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Rightwing populists say that Trump has embraced George W. Bush’s foreign policy. They’re half-right.

When Donald Trump won the 2016 Republican primary, he didn’t just defeat a field of rivals; he toppled a dynasty.

For nearly three decades, the Bush family and its vassals lorded over red America. This regime’s style of Republicanism reflected the peculiar interests and obsessions of country-club conservatives: tax cuts, free trade, and mass immigration to lower corporations’ costs and regime-change wars to fortify America’s global hegemony (and/or Israel’s interests).

But America’s forgotten men and women had little investment in this globalist agenda. They wanted tariffs to protect their jobs, taxes on the rich to fund their entitlement benefits, sealed borders to secure their culture, and an isolationist foreign policy to prevent their kids from dying in a forever war — and this was precisely what Trump would deliver.

Or, so many right-wing populists once believed.

Alas, the idea that Trump’s policies all emanate from a coherent governing philosophy of any kind (much less a pro-labor one) was falsified long ago. Yet, some pro-Trump populists managed to keep the faith — until the Iran War.

For nearly a month now, Trump has been prioritizing the subjugation (if not overthrow) of a Middle-eastern government over the health of America’s economy, and he has done so in the name of preventing that state from acquiring weapons of mass destruction and liberating its people — the same rationales that Republicans used to sell the 2003 Iraq War.

For Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and various populist intellectuals, all of this is painfully familiar. The Claremont Institute’s Christopher Caldwell has declared the Iran War “The end of Trumpism.” Micael Lind, a fellow-traveler of the populist right, goes further, arguing that Trump has proven to be George W. Bush with a more “colorful personality.”

Right-wing populists aren’t wrong to feel a sense of disappointment and déjà vu, but Lind overstates his case. Trump is not Bush in more garish packaging.

Even if we ignore the obvious divergence between the two presidents’ immigration agendas and focus exclusively on their respective foreign policies, clear differences emerge. Trump has taken a novel approach to geopolitics; it just isn’t quite the one that right-wing populists were hoping for.

Can the Iran war even be........

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