For decades, the idea that Iran’s regime represented the worst of the world’s worst stood as a pillar of Republican foreign policy.
But in recent months, and especially as the Trump administration has defended its preliminary peace deal, a different perspective has been taking hold in parts of the American right: Iran as a pragmatic country that the United States can, and must, learn to live with.
The stark shift has been led by President Trump, who called Iran’s leaders “strong people, smart people” last week, but it goes well beyond him. Vice President JD Vance has emerged as its main proponent. Conservatives who long had an isolationist streak have been energized. Even some longtime hawks have changed their tone.
It is too soon to say whether the change will last. Many Republicans have retained their hard-line stance, and Mr. Trump has periodically threatened to restart the war. Some of the shifting language among Republicans could be the familiar Trump-era scramble to stay aligned with a mercurial president.
But interviews show that the right-wing pivot away from traditional Republican hawkishness on Iran is driven by factors that go beyond Mr. Trump’s desire to disentangle himself from the fighting. There is a generational shift in the party away from uncompromising support for Iran’s archenemy, Israel, and even some grudging admiration for the Iranian regime’s ability to withstand weeks of fierce bombardment.
It is a domestic political dynamic with global implications — stakes made plain by the Iran war’s consequences for the energy supply of Europe and Asia and the security of the Arab countries on the Persian Gulf.
“Iran stood up for itself. Good for Iran,” said Curt Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative, channeling what he described as Mr. Trump’s message to Americans. “And that means the U.S. is only so interested in taking these guys down a peg.”
Mr. Mills, 35, runs a magazine founded by one of modern conservatism’s original isolationists, Patrick J. Buchanan. He has long endorsed foreign-policy restraint, a view that polls show is shared by many younger Republicans, who came of age during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Expressing opposition to fighting Iran on the right is getting less and less taboo,” Mr. Mills said.
Stephen K. Bannon, the former senior Trump aide, described the president as a “deal maker and a pragmatist” who now knows “he is not having a surrender ceremony on the battleship Missouri in the harbor at Bandar Abbas,” the Iranian port. Mr. Bannon evoked ancient Persia’s wars against Greece and Rome to explain Mr. Trump’s struggle to defeat Iran.
“They go to ground and dig in hard,” Mr. Bannon said in a text message.
Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said that the Iran war had “successfully demolished” much of the country’s military, and that negotiators were now “working to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capabilities for good.”
“The president doesn’t make these important national security decisions to appease podcasters or think tank armchair quarterbacks,” Ms. Kelly said. “His only priority is what is best for the American people.”
But in a sign of the White House being attuned to the shifting politics of Iran, Mr. Vance went on Megyn Kelly’s online show last week to promote the preliminary peace deal. Ms. Kelly, a former Fox News host, has four million YouTube subscribers and has become a voice for Republicans disenchanted by Mr. Trump’s foreign policy.
The hawks are “operating under an outdated view of the world and of the American attitude and capability,” Ms. Kelly said on her show two days after speaking with Mr. Vance, adding: “The Iranians are not going to bend. They did well in this war.”
That prior view of the world may have been captured in President George W. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address. Iran was part of an “axis of evil”; for the United States, it was “both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom’s fight.” As he launched the war on Feb. 28, Mr. Trump himself had called the Iranian government “very hard, terrible people” who “wanted to practice evil.”
Echoing that view, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, said on his podcast last week that Mr. Trump was now “getting very poor advice” on Iran because “giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics” is “a very, very bad idea.” Senator Tim Sheehy, Republican of Montana, said on Fox News that Iran’s leaders still “want you and I dead.”
But even in the Senate, a bastion for conservative hawks, a change in tone is palpable.
Senator Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican who said in April that negotiating with “irrational religious zealots” in Tehran was “next to impossible,” argued on CNN this month that Iran could be allowed to possess missiles because “they have to be able to defend themselves.” On Fox Radio, he said he did not want to sound like “an Iran apologist.” But he repeated the mantra “no forever wars” in arguing why the United States should negotiate its way out of the war.
“We’ve already lost 13 American soldiers, basically defending Israel for the most part, and getting rid of nuclear weapons,” he said.
Such shifts in language may in part be driven by conservative politicians picking up on a generational change in how their potential voters see America’s place in the world.
A New York Times/Siena poll last month found that 53 percent of potential Republican supporters under 45 opposed the Iran war, compared with 22 percent of those 45 and older; 54 percent of the younger cohort said Mr. Trump was too supportive of Israel, compared with just 16 percent of the older group. And nearly three-quarters of Republican supporters under 45 said the United States should pay less attention to problems overseas, compared with 40 percent of those 45 and up.
The differing world views were also evident in the younger Republican supporters’ relatively positive perspective on the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson — 41 percent favorable, 23 percent unfavorable — even though Mr. Trump has referred to him and Ms. Kelly as “LOSERS” with “LOW IQ.” Mr. Carlson is perhaps the loudest conservative opponent of the war.
Last week, Mr. Carlson posted an interview with the Iran war critic Trita Parsi, a co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank that promotes a more limited U.S. role in the world. He told Mr. Parsi that Iran would emerge from the war “a major world power” because of its ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, a critical route for much of the world’s oil. Mr. Parsi said that Iran had become “much stronger, at least temporarily” and that he had told the Trump administration at the war’s outset that it was a mistake.
In a phone interview, Mr. Parsi said he had been having “continuous conversations” with administration officials about Iran since early last year, including “with the people at the table.” He also said that part of the American right “frankly doesn’t care about Iran.”
“They’re more angry at the idea that the war was started in the first place than the idea that the United States suffered a strategic defeat,” Mr. Parsi said. “It tells you something about how much the idea of Iran has evolved.”
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