Better late than never.

Never was the old English idiom more apt than in President Donald Trump’s wipeout attack on Iran.

It is something the U.S. should have done 50 years ago, or 47 to be more precise.

That was when a mob of Iranian Islamic terrorists, with the approval of anti-American cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979, first taking 66 Americans hostage.

They kept them for 444 days while President Jimmy Carter, the Joe Biden of his day, looked on helplessly.

He tried to rescue them the following April but the mission to land rescuers outside of Tehran was botched and abandoned. That was due to poor planning, faulty helicopters and bad weather.

Eight servicemen were killed when one of the helicopters crashed into a transport plane.

Democrat Carter was defeated in the 1980 election by Republican Ronald Reagan, and the hostages were released just hours after Reagan was sworn in as president.

This is not to make Reagan out to have been effective on the Iran issue or support the naïve belief that the U.S. could reason with an autocratic Islamic theocracy that deals in death.

Iran, under the radical Islamist clerics, is (or was) a nation born chanting “Death to America.”

Reagan found that out when in 1983 Islamist suicide bombers drove two trucks loaded with explosives and blew up a housing facility in Beirut, killing 241 U.S. Marines. The Marines were there as part of a peacekeeping mission during the Lebanese Civil War.

While Iran proxies Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad claimed credit for the bombing, Reagan took no action against Iran. In fact, all the remaining Marines were evacuated shortly after.

It is understandable that the mullahs in Iran created a terrorist network, declared war with the U.S., and went around capturing and killing Americans with impunity. There were no repercussions.

So, they decided to try to build nuclear bombs and  to mount them on ballistic missiles to wipe out Israel and then the U.S., finally realizing their sick dream of bringing “Death of America.”

There was no president to stop them. In fact, the obsequious Barack Obama and the hapless Joe Biden helped Iran by sending in plane loads of cash to the murdering mullahs in exchange for nothing.

The pair, in their own way, worked to make Iran strong and America weak.

Had Biden or Kamala Harris become president in 2024, Iran would be dropping its first nuclear bomb over Tel Aviv, saving its second and third for New York and Washington.

There would have been no one to stop them.

Then came Donald Trump and the world changed. He is the first president in 50 years who has not been conned, willingly or not, by the Iranian mullahs who talk deals they never intend to honor.

And if anyone knows about deals, it is Trump, a man who spent a lifetime making them.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian leader (now of late), believed he could play Trump the way he played past U.S. presidents, promising this while doing that.

But he underestimated Trump, even after Trump, in Midnight Hammer, sent B-2 bombers over Iran in June to take out three Iranian nuclear facilities and went back to building a nuclear bomb.

Khamenei acted as though he was dealing with Obama or Biden and he paid the price for it. Better late than never.

You don’t tug at Superman’s cape.

Veteran political reporter Peter Lucas can be reached at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com