Win or lose, Donald Trump has begun the last war the United States is ever likely to fight in the Middle East. That might sound wildly optimistic, but what it really means is that war with Iran has been decades in the making. If the mission succeeds, it will mark the end of an era. And if it fails, this war will have exhausted what’s left of America’s willingness to remake the region by force.
It’s not just that Iran puts the case for regime change to the ultimate test. America’s relationship with Israel is also on trial. That relationship has been strained lately by the war in Gaza – which for the first time began to shift American public opinion in favor of Palestine over Israel – and by the rise of radically anti-Zionist and outright anti-Semitic influences on the political left and right alike. Demographic changes are also working to loosen the ties between America and Israel, as white Christian baby boomers are succeeded by the least white, least Christian generation in American history, a cohort that does not feel the affinities for Israel that older Americans do.
President Trump is at war with Iran because he feels he has to be, not because he wants to be
This war is an ideological watershed as well. Although in one sense it’s the fulfillment of neoconservatives’ dreams, it was only possible because Donald Trump defeated the neocons in the Republican party and established a new line of credit, so to speak, for foreign-policy interventionism. Trump was never a straightforward peacenik, but his criticisms of the forever wars waged by his predecessors gave non-interventionists cause to throw in with him. Foreign policy restraint may have been less basic to MAGA’s ideology than tariffs and the restriction of immigration, but the three elements seemed to fit together as rejection of global liberalism, the reigning ideological orthodoxy since the “end of history” in the 1990s.
But in Trump’s second term he’s gone beyond the negation of the old liberal globalism to build a new activist ideology of his own, marked by a willingness to use military force to compel adversaries to make deals. The idealistic component of liberal interventionism – including the liberal interventionism of past Republican administrations – is missing. Trump doesn’t seem concerned to promote democracy; his aim is simply to bring about adversaries’ submission to America.
And it’s clear that the western hemisphere is the Trump administration’s primary concern and the focus of this new foreign-policy ideology. The administration’s successful capture of Nicolás Maduro and forcible reorientation of the relationship with Venezuela is the archetype of the kind of intervention Trump would like to undertake – and he seems, at various times, to have hoped that the conflict with Iran could have followed the same pattern. Iran might have completely submitted after the war with Israel and America last summer, or the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei at the start of this war might have done what the removal of Maduro did in Venezuela. But if this war does, at last, achieve satisfactory results for Trump, his next target will be closer to home: Cuba.
President Trump is at war with Iran because he feels he has to be, not because he wants to be. He would rather acquire Greenland or force Cuba to do business. This is why America did not initially join in Israel’s war with Iran last June. Trump is strongly pro-Israel and has been throughout his presidencies, but he would prefer that Israel, and other regional allies, be responsible for securing the submission of the troublemakers in their own neighborhood. And Israel has in fact been very successful in destroying its enemies since the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 three years ago. Hamas and Hezbollah have both been crippled. But to prevent them from regenerating, Israel had to take on their state sponsor – Iran.
The Israelis have a genuine fear of Tehran’s nuclear program, but quite apart from the danger of a nuclear weapon being used against Israel, a nuclear-armed Iran would have a strong enough deterrence to prevent Israel from retaliating against Tehran’s sponsorship of terrorism. A nuclear Iran would be free to engage in much more sponsorship of terrorism, a prospect that’s stomach-churning not only for Israel but for every state in the region. So Israel was prepared to go to war last year to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons capacity.
What Israel discovered, however, was that Iran’s conventional missiles are a powerful deterrent in themselves. Israel alone could not speedily bring Tehran to heel. So the Trump administration stepped in to finish the task, bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities into inoperability. With that victory quickly achieved, the Trump administration turned its attention back to the western hemisphere.
Yet the Israelis saw this, with good reason, as only a delay, not a resolution. If anything, the 12-Day War had proved just how formidable Iran’s missiles could be, and obviously Tehran would seek to strengthen that deterrence so that the next time, Israel would have an even tougher job trying to attack Iran’s nuclear program. The missiles enable the nuclear research, and nuclear weapons will enable more terrorism. Israel would soon have to go to war again, not only to stop Iran from rebuilding its nuclear facilities, but to stop it from restocking and upgrading its missiles and drones as well.
If Trump had not gone to war this year, another Republican would have done so later
The same reasoning behind the Trump administration’s involvement in last year’s Israel-Iran war drove the administration into this year’s conflict: Israel by itself might or might not be able to strip Iran of its offensive capabilities, and if Israel could prevail at all, it would be a protracted campaign.
Ironically or not, Trump’s exit strategy for the endless Middle East conflicts is to empower Israel (and Arab states that have learned to get along with Israel) to deal with the region’s chief troublemaker – but that turns out to be a project that demands America’s intervention. Because Trump had pledged that Iran would never have a nuclear weapon, and because continuing development of Iran’s missile program would eventually reach a point where even America would be within range, the President is now waging the war that Bush Republicans longed for, but didn’t dare launch.
But this doesn’t mean neoconservatism is reborn. The state of mind – and the state of the world – that made possible the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, has passed, never to return. In 1991, the end of the Cold War more than balanced that lingering “Vietnam Syndrome,” which made Americans leery of foreign interventions. America seemed to be the world’s last superpower, as the Soviet Union’s empire crumbled and China’s rise was yet remote. History with a capital H seemed to be on America’s side, and the swift victory over Saddam Hussein in Kuwait only added to that impression.
The Gulf War was the beginning of a long war – not a Cold War, but a series of hot wars to police and promote the “liberal international order.” Neoconservatives and other hawks saw no limit to what they might achieve in using force to topple dictatorships and plant democracy in new lands, including the Middle East. The only problem was the 1991 war hadn’t gone far enough: it left Hussein in power in Baghdad. That was unfinished business that would have to be seen to. And in 2003, with the George W. Bush administration still riding high in the polls after the 9/11 attacks two years earlier, the hawks in the Republican party got the chance to tie up the loose ends of 1991 by bringing regime change to Iraq.
Yet the propaganda of the time emphasized that Iraq was only one member of what Bush, using the words of his speechwriter David Frum, styled the “Axis of Evil.” Iran was also a member, and the neoconservative case for war with Iraq applied equally to war with Iran. It just wasn’t practical at the time. The war would even have the same basic rationale: Hussein’s supposed quest for weapons of mass destruction – including, it was suggested, nuclear weapons – was the proximate rationale for the regime-change war in Iraq. Afterward, the prospect of Iran’s developing nuclear weapons became an argument for going to war there, too. Obama tried to blunt that argument with the “Iran Deal,” but in fact the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, conceded the argument: Iranian nuclear aspirations were an international concern that the United States would have to take the lead in addressing.
The JCPOA itself was, therefore, only delaying the inevitable. Sooner or later either Iran would violate the agreement or an administration that wanted to go to war would make a case that Iran had violated the agreement, much as the UN inspections regime that was meant to monitor Saddam Hussein’s WMD development became useful in making the case for war in 2003. If Trump had not gone to war this year, another Republican would have done so later – not J.D. Vance, perhaps, if he won in 2028, but if he lost, the party would have been ready to return to the hawks.
Trump has preempted that by becoming a hawk himself. If he succeeds in Iran, however, he won’t be restoring the global liberal dream long entertained by the neoconservatives and, in a different way, by the Democrats. His vision of America First isn’t noninterventionism, it’s a version of hegemony that’s more regional than global and more pragmatically mercantilistic (for lack of a better word) than ideologically liberal or democratic. His program means more interventions in the Americas, and doesn’t rule out military actions elsewhere. But its horizons are narrower than those of the neocons and liberal internationalists.
No other Middle East wars are on the Trumpian horizon
No other Middle East wars are on the Trumpian horizon. And no regime other than Iran’s inflames the spirits of those Americans who are old enough to remember the humiliation inflicted on the nation by the hostage crisis of 1979. Americans of that generation are aging out of the population year by year, in any event. The passions that involve us in foreign conflicts in the future will be those of a younger cohort.
And if the Iran war goes badly – as badly as the Iraq War did for Bush – Trump’s new style of interventionism will be repudiated by voters as thoroughly as Trump’s own election repudiated the neoconservatives. MAGA itself, as well as Israel’s standing with the American public, will be collateral damage. And what comes next will be an even more radical phase in domestic politics. For a republic like ours, war always has a home front.
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