Trump’s Opponents Want to Humble the USA

Internal MAGA opposition to President Donald Trump’s support for Israel’s campaign to destroy the Iranian nuclear program is not about helping him preserve his legacy or holding him to his promises about avoiding Middle East conflicts or foregoing regime-change wars. If these issues were that important to the right-wing voices who are now rising against his Iran policy, they could’ve voted instead for Kamala Harris, who, like Joe Biden and Barack Obama, wanted to legitimize Iran’s bomb and flood Iran’s war chests with hundreds of billions of dollars.

Trump voters knew exactly where Trump stood on Iran because he has long been clear that the mullah regime cannot have the bomb. He said so on virtually every stop on his 2024 campaign. Trump’s position on Iran has been known for so long that Tucker Carlson attacked him for it during his first term. The reason then-progressive Democrat Tulsi Gabbard became known to Trump supporters is that Carlson featured her on his Fox show to validate his criticisms of Trump’s Iran policy. Trump’s determination to end the Iranian threat dates back to before his first term in office. According to his first national security advisor, Michael Flynn, concern over Iran’s nuclear weapons is what first drew then-candidate Trump to him after the retired three-star general, combat veteran, and former intelligence chief testified on Capitol Hill on June 10, 2015, to warn against Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Trump officially announced his candidacy less than a week later, on June 16. That is, Trump’s political career runs parallel to his opposition to Iranian nukes.

So-called MAGA opponents of Trump’s Iran policy aren’t really worried he’ll blunder into an Iraq-style morass. All he has to do to avoid the disaster sown by George W. Bush is not get involved in shaping the political arrangements of foreigners. Bush officials like Colin Powell, who believed the United States was obliged to fix polities that it has broken in order to ensure American peace and advance our prosperity, are not the norm in American foreign policy. Rather, they are freakish exceptions. Bush’s defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld thought nation-building was a fool’s errand. And Bush fired him for being normal. Bush’s father was also normal; he ended Saddam Hussein’s run on U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf, declared victory, and went home. It would hardly veer from the guiding principles of America First to let foreigners bear the consequences of their own poor choices by provoking an American military response.

Would the Iranian regime survive an attack that shuts down the Fordow nuclear site for good? Doesn’t matter. Just make sure whoever is left has no ability to build a nuclear bomb and threaten vital shipping lanes that transport oil and the goods Americans buy and sell, especially now, thanks to Trump’s efforts to fix trade imbalances in America’s favor. It doesn’t matter to us what a post-Islamic Republic of Iran would look like, but we wish the best of luck to all. We have no favorite among the Shah’s heirs or the Mojahedin-e-Khalq or surviving Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps moderates or anyone else. We hope you won’t kill each other, but that’s your problem, not ours.

Besides, even if we wanted to restructure your governing institutions from scratch, we can’t—because Elon Musk shut down USAID, the institution that made a habit of wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on trying to build democratic institutions in third-world cesspools. Maybe, once you get your act together, we can have trade and diplomatic relations. Someday. In the meantime, you can’t come here, because our borders are closed. And if you come at us again with bad intentions, as your revolutionary regime did for nearly half a century, we’ll blow your things up again.

So it’s pretty clear that the social media swarm is guided by something else besides the desire to protect Trump’s legacy, something that they can’t say directly. And that’s because what we’ve been seeing unfold over the past few months, and with increasingly hysterical fervor since the success of Israel’s surprise attack, is an information operation purposed to defend Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Self-described America First activists want Iran to get the bomb, just as our most proudly anti-American president did.

Most of the MAGA influencers tweeting against Trump’s Iran policy don’t know that what they’re actually validating is Barack Obama’s foreign policy. They’re just parroting the messaging passed down from the higher levels, where operatives affiliated with the Koch network and its various think tanks have been avidly promoting the Iranian nuke since Obama’s first term. Iran lobbyist Trita Parsi, for instance, has no other function in Washington except to promote Iran’s nuclear program—that’s been his job for almost two decades. Now, of course, he pursues his aims as the vice president at the Koch-sponsored Quincy Institute, providing talking points not to the left but to the right, or, more specifically, its realist, or “restraintist,” school.

Realism’s leading policy intellectual is John Mearsheimer, whose theory of the Middle East is simple, though not obviously realistic. He argues that the region is volatile because of Israel, which has the bomb. Accordingly, stabilizing the Middle East means deterring Israel by getting Iran the bomb, too.

Mearsheimer’s theory is based on two assumptions: One, despite its millenarian convictions, the Islamic Republic of Iran is a rational actor; and two, despite the evidence of many thousands of years, Israel is the reason the Middle East is unstable. Is either pillar of Mearsheimer’s realist reading of the region true? To believe so, you’d have to ignore that Iran opened hostilities with Israel in the early 1980s by sending Hezbollah and other terror proxies against the Jewish state. And even if you get past that salient fact, to imagine the region would be tranquil if only Israel didn’t have the bomb, or didn’t exist, you’ll have to set aside intra-Muslim conflict dating back to the founding of Islam, as well as other sectarian fights that neither Israel, nor the Jews who lived in the region before Israel was founded, have anything to do with. The Jews, after all, are a small Middle East minority—imagine a narrative holding that the Yazidis or the Chaldeans are the villain in the millennia-long story of the Middle East. Yes, it’s nuts—and it’s exactly the obsessive focus on Israel that makes Mearsheimer’s theory appealing to people obsessed with Jews.

The crucial point is this: Israel is a U.S. ally and thus a token of American power in the Middle East. Deterring Israel means hobbling America. This was precisely the point of Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. He said he wanted to create “a geopolitical equilibrium” in which, as he explained, Saudi Arabia would learn to share the region with Iran. But that was misleading. Riyadh, like Jerusalem, is simply a reflection of U.S. hegemony in the Middle East. Since the 1945 agreement between FDR and Ibn Saud, founder of the modern Saudi state, Riyadh’s main role in the U.S.-led postwar order is to pump cheap oil to keep the U.S. economy humming, in exchange for American protection.

For more than eight decades, the United States has been the Middle East’s main power. Aside from the George W. Bush administration’s screwup in Iraq, it’s been a remarkably successful enterprise, thanks in part to allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia. Balancing the Saudis and Israelis against Iran, as Obama and Mearsheimer and the restraintists want, means weakening the United States. Obama was explicit about it, from his apology tour on: His historic task was to humble America. It appears that Tucker Carlson’s obsessions have sadly led him to the same place, for his lengthy X post attacking Mark Levin justified Iran’s nuclear ambitions on the grounds that it needs the bomb to deter the country he calls home.

The self-described pro-Trump opposition to Trump’s Iran policy is just Obama in a MAGA skin suit—opposed to American exceptionalism and keen to cripple what it believes is truly the world’s most dangerous country: ours.