Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
In a remarkable, potentially catastrophic weekend, one bare fact became clear about Donald Trump’s volatile and terrifying White House: The neoconservatives, once seemingly vanquished by the new class of MAGA intellectuals, are back in control.
The killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been the dream of Washington war hawks for decades. American troops are dead, too, and Trump and his allies are hand-waving away the losses. Trump’s second term seems to represent the return, full blast, of this pre-MAGA, right-wing foreign-policy consensus. Trump is less subtle than George W. Bush and, ironically, a tad less ambitious — a Bush regime might have parachuted American troops into Caracas to start the full occupation — but the attacks on Iran and Venezuela, the former coordinated with Israel, fit well with Bush’s legacy.
It’s a surprising turnabout for the hawks after what they endured in the 2024 campaign: Trump, to great cheers, promised “no new wars” and all of his sycophants tried to portray Kamala Harris as the unhinged warmonger, the instrument of undead neoconservative thought. J.D. Vance, as the columnist Sohrab Ahmari recently pointed out, was the leader of this new isolationist vanguard and declared, less than two years ago, “Our interest, I think, very much is in not going to war with Iran. It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.”
Vance might end up the 2028 nominee, but Trump’s second term absolutely belongs to Marco Rubio. In the 2016 presidential campaign — back when he rampaged through the Republican primary as the only candidate to forcefully denounce the Iraq War — Trump mocked his eventual secretary of State for being a neocon: Rubio, he said, was a “perfect little puppet” of hawkish megadonor Sheldon Adelson. Giving Rubio the most powerful foreign-policy position in his second administration was a tremendous pivot, one that few saw coming.
There is a dark political logic to this administration’s military adventures in Venezuela and Iran and the aborted threat to seize Greenland. As Trump’s popularity plummets at home, his immigration and economic policies largely judged a failure by the American people, he has turned to sowing chaos abroad. Overseas, American presidents can act more like sultans than democratic leaders. Military operations can be launched without congressional oversight. Trump, increasingly emboldened, has indicated he might topple Cuba next. All of this is easier and more enjoyable for him than addressing the plight of the American people.
Of course, the Republican Party’s unreconstructed hawks, like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, are ecstatic about Trump’s neocon turn. John Bolton might revile Trump, but this is Bolton-style foreign policy (even if the man himself seems to be fretting at Trump’s recklessness). It doesn’t matter that this war with Iran is probably not going to deliver any freedom for the Iranian people. Killing a brutal dictator is easy — even Barack Obama did it in Libya. The difficult part, as anyone who’s studied foreign policy for ten minutes understands, is the aftermath. Power vacuums are dangerous, and old regime hands don’t simply vanish into smoke. But those well-established facts have never seemed to dull the enthusiasm for war or regime change among right-wing hawks.
Little of this new conflict in Iran makes sense other than as a wish-fulfillment scheme for Israel and frothing American neoconservative warriors. The U.S. already claimed to obliterate Iran’s sites that were aimed at building nuclear-weapons capacity. The Iranian regime, hobbled before the air strikes, posed little threat to the U.S. Its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas have already been crushed by Israel, the latter in the de facto genocide in Gaza.
An unsettling reality is that the current crop of neoconservatives in the Trump administration, beginning with Rubio, do not seem to believe in the need to make a popular case for what they do. When Bush invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, he had the American people, misguided as they were, at his back. He had Republicans and Democrats. In apparently starting a war with Iran, the Trump administration has won over the minuscule slice of hawks in the electorate (and the much larger contingent in Washington), but that’s about it. Younger Americans on the left and right are weary of what feels like America’s constant capitulation to Israel.
In the short term, the Israel hawks in the U.S. and abroad (including CBS’s new media mogul, Bari Weiss) are getting exactly what they want here. Trump has granted them their dream. Iran, they hope, will magically collapse or transmogrify into an Israel-pliant autocracy. (Most could care less if any real democracy blooms in the wake of the bombs.) But this will be a classic case of winning the battle to lose the war. Iranian society is far too complex to be managed by the U.S. As the situation there becomes more dangerous and chaotic, anti-Israel hatred will only grow.
Future American presidents, Republican or Democratic, will not be as pro-Israel as Trump. After watching this administration, they’ll know that — regardless of what words are spoken — presidencies are ruined by waging wars few Americans want. Tragically, though, this sort of comeuppance is still years away. For now, we will suffer through violence and danger. Neoconservatives, beginning with Rubio, will be able to dominate American foreign policy for the next three years. This is their comeback, their new golden age. Trump is apparently delighting in it, voters be damned.
