Dear Mr. Trump

Dear Mr. President,

I am trying to be fair.

You did not promise regime change in Iran. You would probably say the war you launched on Feb. 28 was an America First action with existential benefits for Israel and fringe benefits for the world: protecting American interests, ensuring Israel’s security, preventing a nuclear Iran, and forcing the mullahs to the negotiating table. And if the rapid, targeted decapitation of Islamic Republic leadership sparked hope among Iranian citizens, if they poured into the streets by the joyous thousands, well, their courage was their own, and so are any consequences.

That is the strongest argument against my argument. But it is not the end of my argument.

On March 1, when the regime seemed weakened, you issued a statement calling on Iranians to “be brave, be bold, be heroic, and take back your country. America is with you. … The rest will be up to you, but we’ll be there to help.”

Help how, exactly? As the wife of an Iranian American merchant recently told me, Iranian citizens are unarmed. That makes your call for citizen revolt, while inspirational, impossible—perhaps dangerously so.

As I wrote this letter, Mr. President, a ceasefire collapsed and the shooting war resumed. But since the mullahs cannot win a military fight, they will return to the table—not in good faith, but to buy even more time than they already have with trademark Tehran foot-dragging.

Time to wring from us concessions on economic sanctions. To milk the Strait of Hormuz. To niggle over everything but nukes. But what frightens the merchant and his wife, their friends, and no doubt thousands in the Iranian diaspora is that time lets a murderous regime review surveillance video and identify those who marched in the streets, whose faces are now on camera—those who believed you when you said America would be there to help.

When the regime comes after a dissident, the wife told me, it does not stop with the brave marcher. A dissident’s courage can become his family’s sentence.

Iran may yet open the Strait or make meaningful con­cessions on uranium enrichment. But even that would not protect the protesters from a reconstituted Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Neither would it tell us what happens to Iranian Christians whose fragile footholds this war has put under fresh pressure.

Consider St. Peter’s Evangelical Church, the oldest Protestant congregation in Iran. Tehran is now moving to seize the church’s property and displace the Armenian and Assyrian Christian families who live on the compound.

Why?

“I will tell you the literal words they used,” Sasan Tavassoli, a U.S.-based Iranian Presbyterian pastor with direct contacts at St. Peter’s, told The Free Press. “‘We were concerned about America all these years. America came. They slapped us on the face. We slapped them on the face back. And then America withdrew. So we are no longer afraid of America.’”

That last sentence should give you pause, Mr. President. America does not project power only through sanctions and superior firepower. She also projects power through moral resolve. The great danger now is that Washington will focus on geopolitical matters, accept a cosmetically tamer Tehran, and forget about the Iranian people. The diaspora will ask a piercing moral question: What was it all for? And the mullahs will have learned a frightening lesson: America can be endured.

So no, you did not promise regime change. The question is whether you spoke to the Iranian people in ways that summoned courage and hope without accepting responsibility for what those things might cost.

America can neither police nor save the world. We do not need another forever war. But this war cannot end without meaningful protection for those now exposed. It will be one of the blackest marks on your legacy if your words and actions allowed Iranians to believe freedom was near, only to have American statecraft abandon them to this ruthless regime.

Sir, you specialize in the art of the deal. Any deal with Tehran should include this point: If repression and executions resume against Iranians who responded publicly—humanly—to a glimpse of liberty, then America will hold Islamic Republic leaders personally at risk, as we did at the start of this war. In other words, Mr. President: Make the mullahs afraid again.