https://www.timesofisrael.com/isolationist-us-right-wing-commentators-decry-iran-war-trump-says-he-doesnt-care/

The most important line in this story is not about Iran. It is about agency. The claim that “the United States didn’t make the decision” and, as Tucker Carlson framed it, “Benjamin Netanyahu did,” is not a neutral description. It is a political technology. It relocates authorship, launders responsibility, and converts a strategic event into a domestic loyalty test.

In this technology, the point is not to establish any truth about the Middle East. The point is to organize emotion inside the United States in a way that produces comfortable innocence. “Not us” is the operative formula. Not us who decided. Not us who are responsible. Not us who will own the consequences if things go badly. It is a mechanism for exporting costs: moral, political, and epistemic. Epistemic too, because once “it wasn’t us,” you are permitted not to understand what is happening at all.

Once the frame “Israel decided, America was dragged” is accepted, everything downstream becomes effortless. Costs, escalation risk, deterrence logic, and alliance commitments can be edited out. You no longer have to argue about aims, constraints, or exit criteria. You only need one veto-word: foreign. “Foreign” cancels obligations while preserving moral heat. It allows an audience to feel justified without being informed, righteous without being responsible.

But there is a deeper layer. The “dragged in” narrative is not merely anti-war. It imports an older permission structure: the insinuation that Jewish self-defense is, by default, someone else’s manipulation. This structure has many historical variants, but the core is stable: Jews as the trigger of other people’s catastrophes, Jews as the hidden lever, Jews as the convenient explanation for a world that feels humiliating and out of control. The contemporary version does not need the old vocabulary. It only needs the old affect: resentment, suspicion, and the psychologically addictive sentence, “We were used.” This can operate without conscious antisemitic intent; it functions as a narrative shortcut that reliably finds a scapegoat.

“We were used” is emotionally cheaper than uncertainty. Uncertainty requires thinking. It requires admitting that the world has its own dynamics, independent of our preferred stories. “We were used” offers instant clarity: a perpetrator, a victim, a betrayal, a clean moral account. Most importantly, it offers moral immunity. If you were used, you are not responsible. If you were used, you do not need to justify your decisions. If you were used, even your errors become someone else’s guilt.

This is where the internal American drama becomes almost comical, and precisely for that reason, tragic. A decision about war is treated as if it carries no signature of reason: no articulated criteria, no auditable logic, no consistent public account of ends and means. Instead of argument, a gesture. Instead of criteria, affect. Instead of responsibility, theatrical denial. When the strongest state on earth tries to govern force through a posture of non-authorship, the result is not restraint. It is strategic incoherence dressed up as innocence.

That distinction matters. Restraint is a decision. It has criteria. It has boundary conditions. It accepts costs consciously and publicly. Non-authorship is something else: it is the avoidance of decision combined with the preservation of decision’s privileges. It is the attempt to eat the cake and keep the cake. We want the ability to use force, but we do not want the signature beneath the use of force. We want the world to fear us, but we do not want the political price of being a power. We want influence, but we also want the moral comfort of victimhood.

The humiliation of Vice President JD Vance makes this incoherence visible. Vance has been marketed as the face of a “new isolationism” inside the Trump coalition: the person meant to give “America First” an anti-war seriousness, an exit from the endless cycles of intervention. Yet in the crisis, he does not appear as a brake. He appears as part of a frantic messaging scramble: privately opposed, but once war “exists,” urging speed and closure. That is not a doctrine. It is a post-fact insurance policy. And Trump’s public posture effectively bypasses him, asserting “MAGA is Trump” and projecting indifference rather than elevating Vance as the movement’s anti-war voice. Vance is compromised twice: ideologically, because war happened; and structurally, because he is reduced to décor.

This is the point where non-authorship becomes a tragic farce. A movement that markets itself as the restoration of sovereign decision ends up displaying decision without authorship, war without criteria, power without signature. The stage remains, the brand remains, and the world is expected to treat the performance as governance. That is the signal to watch: the politics of a superpower begins to resemble impression management rather than risk management.

For Israelis, the practical takeaway is uncomfortable but simple. Read these voices less as Middle East analysis and more as indicators of a shifting American admissibility regime. The key question is no longer “Will they support Israel?” but “What story about Israel is becoming socially admissible inside US domestic politics?” Because once a story stabilizes, it reshapes what legislators can vote for, what donors can defend publicly, what journalists normalize, and what voters tolerate the next time.

Notice the deeper symmetry. Parts of the progressive left reduce Israel to a moral allegory of power and guilt. Parts of the populist right increasingly reduce Israel to an allegory of manipulation and American victimhood. Different ideologies, same operation: Israel is turned from a state acting under threat into a screen for someone else’s internal drama. And once Israel becomes a screen, the most important thing in the real world disappears: the causal chain.

In the real world there are aims, constraints, escalation tempo, de-escalation channels, deterrence thresholds, intelligence errors, miscalculation risks, and continuous management of uncertainty. In the world of screens there are only characters. In the world of screens there is only “who dragged whom.” That difference is not cosmetic. The screen-world is the ideal environment for moral panic and political exploitation.

A final point. Alliances are not romance. They are instruments for managing uncertainty and preventing worse futures. A superpower that narrates itself as perpetually manipulated does not become cautious. It becomes incapable of authorship. In that politics, nobody “decides”; everyone is “dragged.” That is not a peace platform. It is a pretext generator.

If you want to see the long game, do not watch who “won” this one debate. Watch what form of decision becomes normal. Does a responsible form return, where criteria can be stated, boundary conditions can be checked, and costs can be owned? Or does a tragic-farce form stabilize, where a power acts but denies acting, decides but denies deciding, uses force but refuses the signature? If the second form stabilizes, the problem is larger than Israel. It touches the basic condition of any politics that is not theatre: authorship.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)