Neoconservatives are having a moment. After America Firsters appeared to conquer the Republican Party over the last decade, Donald Trump has swung right back to the old powers of the GOP. The war in Iran has been a dream project for the likes of Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Tom Cotton. John Bolton may be a critic of the president, but he found the Iran bombing campaign to his liking — if only Trump could actually finish the job and engineer actual regime change. Bolton fretted that Trump wouldn’t go far enough.

We’ll see what comes of the two-week ceasefire announced on Tuesday night, after Trump threatened to erase Iranian civilization hours earlier. But regardless, the Iran war is a booby prize for the neocons who think they’ve won the day. Rather than represent a return to the old status quo, a resurrection of Bush-style interventions abroad, it will likely result in the opposite: the death of interventionism as we know it. Making such an argument at this moment may seem laughable. This is a warmongering administration, and Trump will be president, barring death or removal from office, for another two years and eight months, plenty of time to do damage across the world. Trump has been obsessed with Iran for decades and, as the Times recently reported, he was eager to join up with Benjamin Netanyahu in a war Israel was hungry to launch. He subscribed, wholly, to the Israeli prime minister’s maniacal view of the Middle East.

But the war hawks shouldn’t be so exultant. There is very little popular support for Trump’s bombing campaign, and he has systemically eroded his standing and probably doomed the GOP for the midterms by initiating it. That’s in contrast to George W. Bush, whose wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did, for a time at least, enjoy the backing of a majority of Americans. The 9/11 attacks lent Bush the pretext for his cataclysmic invasions, and Bush won the popular vote after the start of both wars. It was only in his second term, when it became clear to most voters that Iraq was a quagmire, that Bush’s standing eroded. And it was Iraq that helped give rise to Trump, the rare Republican to campaign, explicitly, on an anti-war platform and win.

Now Trump is wielding the playbook he had supposedly rejected. There has been virtually no upside to his and Netanyahu’s war. The radical Iranian regime is only emboldened. Whatever military capacity they’ve lost, they’ve made up for by the leverage they’ve extracted by throttling the Strait of Hormuz. America’s allies in Asia — the nations especially reliant on Middle Eastern oil  have suffered mightily. Theocratic Iran is going nowhere. The Israelis and Americans deluded themselves into thinking a bombing campaign might defenestrate the old guard. Instead, one Ayatollah has simply given way to another. And as diminished as they might be, the Iranians can still inflict great damage.

Wars work to presidents’ political advantage when they and their party can exploit conflict for immediate gain. Bush was able to harness the “rally around the flag” effect in Iraq, but polarization makes that feat much less likely today or in the future. America is too divided for any one president to become too popular; Trump’s peak approval rating barely cracked 50 percent, and Joe Biden wasn’t much more well-liked. In this environment, the only way for a war to achieve mass popularity is if the U.S. is first attacked and the populace feels motivated enough to back sending troops to their death. Barring that, though, there won’t be any public buy-in for the neoconservative project. Americans are truly sick of war. The next president, Republican or Democrat, will learn from Trump’s example; he or she will know exactly what not to do. Inevitably, their mantra will be “less is more.” They will try to reduce America’s footprint in the Middle East, attempt diplomacy, and keep energy prices low.

The hawks will keep trying to manufacture crises. They succeeded with Trump because they found a president gullible and unstrategic enough to actually follow their advice. Now, he’s paying the political price. Until a few months ago, Republicans were seen as heavy favorites to retain control of the Senate. Thanks to the spike in gas prices and inflation the Iran War is doing nothing to solve, Democrats are rapidly gaining ground. It’s suddenly plausible that they could control both chambers of Congress in a few months, at which point Trump will be a lame-duck president possibly facing his third impeachment trial. But even if that scenario doesn’t unfold, Trump’s war has gone so poorly that he has grievously wounded neoconservatism. The president who belatedly embraced the warmongers’ cause will be the one to snuff it out.

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