? We’ll see. Probably. But the enemy always gets a vote. Partners, in this case Israel, are not subjects. And there’s always a tomorrow. The question is whether we — and you — will know what to do when tomorrow comes.
I’m very grateful that you’re one of our readers, and even more so if you’re one of our Premium or Founding Members. Your support means a lot, and a lot more than money. We mean to support you, in whatever you do, with the best analysis available. It’s the same insight we employ at Martin Capital. We mean for it to serve you, and America, well.
So congratulations to all of us on surviving what we were repeatedly told was certain WORLD WAR THREE!!! Congratulations to the Trump Administration and the government of Prime Minister Netanyahu on eliminating an enormous threat to global peace and to Israel’s very existence. Congratulations to Israel’s and America’s warriors for carrying out some of the most spectacular operations in the history of warfare.
And if you aren’t a subscriber, you should be. We just proved it, yet again.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Rod, your posts on Substack and X have been "must reads" for me the last couple weeks. They lifted me up as I only heard truth. Total agreement. I also read your posts related to your church and its struggles with those usurping the good. That told me something. You sounded like a theologian, and it impressed me. Right or wrong, I've always believed, if someone doesn't know the Lord, I didn't put as much stock or trust in their interpretations of the world and mankind's reactions to events. It's my opinion, but I believe it and you proved me correct. TY.
Always a great read Rod!