For 46 years, the Revolutionary Islamic Government has tortured the people of Iran. From the moment that the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in Paris, he managed to propel one of the world’s great cultures into a new Dark Age.

Since 1979, that regime has slaughtered and executed its domestic political opponents. It has publicly hanged people convicted of “crimes against morality,” including people convicted for the “crime” of being gay. It has sponsored terrorism across the Middle East, Europe and America.

The regime has been the biggest colonizing, imperialist power in the Middle East. And it has tried to kill a US president, a US secretary of state and a US national security adviser — among others — on American soil.

Given all of that, you might have thought that there would be marches against the ayatollahs most weeks in Western cities. But there never has been. When the Iranian people have risen up in the past (as in the 2009 Green Revolution), they did so alone. Back then, President Barack Obama did nothing to support the pro-democracy movement in Iran. He just sat back and allowed female protestors to be shot through the head by the foul Basij militia and other government entities.

Decades of weakness

So what is different this time?

Two things. First is the scale of the protests against the regime inside Iran. Over recent days, the Iranian government has turned off the internet in an effort to stop the population of Iran from coordinating. But the brave Iranian people have been turning out in their hundreds of thousands anyway. They have toppled emblems of the regime and attacked regime buildings. This is already bigger than any previous uprising.

The second thing that is different this time is that Donald Trump is in the White House.

In 1979, when the Iranian Revolution happened, a different type of president sat in the Oval Office. Jimmy Carter not just allowed the revolution to happen, he humiliatingly failed to even free the 66 Americans who were taken hostage by the forces that had overthrown the shah.

It was a time of terrible weakness in American foreign policy. The ayatollahs knew that — and they took advantage of it. Likewise they knew that Obama would do nothing in 2009 to support the pro-Western, pro-American protesters who turned on the streets of Iran.

Perhaps it was inevitable that American leadership should have been so weak. After all, from the very start of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the event was misunderstood in much of the West.

For instance, the famed left-wing intellectual Michel Foucault — still one of the most cited idiots in American academia — claimed that Khomeini would bring a spiritual revolution to Iran that would do away with those terrible Western “sins” of capitalism and materialism.

The New York Times ran a piece claiming that the depiction of Khomeini “as fanatical and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false.” And Foreign Affairs magazine claimed that “Khomeini’s Islamic republic can be expected to have a doctrine of social justice at its core; from all indications it will be flexible in interpreting the Koran.”

All of these opinions and many others aged like milk. Khomeini and his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were and are fanatics. They massacred their left-wing and trade union opponents in Iranian jails by the hundreds. They forced a liberal society to become a place where all women had to cover their heads. Their “morality police” stalked the country looking for women they could arrest and beat. They abducted, raped, tortured and killed students who opposed them. And all the time, the West did nothing.

Trump’s options

Of course the question for many years was “What can we do?”

One answer — put forward by weak leaders in the US and Europe — was to try to bring the Iranian Revolution in from the cold. But the regime in Iran didn’t want to be part of our world. They wanted to continue to chant “Death to America.” They wanted to continue to promise the annihilation of America and the wider West. They wanted to keep their fundamentalist Islamic revolution and expand it across the region and then the world.

Now that the brave people of Iran are in the streets, it is a good time to show them that this time, they are not alone.

It is not just in the best interests of the region, but in the best interests of the world that the biggest terrorist government on the planet should fall.

But how can it be done?

Trump has already given fair warning to the ayatollah. Footage that has been smuggled out of Iran shows evidence of the thousands of Iranian citizens whom the regime has already massacred. The regime’s threat to start public executions of protesters drew a sharp response from Trump, who warned the regime that if that were to happen, America would act.

Yet as some of the briefings against Trump have shown, there is a deep fear in DC and other capitals that stretches back to Afghanistan and Iraq.

The rule back then was the old “Pottery Barn” rule: “If you break it, you own it.”

But, as we can see from Trump’s bold action in Venezuela, he operates in a different way.

His policy is that sometimes things are already broken and you need to make minimal interventions in order to fix them. Or allow the people of the country to fix them for themselves.

The US could aid assets and allies inside Iran in taking out major centers of the terror regime. We could hit the headquarters of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp and the Basij militia who are waging war against the Iranian people.

America could also assist people inside Iran to target the people responsible for the terror.

In doing so, we can show that freedom-loving people in Iran have a friend in the United States. And that those who murder their own people and seek to spread terror across the world will not go unpunished.

Trump has a historic opportunity. He could help end Iran’s half-century nightmare and make up for 46 years of foreign policy failure. In doing so, he will prove that — unlike his predecessors — he is the president who stood for freedom in the face of terror.