Four Thoughts on Trump's Hawkish Turn on Iran

New York Times

17-06-2025

The only way to know for certain where Donald Trump's Iran policy is going is to wait — for the president to throw in fully with the Israelis, for a new attempt at diplomacy with a battered Iranian regime, for a continuation of America's current position as spectator, cheerleader and secondary participant.
But while we wait, here are four quick comments on the debate about the war:
1) There is nothing inherently surprising about Trump's permitting and indirectly supporting Israel's war against Iran. Trump generally took a hawkish line on Iran throughout his first term; he has never been a principled noninterventionist; his deal-making style has always involved the threat of force as a crucial bargaining chip; and the idea that you can accomplish a lot with a few sharp blows while avoiding regime change and nation building fits comfortably into his worldview.
What is more surprising is that Trump would let war come after he had seemingly separated himself from his first term's hawkish personnel — sometimes with prejudice, as with the petty withdrawal in January of security protection from his former secretary of state Mike Pompeo. This separation helps explain the wounded shock with which some noninterventionists on the right have reacted to the war. They imagined that personnel was policy, that the realists and would-be restrainers in Trump's orbit would have a decisive influence. That was clearly a mistake, and the lesson here is that Trump decides and no one else. (And it could well be the hawks' turn to be disappointed tomorrow, if he decides to accept concessions from Tehran that they regard as fake or insufficient.)
2) I have a lot of doubts about the decision to let the Israelis go for it. But noninterventionists should recognize that the strongest Tucker Carlson-style argument for restraining Israel from war, the warning that Iran could plunge the Middle East into turmoil and strike at Americans across the region and the world, inevitably looked much weaker once the Israelis were able to absolutely wreck Iranian proxies, Hezbollah as well as Hamas, across 2024.
Those successes were also of immediate strategic benefit to an America that's facing serious challenges from multiple rivals at once, reducing Iran's ability to add its own pressure to Russian aggression and Chinese ambition. So if you imagine the basic Benjamin Netanyahu pitch to the White House — in effect, Let us have a go at the Iranians, and you can decide whether to explicitly support us once you see the outcome — it's easy to see how Trump might decide that an 'America First,' national interest-based foreign policy is compatible with letting the Israelis try to settle all accounts.
3) With that said, I'm unconvinced by the arguments from some writers on the nationalist right, like Oren Cass and Daniel McCarthy, who have tried to square Trump's acceptance of the Israeli war with their own desire for American disentanglement from global obligations. Of course one can square the two in theory — acceptance is not participation, and Israel's war need not be ours — but in practice wars are almost always engines of entanglement for great powers, whatever their initial intentions may be.
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