Win or lose, Donald Trump has begun the last war the United States is ever likely to fight in the Middle East. That might sound wildly optimistic, but what it really means is that war with Iran has been decades in the making. If the mission succeeds, it will mark the end of an era. And if it fails, this war will have exhausted what’s left of America’s willingness to remake the region by force.

It’s not just that Iran puts the case for regime change to the ultimate test. America’s relationship with Israel is also on trial. That relationship has been strained lately by the war in Gaza – which for the first time began to shift American public opinion in favor of Palestine over Israel – and by the rise of radically anti-Zionist and outright anti-Semitic influences on the political left and right alike. Demographic changes are also working to loosen the ties between America and Israel, as white Christian baby boomers are succeeded by the least white, least Christian generation in American history, a cohort that does not feel the affinities for Israel that older Americans do.

President Trump is at war with Iran because he feels he has to be, not because he wants to be

President Trump is at war with Iran because he feels he has to be, not because he wants to be

This war is an ideological watershed as well. Although in one sense it’s the fulfillment of neoconservatives’ dreams, it was only possible because Donald Trump defeated the neocons in the Republican party and established a new line of credit, so to speak, for foreign-policy interventionism. Trump was never a straightforward peacenik, but his criticisms of the forever wars waged by his predecessors gave non-interventionists cause to throw in with him. Foreign policy restraint may have been less basic to MAGA’s ideology than tariffs and the restriction of immigration, but the three elements seemed to fit together as rejection of global liberalism, the reigning ideological orthodoxy since the “end of history” in the 1990s.

But in Trump’s second term he’s gone beyond the negation of the old liberal globalism to build a new activist ideology of his own, marked by a willingness to use military force to compel adversaries to make deals. The idealistic component of liberal interventionism – including the liberal interventionism of past Republican administrations – is missing. Trump doesn’t seem concerned to promote democracy; his aim is simply to bring about adversaries’ submission to America.

Trump says no thanks to Britain’s aircraft carriers

Don’t sacrifice the Kurds

We shouldn’t celebrate Ian Huntley’s death

And it’s clear that the western hemisphere is the Trump administration’s primary concern and the focus of this new foreign-policy ideology. The........

© The Spectator