The best essay for understanding right-wing support for Donald Trump’s war against Iran was published in National Review in 2023, at the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion. Written by Tanner Greer, a conservative writer and China analyst, it argued that the official populist repudiation of George W. Bush and neoconservatism masked a deep continuity between the Iraq-era conservative mainstream and the Trump-era new right.
Both the Bush-era hawks and the Trumpian right, Greer suggested, were profoundly concerned with civilizational decadence and how it might be escaped. Both yearned for national purpose, both displayed a “vitalist drive,” both looked for ways to break out of the limited horizons imposed by liberal convention wisdom and post-Cold War consensus. Neoconservatives then cared more about democracy and human rights, officially, than most Trump supporters now, but the Iraq hawks cared most profoundly about power in a way that’s entirely relevant today: The famous quote from a Bush official about how “when we act, we create our own reality” directly anticipated the Trump-era belief that “you can just do things.”
In the Trump era, the zone of action was supposed to be the administrative state, immigration policy and higher education, rather than the Middle East. But it’s not surprising that the same spirit could be extended to a new round of warmaking, a friend/enemy battle with the mullahs rather than the liberal elite as the existential threat. The arguments for democracy promotion that were stapled onto the Iraq war have been torn away, Bill Kristol is basically a Democrat now and Dick Cheney died a committed foe of Trump. But the spirit of Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld broods over the Trump administration nonetheless.
That spirit is not all-encompassing, and the failures of hawkish foreign policy have had some real effects: That’s why you have a wider range of antiwar and war-skeptical voices on the right, from Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon to Matt Walsh and Megyn Kelly and Bronze Age Pervert, than you did in 2002 and 2003. In a world where the Iran intervention goes badly, it won’t take more than a decade for the right to repudiate it; the antiwar right could be re-ascendant as soon as the 2028 primary campaign.
But at the moment most Republicans support the war, and that support extends beyond the hawkish reflexes of older G.O.P. voters to include plenty of younger, very online and very Trumpy voices. My timeline is filled with social media grand strategists and right-wing anons and professed post-liberals making complicated geopolitical arguments about the benefits of the Iran war that remind me of arguments I heard from Iraq hawks 20 years ago — or that I made myself, even, after too many beers at a D.C. happy hour. And they’re joined by “based” voices asserting that this war is totally different from Bush’s war, a completely different paradigm, because Trump understands strength in a way the “Bushies” never did.
Some of these writers can be forgiven for this perspective because they are young enough never to have watched a Rumsfeld news conference. But the idea that America can go into a rough neighborhood, hit our enemies hard, kill some of their leaders and force them to RESPECT OUR HEGEMONY is not some brilliant innovation of the based Trump era. It was the dominant right-wing perspective on the Iraq war (and, indeed, sometimes a centrist perspective as well), especially in the run-up to the invasion, with democracy promotion very much a minor theme. And the failure in Iraq was as much a failure of this kind of “We win, they lose” militarism as it was a failure of Wilsonian idealism.
Now, history’s recursions are never simple, and what is definitely true about Trump — what gives me some optimism that this war will have a better outcome than Iraq — is that he’s much more flexible and adaptable, more happily inconsistent and open for negotiation, than the hawks of the Bush era. His desire to crush his enemies and see them driven before him coexists with a willingness to cut his losses at any moment, depending on his options and the performance of the stock market.
Did he say this week that he’ll accept nothing but “unconditional surrender”? Check again next week; he might say something else. Is he toying with the idea of sending ground troops into Iran? Allegedly, but he might have the opposite view if the next person who talks to him emphasizes the word “quagmire.” Did his secretary of state call the Iranian leadership “religious fanatic lunatics”? Sure, but if declaring victory requires making a deal with a religious fanatic lunatic, Trump will be OK with that.
It’s in this flexibility that I put my hope, rather than the supposed reality-creating powers of Trumpian resolve. But as with conservatives in the Bush era, so today — the desire for a revolutionary presidency gives hubris a lot of space to work.
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