Those Sometimes-Trump Neocons Are Returning to the Fold Over Iran

Ten years ago this month, Donald Trump launched his first presidential campaign, which means that, after a few false starts, Bill Kristol has been vocally Never Trump for almost a full decade. The Weekly Standard, the flagship neoconservative magazine Kristol founded in 1995, folded in 2018 when its publisher, Philip Anschutz, withdrew funding over its opposition to the first Trump administration. The Bulwark, which Kristol cofounded as an online successor to the Standard, has maintained that posture into Trump’s second term. In recent months, Kristol has gestured toward positions that would place him to the left of much of the Democratic Party—on Twitter, he has applauded Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies, all but endorsed abolishing ICE, and repeatedly referred to his “inner social democrat”—the last of these perhaps a reference to the youthful Marxism of his late father, Irving Kristol, who is widely considered a foundational neoconservative.

But as Trump contemplates direct US participation in Israel’s war with Iran, including the possible use of “bunker buster” bombs on the heavily fortified Fordo uranium enrichment site, Kristol has made it known that he still has that hawk in him. “You’ve got to go to war with the president you have,” he told The New York Times on Wednesday. “If you really think that Iran can’t have nuclear weapons, we have a chance to try to finish the job.” In a series of blog posts for The Bulwark, Kristol has elaborated on his position: “I’ve not been in recent years a supporter of Bibi Netanyahu. But I support Israel’s attack on Iran’s nuclear program,” he wrote last week. “I’ve never been, and don’t intend ever to be, a supporter of Donald Trump. But I wish the president and his administration well in this crisis.” John Bolton, the neocon policymaker who had a dramatic falling-out with Trump during his first term, struck a similar note. “Bomb Fordo and be done with it,” he told the Times. “I think this is long overdue.’’

To longtime critics of Kristol and the wider cohort of Never Trump neocons he represents, Kristol’s endorsement of yet another US war in the Middle East is a vindication of a decade of warnings. “I’ll be accepting apologies from everyone who insisted we needed to welcome Bill Kristol in our coalition,” tweeted Matt Duss, Sanders’s former foreign policy adviser, yesterday. “He delivered no votes, but thanks to you treating him as a democratic ally he can provide the illusion of consensus for another catastrophic war.” Glenn Greenwald, whose opposition to US imperial wars has in recent years aligned him with the “America First” right that backed Trump’s presidential campaigns, piled on: “The #NeverTrump neocons have been biting their tongues so hard over the last week, wanting to praise Trump for supporting another Israeli war but also knowing they trained a loyal liberal audience to believe he’s Hitler.” Meanwhile, Trump’s MAGA inner circle, including Vice President JD Vance and Steve Bannon, is scrambling to reconcile its loyalty to the president with its oft-stated opposition to new US wars. “Of course, people are right to be worried about foreign entanglement after the last 25 years of idiotic foreign policy,” Vance tweeted on Tuesday. “But I believe the president has earned some trust on this issue.” Bannon, too, seems ready to put loyalty first. “We may hate it,” he said at an event for The Christian Science Monitor, “but you know, we’ll get on board.”

When Trump won last November, the conventional wisdom immediately congealed that “America First” isolationism had won out against neocon interventionism. The defeated Democrats were the party of Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney, and above all of Joe Biden’s disastrous support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. As The New York Times reported days after the election, Trump’s national security team “reflects the broader marginalization of neocons throughout the Republican Party after the disaster in Iraq and the rise of America First.” In my own inaugural Nation column in February, I sounded a note of skepticism; Trump, I wrote, “has taken advice in the past from figures whom the Times would call ‘America First’ as well as figures it would call ‘neocons’—and most likely he will again.” With Trump, inconsistency is usually the safest bet; the president is no ideologue, and is easily swayed by flatterers and the vagaries of the TV news cycle. On any given day, he may be pushing for a Gaza ceasefire and a restoration of the Iran nuclear deal his first administration unilaterally scrapped—or he may be preparing to bomb Iran and mulling the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

Trump’s flakiness is crazy-making for anyone with a coherent worldview, including neoconservatism as practiced by Kristol, which might be summarized as support for robust American military power in the service of crusading idealism abroad. This worldview is rooted in the Cold War liberalism of the JFK era, was kept afloat by Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson through the 1970s, and found a comfortable home in the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush before returning to the Democratic establishment’s welcoming embrace in the Trump era. Kristol’s wing of neoconservatism, which also includes figures like David Frum, Max Boot, and Robert Kagan, has generally cast the president as a vulgar authoritarian whose assault on American institutions is at least as terrifying as the threat they once perceived from the New Left. This stands in contrast to the geriatric Norman Podhoretz, who alongside Irving Kristol is neoconservatism’s acknowledged patriarch, and who sees Trump as a kindred spirit. His son, John Podhoretz—the nepo-editor of Commentary, which his father turned into a neocon stalwart and ran for 35 years—likewise sees continuity between the Bush era and today. “Eighteen years ago this month, my father, Norman Podhoretz, published ‘The Case for Bombing Iran,’” the younger Podhoretz tweeted last week. “He’s 95 and a half. I’m thrilled he’s with us still to see this unfold.”

One would think by now that the neocons might know better than to get carried away with excitement over a new war in the Middle East. Their last successful effort to launch one, Bush’s campaign of regime change in Iraq in 2003, is almost universally regarded as a fiasco today, even though it, too, seemed to be going well at the outset. Besides the humiliating failure to ever find the weapons of mass destruction it had cited as a pretext for war, the Bush administration had no real plan for a post–Saddam Hussein Iraq, and its mismanagement of the invasion’s aftermath set off a years-long, brutal sectarian war—hardly the flourishing liberal democracy that Kristol and his cohort had assured the public would emerge.

Back then, the neocons wielded considerable influence within the executive branch, where many friends, fellow travelers, and even family members worked on national security policy. Today, they watch from the sidelines, with Kristol at least acknowledging that the leaders prosecuting their long-sought war against Iran are temperamentally unsuited to the task. Even if Israel and the United States do manage to dismantle the Iranian nuclear program by force, no one knows whether Iran’s theocratic regime will remain in power, or what would replace it if it fell, or what kinds of long-term ripple effects will spread throughout the region, where Israel is currently at war with five distinct belligerents. It’s unlikely this will end well, and extremely premature to be declaring Mission Accomplished.