Strait talk

(JNS) — Forty-seven years ago, the Islamic Republic of Iran vowed “Marg bar Amrika!,” “Death to America!”

That declaration of war was followed by multiple acts of war from the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran to the orchestration of two bombings of Americans in Beirut in 1983 to the arming of Shia militias who killed more than 600 Americans in Iraq from 2003 to 2011 to numerous assassination and kidnapping plots.

American attempts to end the war diplomatically failed. Five presidents vowed that Iran’s rulers would never be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons. Iran’s rulers repeated...