The Euros Finally Wake Up — Sort Of

It only took the Euros 47 years to understand that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the IRGC, is a terrorist organization.

Perhaps the IRGC bank accounts in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Luxembourg, have gone dry. That’s the only explanation I can find for why the EU finally put the IRGC on their list of international terrorist organizations this week.

Estimates of how many people the regime goons killed during the big protests earlier this month now top 36,000. It goes way beyond anything we have ever seen before.

One Iranian twitter user visualized it as a vast parade ground, with boxes of people, side by side, as far as the eye can see. Each box contains 450 people. And they are all dead.

President Trump said on Thursday at the premier of Melania at the Trump Kennedy Center that he still wanted to talk to the Iranian leadership. But he made it clear it would be a very short conversation.

“I told the Iranians two things — no nukes, and stop killing the protesters. They’re killing them by the thousands,” he said.

The USS Abraham Lincoln has now reached the Persian Gulf, along with its carrier strike force of five Arleigh Burke guided missile destroyers carrying Tomahawk cruise missiles, three littoral ships (with 5,000 to 6,000 U.S. Marines on board), and 90 combat aircraft.

Carrier strike forces are usually accompanied by attack submarines which carry more Tomahawks, although they might not have steamed into the Persian Gulf because of the shallow waters. In addition, the United States has eight large military bases in the region with hundreds of attack aircraft and a total of 40,000 troops.

The U.S. Air Forces Central Command, which controls all the air assets in the region, announced on Monday it would conduct several days of drills across the region “to sharpen the U.S. Air Force’s ability to rapidly deploy personnel and aircraft, operate from dispersed locations and sustain operations with a minimal footprint.”

The president warned Iran’s leaders that a “massive armada” was  heading their way, bigger even than the force used to capture Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro. “Time is running out,” he said.

Most U.S. allies in the region have asked the president not to attack. Over the past two months, the Saudis, in particular, have cozied up to the Iranian regime, and dropped all plans to join the Abraham Accords in favor of a new alliance with former enemy Qatar and Turkey.

This is an ominous development.

But the president has shown repeatedly that he will listen to his “friends” respectfully, and then go ahead and do what he intended to do anyway. What course will he chose?

My guess is that he will not strike Iran unless he is convinced his military leaders have a plan that will successfully lead to the regime’s collapse. That’s a tall order.

It could include strikes on the IRGC leadership, IRGC and bassij command posts, and the creation of safe havens in cities and towns liberated by protesters. One analyst suggested that we seize control of Kharg Island, the oil export terminal not far from Iraq where 90% or Iran’s oil gets piped onto tankers.

But does this president really want to launch a major war that could hang over into the midterms? I think not.

How he juggles his goals of helping the protesters and preventing a nuclear Iran with the realities of military intervention is anybody’s guess at this point.

U.S. commanders frequently refer to our nuclear-powered aircraft carriers as 80,000 tons of diplomacy. I witnessed with my own eyes in the Persian Gulf One nearly thirty years ago a flight of Iranian F-14s head out toward the Persian Gulf, espy the USS George Washington (where I was then reporting), and beat a hasty retreat back to land.

You can read about that in my latest book, The Iran House: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue.

For now, in public, the Iranian leadership is all bluff and bluster. They claim they are prepared for war, and will inflict horrible damages on the US should we attack.

Somehow, I doubt that. I suspect the Iranian leadership is going to think long and hard before executing more prisoners or attacking the US or Israel. And in the meantime, the president could offer them an out — say, exile in Moscow, a la Bashar al-Assad.

I discuss this, as well as Spain becoming Europe’s latest gateway for illegal migrants and China’s expanding relations with Canada, on this week’s Prophecy Today Weekend.

As always, you can listen live at 1 PM on Saturday on 104.9 FM or 550 AM in the Jacksonville, Florida, area, or by using the Jacksonville Way Radio app. You can listen later to the podcast here.

Yours in freedom.

©2026 Kenneth R. Timmerman. All rights reserved.

Website: kentimmerman.com

Ken Timmerman’s 14th book of non-fiction, THE IRAN HOUSE: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue, can be ordered by clicking here or by viewing my author’s page, here. 

Raising Olives in Provence, can be ordered by clicking here.