The Airstrikes Have Widened the Fractures on the Right
The outcome of the war in Iran will be the defining legacy of the second Trump administration, just as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the legacies of the George W. Bush administration. The heavy barrage of the joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes, which began early Saturday morning as missiles hit a series of strategic targets in Iran’s largest cities, took out much of the top level of the regime’s political and military leadership class. One of the chief stated objectives of the war—decimating Iran’s lackluster Navy—has essentially been met, which included the U.S. sinking its first ship using a torpedo since World War II.
Though John Bolton’s castigation of the Trump administration’s strategy in Iran is extremely ironic from the man who sought to carry out a “maximum pressure” campaign against that regime, he isn’t wrong to point out a pivotal question the administration needs to grapple with: who the next Iranian leader will be. President Trump admitted that the strikes essentially eliminated all the individuals the U.S. thought could take over in the wake of Ayatollah Khamenei’s demise.
Before the strikes, the CIA apparently sketched out multiple scenarios for the president: the emergence of another hardline cleric, which was clearly the worst-case scenario, or even a group of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps led by more practical aims, with perhaps a less radical cleric as a figurehead. Tellingly, the elevation of Reza Pahlavi, the eldest son of the shah who was overthrown in 1979, wasn’t mentioned, meaning he likely doesn’t have significant backing in the country—or pull with President Trump.
While the lack of a plan in this area doesn’t promote confidence in what may lie ahead, at the very least, the Trump administration seems to be engaged in a more realpolitik assessment than the gauzy project of democracy promotion that bedeviled the Bush administration, or the theological millenarianism that’s coming from certain Trump administration officials. As Angelo Codevilla counseled in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, “Our peace, our victory, does not require that the peoples of Afghanistan, the Arabian Peninsula, Palestine, or indeed any other part of the world become democratic, free, or decent.” Iran has had a monarchy (or its degraded form) for millennia, which no amount of U.S. power can hope to change.
Undertaking regime change in any respect is particularly fraught, which is why the classical political philosophers urged statesmen to focus on domestic affairs. The unintended consequences are legion, and bad outcomes, especially in recent decades in the Middle East, occur far more often than not.
While the MAGA base seems to back the president by a strong majority—even Paul Gottfried, a noted critic of neoconservatism, is taking a wait-and-see approach—prominent online voices are highly critical of Trump’s bombing campaign, widening a rift on the Right that’s been growing for some time in the realm of foreign policy. Influential podcasters and commentators have bemoaned the president’s actions in Iran, which presents a stark contrast to the often caricatured claim that Trump voters march in lock step with the president.
Tucker Carlson, a guest at the White House on numerous occasions, called the Iranian campaign “absolutely disgusting and evil.” Individuals from The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh to the columnist Sohrab Ahmari have made their displeasure abundantly clear.
While not a MAGA diehard, Mary Harrington presents what many in Europe are thinking, including those on the Right. She writes that they have “good reason to deprecate a new conflict in the Middle East,” describing the president’s actions as follows: “This isn’t neoconservatism; it’s just militarism.”
Many of these commentators and writers point to Trump’s many pledges not to get the U.S. involved in any more “forever wars,” viewing his Iran airstrikes as a clear betrayal of that promise. Since he entered the 2016 presidential race, Trump has been trying to distance himself from the disastrous consequences of the policies pushed by the neoconservatives and hawks that dominated the GOP. Even on election night in November 2024, Trump stated during his victory speech, “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”
But Trump also has a far longer track record of opposing the Iranian regime, and he has unsurprisingly not been bashful about saying so. As Matthew Schmitz points out at Compact, Trump said in a 1987 speech in New Hampshire that the U.S. should “attack Iran and seize some of its oil fields in retaliation for…Iran’s bullying of America.” The following year, Trump told The Guardian, “I’d be harsh on Iran. They’ve been beating us psychologically, making us look a bunch of fools. One bullet shot at one of our men or ships and I’d do a number on Kharg Island” (an oil hub). The alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Trump likely raised his ire against Iran’s ruling class to a new level.
How are we to untangle this paradox between Trump the anti-war candidate and Trump the interventionist president? On the one hand, there’s his almost libertarian-esque, Ron Paul-style rhetoric on the campaign trail. On the other hand, the second Trump administration has already conducted at least seven military operations in a little over a year, including in Yemen, Venezuela, and now Iran—and all without congressional authorization.
While it could be chalked up to the difference between bombastic campaign rhetoric and the realities of being president, another consideration could be more relevant: the still ongoing political realignment in the Republican Party. The president, along with Vice President JD Vance, is trying to deal with an electorate that is tired of losing wars and our nation’s self-respect, blood, and treasure. At the same time, Trump is also attempting to secure American interests, as he sees them, through the right use of military power. Balancing these two desires is difficult, especially given what the American people have been put through for at least the last two decades.
The administration is working out in real time how to practically secure the chief aims of foreign policy: attaining security and peace for American citizens. While it isn’t accurate to suggest that they know what they are against (neoconservative foreign policy, for one) rather than what they are for—simply scan the 2025 National Security Strategy—the positive use of power remains murky at best. And this question is deeply intertwined with how the U.S. should navigate the transition away from the crumbling rules-based liberal international order to something new.
Furthermore, it shouldn’t be overlooked that Trump is trying to clean up the mess that a succession of presidents left him with. Though perhaps an easy excuse for military intervention around the globe, there could be something to the claim that Trump’s actions in Iran and elsewhere are the necessary preconditions to establish a true America First foreign policy that’s much more restrained.
Such a foreign policy would look more like what the American founders promoted. According to Hillsdale’s Tom West, their “anti-imperialist conception of foreign policy…rejected Machiavelli’s belligerent republicanism, with its celebration of hegemonism and conquest.” Instead, they sought to restrain “the dangerous human passion to dominate others, both at home and abroad.” This is why Angelo Codevilla warned in the fall of 2005, “If we continue to trifle with empire rather than establishing peace, we shall reap stalemate, retreat, and the domestic strife that is empire’s bitterest consequence.”
The presuppositions of this analysis point to one of the chief reasons for the current split on the Right. What kind of country is America? Have we been an empire from the very beginning? Or did our experience with the British, along with the political principles we adopted during the Revolution, cause the founding generation to reject empire in favor of being a nation that would provide an example to the world of republicanism in action? There’s even a third option: Did we become an empire in the 20th century, and will the process of rollback take generations?
That most of the Right does not have ready answers for these questions is part of the problem—but it’s also an opportunity to construct a better framework for U.S. foreign policy for the future.
At the outset, no matter how these questions are answered, it must be admitted that it has been decades since Americans have seen a conclusive military victory that has benefited them. “Stupid presidents,” in Vance’s recent words, have misused military power on pointless excursions that have greatly harmed American citizens. Our political class has too often sacrificed the country’s reputation and instead followed the designs of technocratic managers of the rules-based liberal international order.
However, the answer to ideological interventionism is not ideological non-interventionism—it is a prudent use of means to achieve U.S. interests.
Though younger generations are right to say that the Boomers tend to view foreign policy (and therefore domestic policy) through the lens of the post-World War II era, younger generations—especially Millennials—tend to view it through the lens of the War on Terror. But not every military incursion is destined to descend into a decade of chaos. (The president’s recent suggestion that he hasn’t ruled out boots on the ground in Iran is certainly cause for concern among the critics of his war in Iran.)
Statesmanship, after all, is about far more than not starting new wars. Trump seems interested in reviving some of its most fundamental elements, which are expressed in his typically straightforward manner: winning and being proud of our country. The classical elements of statesmanship—the grand strategies that protect and preserve human civilization, as discussed by individuals from Thucydides to Winston Churchill—look different in kind from how foreign policy is normally discussed today.
These grand themes are far more interesting—and far harder to deal with in real time—than the rigid, almost mathematical, conception of politics of the purists, as Daniel McCarthy contends. “Libertarians are more comfortable as gadflies than as leaders,” he rightly wrote, “which means there is little chance a Paul or a Massie will ever become the nominee—at least not without ceasing to be a purist.” There is a good reason why no consequential nation in world history has ever followed the tenets of doctrinaire libertarianism.
But that doesn’t mean the president doesn’t have his own set of problems he has to deal with. Will Thibeau of the Center for the American Way of Life notes that “we do not have the industrial base to sustain what our military can start.” (He argues that we need “AI-driven supply chains that connect the Pentagon to the sub-tier manufacturers who actually build the components.”)
Also, the midterms are coming, in which the president could see the House—and even possibly the Senate—turn toward the Democrats, as more Republicans announce they will not run again. This also has deep implications for Vice President Vance’s eventual presidential run in 2028. If the U.S.’s intervention in Iran goes badly, it will be an albatross that Gavin Newsom and other top Democrats will easily be able to hang around Vance’s neck. Apart from that, Vance needs to explain to independents, along with a select group of right-wing influencers, his support for the Trump administration’s wars. Stories like what appeared in the New York Times on Thursday—that the vice president was against intervention in Iran but once that decision had been made, he offered his best assessment given the situation—will help in this regard.
The political realignment that has shattered the old consensus has still not crystallized. The War in Iran, however, may be what solidifies the character of the new consensus.
