Could President-elect Trump in his fresh term in the White House authorize preemptive strikes against Iran to curb its nuclear aspirations? That is the suggestion of a new report in the Wall Street Journal amid a growing recognition that economic sanctions alone may not do the trick.

The suggestion, moreover, did not  come out of the blue. Mr. Trump himself evoked the possibility of military action against Iran in a new and lengthy interview with Time, which this week named the president-elect as its “Person of the Year.” 

Time magazine’s Eric Cortellessa noted that “the President-elect prides himself on not entering into any new wars in his first term,” but also  “leaves open the possibility that one may be necessary in a second. Asked about the chances of war with Iran, Trump pauses, then replies, ‘Anything can happen.’”

That, in a year as turbulent as 2024, is an understatement. It is a year that saw an Iranian plot to assassinate Mr. Trump during a presidential campaign already marred by close-call with an American assassin’s bullet. It is also a year that, as it draws to a close, saw the Bashar al-Assad’s regime — which had been tightly aligned with that of Tehran — simply collapse and flee. 

It’s not hard to imagine that the mullahs’ setback in Syria could push their regime to accelerate its drive to make nuclear weaponry. In his first term, Mr. Trump showed the world he was not interested in playing softball with the Islamist hardliners. He withdrew from a flawed nuclear deal that had been hastily formulated by his predecessor, President Obama. 

He oversaw a complex operation that targeted and eliminated the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp’s Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani. Yet preemptive strikes on Iran would mark a major change from a policy of sanctions and back-channel diplomacy, both of which could be approaching their sell-by dates as tools of dissuasion.

Mr. Trump’s hypothetical statement on war with Iran is newsworthy, especially given the decades of bad blood between America and the Islamic Republic. It is all the more remarkable because he has in recent years shown himself to be a man — or person, as Time puts it — with a greater sensitivity to the human cost of global conflicts than some might imagine him to possess.

The president-elect’s evocations of the “madness” of thousands of soldiers dying in the Russian war on Ukraine have found virtually no antecedent among so-called progressive members of the Biden administration. 

With Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, considerably weakened by Israel and with the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, Iran is more vulnerable than ever — and its retaliatory responses to preemptive strikes, possibly diminished.

In any event, the various hints of tough action against Tehran, whether the hints are from news magazines or elsewhere, may be for now mostly speculatory. A lot will hinge on Mr. Trump himself, and his thinking. He is a president-elect who invited the the Communist Chinese party boss to your own inauguration. 

Time interview with the president-elect is a textured piece, showing as the magazine’s person of the year a more relaxed president-to-be compared to the Donald Trump who was Person of the Year in 2016. 

Sam Jacobs, the magazine’s editor in chief, made the announcement on NBC’s “Today” show, saying that Mr. Trump was someone who “for better or for worse, had the most influence on the news in 2024.” Added he: “This is someone who made an historic comeback, who reshaped the American presidency and who’s reordering American politics.”