This past weekend, the United States launched Operation Epic Fury, a coordinated campaign with Israel that sent a wave of airstrikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran, targeting its military and infrastructure after decades of refusing to halt its nuclear program. In this effort to break the spine of a regime that has ruled through terror at home and violence abroad for nearly 50 years, a significant number of the regime’s top political and military leaders were killed, including the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

It matters that the ayatollah did not simply expire naturally but was taken out by the United States. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s evil project of repression is well known across the West, along with its killing of Americans and regular chants of “death to America.” For decades, it has brutally crushed its own citizens and wreaked havoc worldwide through its proxies while Western countermeasures were marginally effective at best and enabled these actions at worst.

Shortly after the joint operation was launched early on Saturday, predictable responses from some of the U.S.’s most powerful Western European allies began streaming in. Leaders in the U.K., France, and Germany frowned upon our actions in Iran and urged adherence to international law. Even those at the helm of Alternative for Germany, an anti-immigration party on the Right, urged this path. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, called for de-escalation and the convening of an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council. She also brought together the commissioners for deliberations earlier today.

Though Iran is geographically far from Europe’s shores, its decades-long destabilization campaign has caused drugs, terrorism, and illegal immigration to pour over its borders. The Iranian regime has executed protesters, imprisoned dissidents, funded terror proxies, and aided a war effort on the European continent. The procedural reflex invoked by so much of modern Western Europe’s governing class is that international bodies and endless negotiations (which have failed every time) would solve these problems. But those leaders and institutions have utterly failed to offer a robust response, or really any response at all.

Endless appeals to globalist institutions and technocratic procedure are clearly alien to the ears of MAGA—but key to remember is that they are also alien to Europe’s own history.

Operation Epic Fury has exposed the post-war shedding of Europe’s thymos.

Plato describes thymos as spiritedness, and we think of it today as courage disciplined by moral judgment. Thymos is central to Europe’s story, inspiring the heroism of warriors who fought back against Islamic invasions, the martyrdom of Christian saints, and the daily actions of ordinary people who acted in the name of righteous anger. Properly ordered, it is neither frenzy nor bloodlust, but the moral force that refuses humiliation and resists the inversion of good and evil, promoting courage, sacrifice, and the defense of the sacred.

Europe’s warriors of old, which included kings, saints, and martyrs, endured lives marked by hardship: hunger, plague, invasion, civil war, and exile. Their spirits pressed deep into theology, philosophy, science, exploration, and statecraft, expanding the frontier of human knowledge. The European peoples, formed in principalities, kingdoms, and states, took control of their destiny, much like President Trump has implored the Iranian people to do.

European warriors made plenty of strategic blunders throughout their history, but they realized that building up forces was the key to fighting the powerful and obtaining power. At one time, nearly all of Europe underestimated Napoleon, but they did not assume that conferences alone would restrain him. Coalitions eventually formed because countering a powerful threat required a decisive response, and the Congress of Vienna only mattered because armies first checked imperial ambition. Europe learned through blood that force underwrites order. Today, however, its leaders often speak as if procedural appeals alone can substitute for resolve.

The European Union has become an institution that manages, regulates, and adjudicates—it does not protect nations or Western civilization as a whole. The peace in postwar Europe is dependent on American security guarantees and nuclear deterrence rather than institutions like the E.U. and the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). This project’s main “success” is the coordinated dissemination of the belief that technocratic governance is a sufficient framework to sustain civilization. However, the decline of civil society across Europe and the responses of some of its leaders to the U.S.’s actions in Iran indicate the spurious nature of that belief.

International law is not self-enforcing, and the international system depends upon sovereign states willing to act. When enforcement is absent, resolutions accumulate into a paper fortification. The Islamic Republic has endured decades of censure from international bodies while expanding its influence and repressing its citizens. The UNHRC, for instance, puts its faith in strongly worded letters that have failed to achieve any positive outcome for Europe.

By contrast, America’s Operation Epic Fury rests upon a simple premise: regimes that kill Americans, arm proxies, launder narcotics revenue, and pursue nuclear capability cannot be indefinitely managed by elegantly crafted communiqués.

Crucially, the U.S.’s strikes are targeting the ideological Islamist infrastructure in Iran, a problem that Europe has struggled to confront within its own borders. In parts of Western Europe, the rise of leftist and Islamist coalitions is undeniable. In the U.K. and elsewhere, such demographic realities are almost certainly why the ayatollah’s death is being mourned instead of being celebrated. Indeed, on Saturday afternoon former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn joined hundreds of pro-Iran protesters in London carrying banners of the ayatollah.

Europe’s throwing open its doors to mass migration in 2015 is indicative not only that it regards itself simply as an economic zone, but also that it treats spirited self-preservation as morally suspect. It cannot help the U.S. to save others if it cannot even defend itself.

As Americans, we should not expect our allies to endorse all our actions uncritically. But among these friendships, we do require that righteous indignation at injustice not be equated with extremism, warmongering, and needless escalation. A civilization that desires to suppress thymos will crumble. Indeed, much of Europe is already governed by a cadre of technocratic managers, while the spirited element of the people is being pushed to the margins.

Under President Trump, the United States retains, however imperfectly, a measure of civilizational confidence. We still believe that sovereignty, national defense, and the protection of citizens are legitimate goods. But whereas Europe’s thymos has been effectively sedated by procedure and managed decline, President Trump may be on his way to reviving it.

NATO chief Mark Rutte voiced support for the strikes on Iran, declaring that key allies stand “all for one, one for all” amid our adversary’s widening missile retaliation. Such language hints at a remembered instinct—an older European reflex of solidarity not as bureaucratic coordination but as shared resolve and the will to act. There are also glimmers of hope in Sunday’s E3 statement, where Britain, France, and Germany said they were ready to take steps to defend their interests in the region.

Operation Epic Fury will be debated for years to come in the language of strategy and geopolitics. But beneath those arguments lies a more enduring question about the character of civilizations: Do they still believe that evil should be confronted? Do they still possess the spirited confidence that is required when words have failed?

Europe’s history is not one of defaulting to procedure. It is a civilizational resolve formed through centuries of trial. The same continent that produced parliaments and cathedrals also produced men willing to stand at Vienna’s gates and refuse surrender. Its Christianity did not preach passivity before tyranny. It taught that love may demand resistance.

Praising Athens’s war against Sparta, Thucydides wrote in Pericles’s Funeral Oration:

For we are lovers of the beautiful in our tastes and our strength lies, in our opinion, not in deliberation and discussion, but that knowledge which is gained by discussion preparatory to action. For we have a peculiar power of thinking before we act, and of acting, too, whereas other men are courageous from ignorance but hesitate upon reflection. And they are surely to be esteemed the bravest spirits who, having the clearest sense both of the pains and pleasures of life, do not on that account shrink from danger.

Europe must choose whether it will regain its strength or allow the civilization it built to disappear forever.