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Trump’s Iran Disaster Is Making All His Cronies Look Like Fools

Two foreign-policy camps are claiming Trump for themselves, while the Middle East fiasco humiliates every single one of them.

Ever since the 2024 election, two mutually hostile conservative foreign-policy camps have raced to claim Donald Trump’s victory as a mandate for their respective views. There are the “restrainers,” a coalition defined by a skepticism of interventionist wars like George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq and by a deep distrust of Israel and its lobby in Washington. And there are the latter-day neocons—the ones who haven’t defected to the Democratic Party, at least—who regard Israel as America’s indispensable ally and remain committed to the military overthrow of its enemies in the Middle East.

Each camp openly disdains the other. The restrainers see the neocons as Israel Firsters and warmongers, while the neocons see the restrainers as antisemites and isolationists. Both camps have power bases within the Trump administration: Vice President JD Vance and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, for instance, are known to be close to influential restrainers like Tucker Carlson and American Conservative executive director Curt Mills, while Secretary of State and national-security adviser Marco Rubio has been influenced by neocons like Elliott Abrams (who served in Trump’s first administration) going back more than a decade. Both camps, if they squinted hard enough, could argue that Trump supports their goals. And both camps keep being made to look foolish by Trump’s actual policies.

When Trump returned to power, the restrainers seemed to be ascendant. A New York Times article the week after Trump defeated Kamala Harris asserted that Rubio and other top picks for Trump’s national-security team, including Pete Hegseth (now defense secretary) and Mike Waltz (now UN ambassador), had shifted from “neoconservatism” in favor of “America First.” The week before he took office, Trump and his special envoy Steve........

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