The only way to know for certain where Donald Trump’s Iran policy is going is to wait — for the president to throw in fully with the Israelis, for a new attempt at diplomacy with a battered Iranian regime, for a continuation of America’s current position as spectator, cheerleader and secondary participant.
But while we wait, here are four quick comments on the debate about the war:
1) There is nothing inherently surprising about Trump’s permitting and indirectly supporting Israel’s war against Iran. Trump generally took a hawkish line on Iran throughout his first term; he has never been a principled noninterventionist; his deal-making style has always involved the threat of force as a crucial bargaining chip; and the idea that you can accomplish a lot with a few sharp blows while avoiding regime change and nation building fits comfortably into his worldview.
What is more surprising is that Trump would let war come after he had seemingly separated himself from his first term’s hawkish personnel — sometimes with prejudice, as with the petty withdrawal in January of security protection from his former secretary of state Mike Pompeo. This separation helps explain the wounded shock with which some noninterventionists on the right have reacted to the war. They imagined that personnel was policy, that the realists and would-be restrainers in Trump’s orbit would have a decisive influence. That was clearly a mistake, and the lesson here is that Trump decides and no one else. (And it could well be the hawks’ turn to be disappointed tomorrow, if he decides to accept concessions from Tehran that they regard as fake or insufficient.)
2) I have a lot of doubts about the decision to let the Israelis go for it. But noninterventionists should recognize that the strongest Tucker Carlson-style argument for restraining Israel from war, the warning that Iran could plunge the Middle East into turmoil and strike at Americans across the region and the world, inevitably looked much weaker once the Israelis were able to absolutely wreck Iranian proxies, Hezbollah as well as Hamas, across 2024.
Those successes were also of immediate strategic benefit to an America that’s facing serious challenges from multiple rivals at once, reducing Iran’s ability to add its own pressure to Russian aggression and Chinese ambition. So if you imagine the basic Benjamin Netanyahu pitch to the White House — in effect, Let us have a go at the Iranians, and you can decide whether to explicitly support us once you see the outcome — it’s easy to see how Trump might decide that an “America First,” national interest-based foreign policy is compatible with letting the Israelis try to settle all accounts.
3) With that said, I’m unconvinced by the arguments from some writers on the nationalist right, like Oren Cass and Daniel McCarthy, who have tried to square Trump’s acceptance of the Israeli war with their own desire for American disentanglement from global obligations. Of course one can square the two in theory — acceptance is not participation, and Israel’s war need not be ours — but in practice wars are almost always engines of entanglement for great powers, whatever their initial intentions may be.
So you can tell yourself a story in which America just watches Israel’s war play out and stays aloof even if Iran collapses in the manner of circa-2005 Iraq or post-Qaddafi Libya, because “America First” means that we don’t worry about regional stability anymore. But stories have to interface with reality, and I don’t see anything in the current nature of America’s relationship with the Gulf States or the Israelis to suggest that we wouldn’t be caught up in a postwar mess. “America First” isn’t a magic wand that does away with path dependency or makes the retreat from empire smooth. If Iran implodes, there will be crises we have to help manage, and a price we have to pay.
4) Last, it is by no means the most urgent question as the bombs and rockets fall, but one of my fears is that the price of a war against Iran that goes sideways will be paid inside American conservatism. I’ve suggested before that anyone who fears the toxic elements at work on the contemporary right — the pull of paranoia, the openness to antisemitism, the impulse to take the “blackpill” of despair — should especially fear what might take root among disaffected right-wingers if Trumpism is seen to end in failure. And a reckless war the Middle East, an echo of the Iraq disaster that implicates the right’s longstanding loyalty to Israel, would be one of the most blackpilling ways for Trumpism to fail.
All active presidencies assume some risk of this sort. You can’t let the fear of disillusionment stop you from making what seems like the correct strategic choice, and I am more hopeful about the potential success of a war against Iran than I would have been a year or two ago.
But that is not the same as being optimistic.
Breviary
Sam Altman’s gentle singularity.
Joan Didion’s posthumous exploitation.
South Africa’s unfinished civil war.
ChatGPT’s haunted antecedents.
The new right’s artistic horizons.
William Langewiesche and Frederick Forsyth, R.I.P.
Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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