The irony of the Iran war is that Donald Trump, whose patience with writing and policy explanations is too famous to be ignored, came to understand the reality of the situation more quickly and more clearly than his conservative supporters who spent years pondering the issue. Trump, realizing that the United States has suffered a historic defeat, has abandoned his demands for unconditional surrender, and is trying to buy his way out of the accord that reportedly promised Tehran billions of dollars to restore the status quo. In contrast, the neocons, a group of interventionists who long developed a reputation as the brains of the conservative movement, have been slow on the uptake.
“I suspect that the MOU may be worse than the administration’s poor sales orientation,” Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies published on X yesterday. (Later he he agreed the plan was not better at all but, in fact, “worse than I thought.”) Analyst Batya Ungar-Sargon. hypothetical that Trump may be “in fugue mode.” Marc Thiessen, A Washington Post a journalist who has tried to steer Trump toward trafficking through relentless negligence, it is called MOU “Vance peace plan,” as if the anti-interventionist troops had staged a coup. The plaintiff’s time actually happened when Commentspodcast when Eli Lake, a hawkish foreign policy analyst, he cried “What’s going on? What’s going on?”
What is going on is that the neocons misunderstood the geographic situation and the president they trusted to solve it.
A defining characteristic of conservative thought is an unbridled belief in the effectiveness of American military power. This belief led the leaders to boycott the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. A tougher president, they believed, would use the threat of US power to get Iran to accept tougher terms.
At the time, the neocons insisted that their plan would not involve using force. “There is an alternative, and it is not war,” Dubowitz he wrote in 2015, “It’s a great deal.”
Trump broke Barack Obama’s deal, but the threat of war did not produce a better deal. So Dubowitz and his allies believed that the military would accomplish their goals. When Trump’s 2025 bombing campaign failed to eliminate Iran’s nuclear threat, they decided a larger military campaign would force the country to make a deal. The campaign has come, but the consensus has not come. The hard truth is that the Iranian regime has held on to power, is indifferent to the suffering of its people, and buried its nuclear material and most of its military power underground where air power could not easily destroy it.
Another mistake made by the neocons is to misjudge Trump. The president may have seemed to contribute to their goals, given his frequent disdain for the Obama administration’s handling of the issue. But the reason why Trump hates Obama’s nuclear deal is that it was done by Obama, a figure he regards with a mixture of jealousy and racial hatred.
While the neoconservative drive to prevent a nuclear Iran stems from hatred and fear of its own authoritarian regime, Trump has never had an ideological hatred of a foreign power. His geographical vision is personal. To the extent that a country’s authoritarian character contributes to its assessment, it is generally beneficial.
By suppressing mass protests and then defeating Trump at the negotiating table, the Iranian regime began to elevate itself in the same group as Russia, China, North Korea, and other “powerful” dictatorships that it supports. “I have never cared about a change of government,” he said yesterday at the G7 meeting. “We’re dealing with people who I think are sane people,” Trump said of Iran’s leadership. “They were great to deal with. They were strong, smart people.”
If Iran’s rulers are wise and good, one wonders why their potential acquisition of nuclear weapons would concern the United States. Indeed, Trump floated the notion that seizing Iran’s nuclear material is no longer very important. “You can make a case, why even bother?”, he thought, adding, “They are not very valuable things.”
Despite his bragging, Trump has never been a shrewd businessman. His specialty is finding ways to eliminate short-term value while increasing long-term costs to others, while manipulating public opinion so that he can always find a new round of exploiters. Nothing about this skill set suggested an ability or even a willingness to deal with a problem like Iran’s nuclear ambitions, especially if doing so would increase costs. Once it became clear that he would not enjoy a quick and cheap victory, Trump’s calculation was always that expensive gasoline was his problem, and a future nuclear-armed Iran was someone else’s.
Trump’s desperation to withdraw from the war has been evident for more than two months. War supporters have had to deal with this fact by continuing through Kübler-Ross stages of grief at various speeds. They all started in a stage of denial. “It’s amazing to me that so many seem to conclude that the US implicitly agreed to Iran’s unacceptable demands (US guarantees of non-aggression, acceptance of enrichment, full sanctions relief, unfrozen Iranian assets, and a complete US withdrawal from the Middle East) when Iran clearly opposed ours (no ballistic missile program, weapons enrichment program,” National Assessmentof Noah Rothman he insisted in early April, dismissing as impossible the emerging contours of the plan.
“I would say this to the President: I personally know you will do the right thing,” commented the hawk. Mark Levin he said in early April, when the ceasefire began, adding, “I have complete faith in this man.” A month later, a Fox News personality Jesse Watters he still clung to hope. “The commander-in-chief must believe that the Iranians are willing to surrender,” he said. “The president,” Watters continued, “must know what he’s doing.”
At the moment, the main emotion among hawks is the second stage: anger. Trump “choked, laughed, bled dry,” Podhoretz he complained earlier this week. “The greatest power that ever existed was brought to its knees by a few mines. Just a disaster for America,” Ungar-Sargon wrote on X today.
Others have entered the negotiation stage. “The smartest thing for Trump to do is to get Iran to settle for this deal and then let Israel do another decapitation strike,” the podcaster said. Erick Erickson he said yesterday. Conservative activist Will Chamberlain he suggested“President Trump should refuse.” For those dealing with hawkish loved ones, the next steps are depression and then acceptance.
Reaching this final is not easy, though. When Trump declared war, he warned, “the government’s conventional ballistic missile program was growing rapidly and massively, and this posed a very clear threat to America and our forces overseas.” But speaking in Europe today, he said Iran he was to keep its ballistic missiles, as Saudi Arabia had its own, and to be mocked consultants who suggested otherwise (“I don’t think they’re smart”).
At the same time, the administration is trying to make its supporters forget a decade of claims that Obama betrayed the country by giving “pallets of money” to Iran while allowing the country to return billions immediately, by lifting sanctions, and perhaps even more in “reconstruction funds” that Iran sees, not correctly, as compensation. The horror palettes seen in endless Fox News clips transferred $1.7 billion to Tehran, a small figure compared to the $12 billion in unfrozen assets, not to mention the potential $300 billion in reparations.
Obama “gave them $1.7 billion in cash, cash,” Trump said Wednesday morning, in a video clip along with its rapid response team. It is as if Trump’s only objection to the JCPOA was not the amount of money involved but the use of actual sanctions.
Perhaps the hawks will realize that their preferred policy was wrong, that regime change with air power was impossible, and that Trump should not have been in charge in the first place. Or maybe they will appear on Fox News soon praising Trump’s wise and generous dealings with our Iranian friends, in contrast to the sly gifts from the stingy Obama.
