It seems to me that the choice is a simple one; do we want cheap gas and radiation or do we not. We have survived for seventy years with the threat of nuclear Armageddon. But our adversaries were mostly sane and had similar objectives to our own. Now we face an adversary who has Armageddon as their ultimate objective, and they do not seem to be guided by the usual mores of civilized behavior that is to be found in the rest of humanity.
My father served in WWII, spending almost five years as a POW mostly in Poland. He well remembers Neville Chamberlain getting off and airliner while waving a piece of paper and declaring, ‘Peace in our time.’ That then was the poster board image of appeasement that my father and his fellow soldiers were obliged to pay for.
For almost fifty years a stream of American Presidents and diplomats have similarly alighted from airliners while declaring their version of ‘Peace in our time.’ Meanwhile Iran has used its oil income not to emancipate its people but to fund and encourage terrorist groups around the middle east and the rest of the world. Now they are close to having atomic bombs with no unwillingness to use them while we bitch about the price of gas.
The price of gas has certainly increased during the current conflict, although for most not as much as it was for Californians beforehand. The major reason that oil tankers are not transiting the Straights of Hormuz is that the owners cannot obtain voyage insurance from Lloyds of London or any other marine insurer. Once the tankers can be indemnified for their voyage the cost of gas will come down. The question for Americans to answer for themselves is what cost they are willing to endure for cheap gas. Are they willing to allow Iranian terrorists to have nuclear weapons that they may mount on their rockets to threaten their neighbors and all of Europe with. Perhaps Iranian sponsored terrorists will sail a nuke up the Mississippi in a barge to park it in St. Louis and issue blackmail demands before detonating it anyway.
It seems to me that the choice is stark, but since I’m much nearer the end of my life than to the beginning of it, I’ll let others decide how they want to live in their future since that future is likely to be much longer than mine.
AMN, 4/13/2026
