In his decade dominating conservative politics, President Trump donned the mantle of “America First.”
Now he is fighting to retain it.
Mr. Trump, along with his allies and his critics on the right, is in a race to redefine Republican foreign policy for an era of renewed U.S. warfare in the Middle East. The stakes go beyond the current conflict to the future of the party after Mr. Trump, whose 2024 campaign highlighted the eagerness of part of the electorate to limit America’s military commitments abroad.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump made his clearest break yet with the antiwar segment on the right, a younger and online-savvy group that vigorously endorsed him in 2024. In a 482-word social media missive, Mr. Trump lashed out at right-wing media figures like Tucker Carlson who have depicted his war on Iran as breaking a campaign promise to avoid Middle East wars.
“They’re not ‘MAGA,’” Mr. Trump wrote, using his “Make America Great Again” acronym. “MAGA is about WINNING and STRENGTH in not allowing Iran to have Nuclear Weapons.”
The post further energized hawkish Republicans, who insist that skeptics of military intervention had projected their views onto a president who was much less averse to using force than his “isolationist” supporters had realized. The war’s opponents on the right say that Mr. Trump’s mantras like “peace through strength” and “America First” are being twisted to justify a conflict best seen as a relic of Iraq War-era neoconservatism.
“The years of war, weakness and chaos will be over,” Mr. Trump said in his Milwaukee convention speech in 2024. “I don’t have wars.”
Many Republicans now say that Mr. Trump was misunderstood.
“It should be thought of as no new endless wars,” said Brian T. Kennedy, a conservative commentator who supports the war with Iran. “A lot of his supporters said that just means no new wars.”
Then there is the swath of Trump supporters who were not clamoring for war with Iran but have been willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt for now. Douglas Wilson, a Christian nationalist pastor in Idaho, told The New York Times in January that Mr. Trump risked suffering from “hubris” after the seizure of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and that he questioned the U.S. foreign policy interest in potential airstrikes on Iran.
In a follow-up interview, Pastor Wilson said that if Mr. Trump managed to extricate the United States from the war soon with minimal losses, he could keep the “America First” mantle by drawing a contrast to the “forever wars” of his predecessors. But he warned that this week’s cease-fire prolonged the uncertainty, given the possibility that Mr. Trump could restart the war if Iran does not agree to his demands.
“Lengthening the war is not Donald Trump’s friend,” said Pastor Wilson, whose ultraconservative denomination counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a member. “He wants to be able to argue, ‘short and sweet, decisive action, defend America’s interests and then come home.’”
Washington has been debating the thrust of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy for more than a decade, with the only consensus being that “America First” means whatever the president says it does. The differences were apparent at a briefing in Washington after the 2024 election set up by the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank.
Claremont’s president, Ryan P. Williams, recalled in a recent podcast that a senior official from Mr. Trump’s first term, Michael Anton, warned “the young MAGA folks” headed into the new administration that “Trump has always been an Iran hawk.” Those who disagreed, he went on, would “have to put a lid on all that and do your job.” Mr. Anton declined to comment through an associate.
Another speaker at the event, Brian Hook, the special envoy for Iran in Mr. Trump’s first term, remembers telling the group that the president “comes to Iran from a position of principle.” Mr. Trump’s support for military force against Iran dates to the 1980s, when he argued for an attack to free the U.S. embassy hostages and mused about seizing Kharg Island, the export hub for the country’s oil.
“Some in the party have projected their own views onto Trump,” Mr. Hook said last week. “But he has never been an isolationist on Iran.”
Two people in the audience at that Claremont event, who spoke about it on condition of anonymity because it was a private session, recalled reacting dismissively. The rise of figures skeptical of military intervention like Vice President JD Vance and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, seemed to signal that Mr. Trump was discarding the Republican Party’s hawkish stance in the Middle East.
Indeed, the first year of Mr. Trump’s second term held hopeful signs for those who wanted him to rein in America’s global ambitions: negotiating with Russia, cooling tensions with China, turning away from NATO and retrenching in the Western Hemisphere. In Saudi Arabia last May, Mr. Trump attacked American “interventionalists” who “wrecked far more nations than they built.” In December, the administration’s main national security document said “the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy” were “thankfully over.”
But Mr. Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites last June and the attack on Venezuela seemed to point to a third way of wielding American military might: short and violent strikes that did not tie up U.S. forces. The missions were widely seen by the right as successes, emboldening Mr. Trump and challenging the right-wing voices urging foreign policy restraint.
Then Mr. Trump and Israel began their full-fledged air war on Iran, kicking off the most intense battle yet over how the president is reframing American foreign policy and what that means for the Republicans’ view of the world.
“Some people have misunderstood the president on foreign policy and national security, right from the beginning,” said Jack Keane, a retired general whom Mr. Trump awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2020. “It’s much more about what he does than what he says.”
Mark Levin, the Fox News host whom Mr. Trump often cites on social media, called the Iran war a “peace mission” and its conservative opponents “neo-fascist isolationists.” On his show last month, Mr. Levin urged a ground operation to seize Iran’s enriched uranium and pre-empted criticism by arguing that Mr. Trump never promised not to send ground troops to Iran: “I don’t remember that in any campaign speech.”
Things sound different online. Mr. Kennedy, the conservative commentator, says he feels like a lonely supporter of the war when he appears on “War Room,” the show hosted by the 2016 Trump campaign chief Stephen K. Bannon. There are few Republicans making a convincing, “America First” case for attacking Iran beyond Mr. Trump, he said, drawing a distinction with people like Mr. Levin or Sen. Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who highlight the need to defend Israel’s security.
“There aren’t many people on our side giving a Trumpian defense of this,” said Mr. Kennedy, a former president of the Claremont Institute. “There’s people like Lindsey Graham and Mark Levin who are giving a pro-Israel defense of this.”
The intensity of the debate shows how much the outcome of the war could sway Republicans’ foreign policy positions in the elections this year and in 2028. Katherine Thompson, who served as a senior Pentagon official under Mr. Hegseth last year, said she saw “a window of opportunity here with Iran” for “neoconservatives to basically take back the narrative.”
“They are very good at co-opting the right side of the spectrum,” said Ms. Thompson, who is now a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. “You’re seeing this war between the two factions play out in real time.”
Polls show that a generation gap is a defining aspect of the debate. Among Republicans ages 50 and older, 85 percent said the U.S. made the right decision in striking Iran, according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in mid-March. Among Republicans 18 to 49, support dropped to 58 percent.
Mr. Trump has bristled at the notion that he may have misled his voters. In his social media post Thursday, he said that antiwar right-wing figures were “just trying to latch on to MAGA.”
But Mr. Bannon, who helped hone Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” message in 2016, predicted that the movement the president started would turn further inward after the Iran war. It would demand even more hard-line policies on immigration, he said, and bridle at the money spent on war abroad.
“The MAGA movement has been more populist than nationalistic,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview. “It’s going to be much more nationalistic coming out of here.”
Anton Troianovski writes about American foreign policy and national security for The Times from Washington. He was previously a foreign correspondent based in Moscow and Berlin.
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