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The American and Israeli strikes on the Islamic Republic in Iran are spilling out across the Gulf. One social media video shows Dubai’s iconic Palm Hotel in flames. Tourists on the emirate’s beaches are filming interceptors colliding with incoming rockets. Other clips show the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain exploding after being struck by cruise missiles. Rumours – not yet confirmed – are spreading that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been killed. This state of war is taking place under the command of a president who claimed to be the candidate for peace.
“I’m in awe of President Trump’s determination to be a man of peace but at the end of the day, evil’s worst nightmare.” That is what the neo-conservative Senator Lindsey Graham posted on X this morning. At the end of the day, President Trump will choose war over peace, in other words. The neo-cons are ascendant in Trump’s America. A president who was elected as the anti-war candidate is delivering their dream of a war for regime change in Iran. Trump once said that had he listened to his hawkish former national security adviser, John Bolton, then the US would be in “World War Six”. This morning Bolton praised the war as “the most consequential decision” of his presidency.
Even President Trump’s rhetoric echoes the paeans to freedom that were used to justify what 2015 candidate Trump once derided as the “forever wars”. He told the Washington Post this morning that “all I want is freedom for the people”, and in a video address, he attacked the Islamic regime to hand the Iranian people a “once in a generation chance” to oust the mullahs. He said the regime had caused regional “mass terror”. These lofty and moral considerations are nothing like his previous calls for US foreign policy to focus solely on the national interest.
Alongside the rhetoric, Trump also resembles the neo-cons is his close cooperation with Israel. Those who believe in America First, such as Tucker Carlson, see Israel as the devil in America’s ear, keeping the US militarily engaged in the Middle East instead of spending those precious dollars at home, where they can reconstruct the heartland. Trump’s pressure on Netanyahu to end the war in Gaza, particularly after the Israeli strike on Doha, was a sign that the real special relationship was breaking down. But that was short-lived. Today’s assault on Iran is a joint mission, which serves Israel’s long-held ambition to destroy a regime that wants to remove it from the map.
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The strikes are at odds with what many in his administration and the Maga movement at large believe in. Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, said as recently as December that the “War Department will not be distracted by democracy-building interventionism, undefined wars, regime change”. JD Vance, an America Firster, said this week that a “full-blown war” would not happen, and Vance, who served with the US Marine Corps in Iraq, must have smarted at the glib way Trump said in his speech that Americans will probably die as “that often happens in war”. Vance’s prediction now looks more like futile hope than White House policy. Carlson, who was at the White House with Trump last week, has called the war “absolutely disgusting and evil”.
And don’t expect Congress to rein in the President. Although reports suggest Marco Rubio told Congressional leaders in advance of the strikes unlike before the assault on Caracas, the House of Representatives, where rebellious members such as Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna had been trying to pass a War Powers Resolution that would prevent military action, is not due sit on Monday or Tuesday.
The question this all poses is why Trump has transformed from a trenchant critic of the neo-cons to the man who makes their dreams come true. (Surely somewhere in heaven, or perhaps down in hell, Dick Cheney is watching this all unfold with a wolfish smile on his face.) Over the past year, Trump has used the American military like an imperial army, sending it off to kill and capture those who defy his will.
The reasons for striking Iran over the past few weeks have been muddled, shifting from merely serving as a negotiating tactic to full-blown regime change. It is more probable that Trump’s odes to freedom are little more than cover for him to punish a regime that he considers disobedient. Alongside tariffs, opposing foreign wars was one of the few consistent beliefs Trump held. But now he has unleashed a war whose outcome he cannot control.
[Further reading: Donald Trump is sleepwalking into war with Iran]
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