Of course he did

Can all you anti-establishment types tell me who this was for?

I’ll get to the strikes themselves in a moment. First, let’s back up a bit.

Ten years ago, Donald Trump burst onto the scene as a different kind of Republican. There were many ways he was different, rhetorically and temperamentally. But when it came to policy, no issue more distinguished him than his approach to foreign policy. His sharp criticism of “endless wars” in the Middle East, the trillions spent on them, and the neoconservatives who started and continued them, from George and Jeb Bush to John McCain, was a huge driver of his appeal.

Trump was no peacenik in his first term, but he played one on TV, and could at least argue that most of his wars were inherited from predecessors. He reaffirmed his noninterventionist mandate in his 2019 State of the Union address:

“I was elected on getting out of these ridiculous, endless wars, where our great military functions as a policing operation to the benefit of people who don’t even like the USA.”

26 months ago, Trump’s campaign rolled out a foreign policy platform called “Agenda 47.” It promised to “fire the warmongers and globalists who seek endless wars.” In announcing it, Trump boasted that he was:

“the only president in generations who didn’t start a war... the only president who rejected the catastrophic advice of many of Washington’s Generals, bureaucrats, and the so-called diplomats who only know how to get us into conflict, but they don’t know how to get us out.”

17 months ago, Trump held a rally before the Iowa caucus where he told supporters to elect him so the country could “turn the page on those foolish, stupid days of never-ending wars.” He won his primary against Nikki Haley in part by deriding her as a “warmonger” whose mentality on foreign policy was “Let’s kill people all over the place and let’s make a lot of money for those people that make the messes.”

All summer, Trump insisted that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza would never have happened if he were president. All summer, self-described libertarians told me they had to vote for Trump to end the wars. Appointing JD Vance as VP and Tulsi Gabbard as DNI proved he was serious, they said.

Insofar as Trump’s oddball coalition had a unifying ideology this past election, it was “anti-establishment.” And the most defining aspect of that nebulous establishment—the most striking way in which the consensus of DC insiders departs from the views and priorities of everyday Americans—is the insiders’ penchant for military force overseas to advance vague “security interests,” which are so often a euphemism for foreign interests, pork barrel spending, and enriching the military industrial complex. The most coherent arguments for Trump I could find revolved, most of all, around draining that swamp.

Three months ago, Tulsi Gabbard told Congress that the unequivocal assessment of the U.S. intelligence community was that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. When Israel presented its evidence arguing that Iran was building a bomb, the U.S. intelligence community was not convinced.

One week ago, Israel started a war against Iran anyway. It did this not because it was in any pressing danger, nor because Iran was meaningfully closer to building (much less using!) a nuclear bomb than it has been for years. Rather, Israel attacked because it is run by a warmongering cult, and because its Prime Minister is a corrupt, jingoistic war criminal who knows his term will end as soon as there are no more wars to fight. And since Netanyahu sees Trump as manipulable, he didn’t just ask for his green light—he asked for his participation.

All week long, the most MAGA of MAGA diehards—Marjorie Taylor Greene, Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk, etc.—implored Trump not to fall for it. Tucker Carlson dragged Ted Cruz onto his show to berate him for supporting it. What passes for right-wing intellectuals these days had what passes for a debate, and the whole country hung in suspense: would he, or wouldn’t he?

Two days ago, Trump said he’d decide “within the next two weeks”.¹ The same day, he told a fawning reporter (and later posted to Truth Social) that he deserves to have won the Nobel Peace Prize “four or five times” by now.² The reporter suggested they rename it the Trump Peace Prize.

28 hours later, he made war. He bombed a country that previously presented no noticeable threat to the safety of the American people, but now is well within its rights to fight back.

I am professionally involved with the political movement supporting “realism and restraint” in U.S. foreign policy. Most of them are well-meaning people who do important work. About half of them voted for Trump or volunteered to work in his administration because they bought into the idea that Trump was on their side. Democrats, they told me, care about feel-good principles like democracy and human rights, but Trump the Realist was going to pivot to China. Democrats can’t distinguish core from peripheral interests, but Trump had the restraint to avoid entangling us in wars of choice—et cetera, et cetera.

All through 2024, I tried to reason with these people. I steel-manned their arguments and then dismantled them, citing the “long list of hawkish blunders” Trump made in his first term. He fired missiles at Syria, assassinated Soleimani, increased troop levels in Afghanistan, and massively increased U.S. drone strikes in multiple countries. He disastrously withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal. He armed Saudi Arabia while it slaughtered Yemeni civilians, enflaming a horrendous humanitarian catastrophe. He floated military operations against Mexican drug cartels.

I warned that his “ignorance, vanity, and penchant for absurd and impulsive ideas was extremely dangerous in global affairs, where temperament is not independent from policy in a crisis.” I warned that “the few areas where Trump is more dovish than Harris are more accurately described as pro-dictator than they are as pro-restraint, and would result in sudden destabilizations of global conflicts rather than a responsible handover of responsibility to U.S. allies.”

So before we move on to picking up the pieces of this decision, I’d like those people I warned to own up to it: they got suckered.

There’s no great shame in it. Hindsight is 20/20, and you can argue you made the best decision you could based on the information at the time. I’ve been suckered myself. But I admitted it, and so should you. If you thought for half a second that this man had actual principles, on foreign policy or anything else, you were the dupe of a dishonest gasbag who says anything he needs to stay in power. Less biased people didn’t fall for it, and those people were right.

People with eyes to see, ears to hear, and a brain not addled by ingroup bubbles knew all along that Trump did not give one flying fuck about “realism and restraint,” because he doesn’t care about anything on this planet but himself. When push came to shove, and the most powerful lobby in American foreign policy pulled out all the stops to coax and flatter him into making war, he dropped a decade’s worth of promises like a toy he was bored with, so that he could flex how big and strong his bombs are in a speech that would make Donald Rumsfeld blush.

Most of his supporters will immediately fall in line. They’ll move the goalposts, like they always do. Smart people will have more respect for you if you don’t do that.

Four thoughts on the strikes themselves

I don’t know how this will end. It is not yet Iraq—we don’t have boots on the ground, have not committed to regime change, and may well avoid catastrophe. We have certainly used airstrikes on sovereign nations before and gotten away with it. Maybe it will be fine! Maybe Iran is too weak to do shit, and will save face with some non-response, and it’ll all blow over like the strikes on Syria did. Here’s what I do know:

1. The justification for the strikes is completely contrived.

There has been no recent change in Iran’s nuclear program. Israel is only pretending that there has been as an excuse to do what it’s wanted to do for decades. We can be confident of this because Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that Iran was dangerously close to achieving a nuclear weapon, and urged the United States to stop it by force, for roughly 33 years. Here is a video compilation of him saying this over and over and over:

In 2023, I was a national security staffer for a centrist Senator. I fielded dozens of meetings with the Israel lobby, and this same exact line of argument—that Iran was only weeks away from a bomb—was trotted out in most of them. It’s not new! It’s been the status quo for years.

It’s also not unique to Iran. Plenty of countries hedge about nuclear weapons, including U.S. allies like Japan and South Korea. These countries insist they have a right to nuclearize, and they have the technical capacity to do so, but they’ve resisted the temptation to actually build a bomb. Nobody thinks this combination of factors would justify China or North Korea in launching a preemptive strike. If they did, it would likely start a World War. The Biden administration bent over backwards to fund all manner of war crimes in Gaza, but it at least had spine enough to call bullshit on the idea that Iran’s nuclear research facilities were grounds for starting a second war.

The singular reason Israel launched this war now, rather than last year, is that they knew Donald Trump would allow and perhaps join it, while Joe Biden would not. They had to go through a charade of “negotiations” with maximalist demands first, but that only cost them a few months. They correctly calculated that Trump was someone they could walk all over, and saw his presidency as an opportunity to get away with as much violence as they wanted.

2. The strikes are transparently illegal.

I have written long papers on the war powers debate, and don’t have space to restate the case in full detail. Here’s a piece I wrote about the Syria attacks that mostly applies today too. For a high-level summary, I’ll quote:

“The Constitution of the United States is Donald Trump’s only legitimate source of political authority. The powers of the president are clearly enumerated in Article II of that constitution. The power to attack foreign nations (or initiate hostilities, or take kinetic military action, or conduct sustained air/ground/counter-terror operations, or whatever euphemism for war you prefer) is not among them. It is, however, explicitly provided to Congress in Article I, under the non-euphemistic label “to declare war” – a fact which makes its absence in Article II all the more glaring. As Ilya Somin of the Volokh Conspiracy wryly points out: “It is a longstanding principle of legal reasoning that we should not interpret laws in such a way as to render large parts of them completely superfluous.”

People (like John Yoo and Lindsey Graham) who argue that the President’s Article II powers include the right to initiate hostilities are generally charlatans arguing in bad faith. Their interpretation is provably at odds with the intended meaning of the Constitution and with how its text was understood for our nation’s first 160 years. In a sane world, Trump would be impeached for this.

3. Trump’s address shows how far the presidency has fallen.

Last night, Fox interrupted the Mets game I was watching to broadcast the President’s address to the nation. I changed the channel in disgust, but I’m told it went about as I expected:

The targets are completely obliterated, except for the targets we’ll take out next. We have the best guns, nobody has guns like we do. Go Israel. Boo Iran. Yay. We love you God.³

Before FOX cut to the address, the broadcasters gave instructions for what channel to switch to if viewers preferred to keep watching the game. I thought that was telling! I’m old enough to remember when those instructions would have been unthinkable.

I remember the edge-of-your-seat gravity, the thickness in the air, the shushing of side-chatter, as we huddled around my parents’ 11-inch television to hear Bush speak somberly about his decision to invade Iraq. Back when it was only the second or third time our nation made this mistake, we saw the President as speaking for us. If our brave, devoted military experts decided this was necessary to keep us safe, who were we to question it? If the President had an announcement so somber that it warranted interrupting a live national broadcast, we citizens had a duty to listen! Military strikes were must-watch TV, and even suggesting that people might want to watch sports instead would be seen as disrespectful to the office.

Even when we got bin-Laden in 2011, there was a seriousness to these announcements that reflected competence and national unity. Polarization was well underway—the right detested Obama—but even Republicans saw the strikes as a victory. Coincidentally, I was in the stands of another Mets-Phillies game when the news broke, and the crowd chanted: U. S. A.! U. S. A.!

Can anyone imagine a crowd chanting USA about this decision? Do even Trump’s most adamant supporters believe these strikes were necessary to keep us safe? Or are even they a bit burned out by the thought of yet another war, at an already chaotic moment in world affairs? Could the broadcasters sense that our yearning to tune out the news for three blessed hours on a Saturday night was half the reason we’re watching baseball in the first place?

4. We all know who this was for.

I was walking home when I got the NYT notification. I stopped, sighed, and muttered: “Of course he did.” Because that’s what our country needs right now, is another war. We don’t have enough going on.

I was not yet home before my phone lit up with messages from dismayed friends and family. Anger added some pep to my step. As I hurried home to start writing this blog, I passed three homeless dudes who, I am certain, could not possibly give less of a shit what is happening in Iran. It had a way of driving home the obvious: it sure wasn’t the little guy Trump did this for.

So tell me: who was it for?

Was it his blue-collar base in middle America that clamored for these strikes? Was it the anti-woke Substackers, or the edgelords on X, who thought they were taking their country back from the blob? Was it the populists, so moved by Rich Men North of Richmond, who felt this served the interests of “people like me, people like you?”

My little brother is in the Army Reserves. He just finished BOLC two weeks ago and reunited with his girlfriend after four months apart. Was it for his benefit that we picked this fight? I served four years myself, so a lot of my friends are still in. Was this what they envisioned being asked to risk their lives for?

It doesn’t seem like it. Polling from the Washington Post last week showed 45% of Americans opposed striking Iran, against 25% in favor. When we limit it to Trump voters, another poll said 53% opposed vs. 19% in favor.

Even if we avoid a wider war, and no troops are deployed to manage the fallout, and there’s no humanitarian or refugee crisis—three big ifs!—Americans will face a higher risk of terror attacks on U.S. soil today than they did yesterday. That risk will remain elevated for years. They’ll face higher gas prices, especially if Iran responds by closing the Strait of Hormuz. They will notice exactly zero benefits to their everyday lives.

The only groups Trump did this for are Israel and the good-ole’ foreign policy establishment, the same one railed against for a decade. John Bolton and Bibi Netanyahu are over the moon. The rest of us got stuck with the bill.

1. This is what he says about everything, because he thinks it’s a savvy negotiating tactic. If people think he’s still making up his mind, he reckons, they’re more likely to grovel before him and plead for his favor. Funny how it never seems to work, on tariffs or Iran or North Korea or anything else.

2. The same day as Trump’s strike, Pakistan did in fact nominate Trump for the Prize, which surely was pure coincidence and had nothing at all to do with manipulation through flattery.

3. Not an actual quote, except that last sentence.