Trump's Gift to the Neocons
The fact that the people with the worst foreign policy judgment in America are cheering Trump on just confirms how wrong he was.
Samuel Moyn reminds us that Trump’s illegal Iran attack fulfilled the fantasies of neoconservatives:
With neocon scion Bill Kristol in the lead, after the Iran strike they fawned over the man whom they had spent years castigating as irresponsible, or malignant, or both. No wonder: Trump, far from acting as an isolationist or realist, was executing one of the longest-held and longest-denied neoconservative fantasies: that bombing Iran’s nuclear program off the map would work, and might have the fringe benefit of causing the regime to fall. It remains a fantasy. But Trump’s place in history is now defined by that fantasy more than by any other foreign policy choice he has made so far.
It is no accicdent that Trump’s decision to bomb was celebrated by many of the worst people in the country. Every cheerleader for the Iraq war and every Bush-era ghoul came out of the woodwork to praise Trump for doing what even George W. Bush wasn’t stupid enough to do. To take one example, Bret Stephens lauded Trump’s “courageous and correct decision.” Given Stephens’ atrocious foreign policy views, that is more proof that Trump’s decision was neither of those things.