Trump Ran on ‘No New Wars.’ What a Joke. |
In a remarkable, potentially catastrophic weekend, one bare fact became clear about Donald Trump’s volatile and terrifying White House: The neoconservatives, once seemingly vanquished by the new class of MAGA intellectuals, are back in control.
The killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been the dream of Washington war hawks for decades. American troops are dead, too, and Trump and his allies are hand-waving away the losses. Trump’s second term seems to represent the return, full blast, of this pre-MAGA, right-wing foreign-policy consensus. Trump is less subtle than George W. Bush and, ironically, a tad less ambitious — a Bush regime might have parachuted American troops into Caracas to start the full occupation — but the attacks on Iran and Venezuela, the former coordinated with Israel, fit well with Bush’s legacy.
It’s a surprising turnabout for the hawks after what they endured in the 2024 campaign: Trump, to great cheers, promised “no new wars” and all of his sycophants tried to portray Kamala Harris as the unhinged warmongerer, the instrument of undead neoconservative thought. J.D. Vance, as the columnist Sohrab Ahmari recently pointed out, was the leader of this new isolationist vanguard and declared, less than two years ago, that “Our interest, I think, very much is in not going to war with Iran. It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our........