For months, leading up to Israel’s attacks on Iran last week, an intense and bitter battle has been underway on the American right — a battle for influence over President Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

The core assumptions that have guided Washington’s approach to the world for 80 years are suddenly up for debate. The global balance of power, the outcome of life-and-death conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, and more momentous future questions of war and peace all hang in the balance.

GOP foreign policy has long been steered by hawks, who see the US as locked in a struggle for global dominance against hostile and dangerous foreign powers. They’re willing to threaten — and, in some cases, use — military force to achieve American ends. During his first presidential campaign, Trump broke with the hawks on some key issues, but his first-term governance was largely hawkish in practice.

In the past few years, though, an “America First” faction came together to try and push Trump’s second term in a different direction. Deeply skeptical of “neocons,” foreign entanglements, and “forever wars,” they’ve competed with the hawks over administration jobs, tried to swing the MAGA base to their side, and worked to win Trump over in private.

Leading their fight was an unlikely foreign policy power trio: Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., and Vice President JD Vance. The three are like-minded in their loathing for the establishment and are also personal friends. It is not uncommon, in Washington, to hear talk of a “JD-Tucker-Don Jr.” axis of American foreign policy. Their increased influence meant Washington’s hawkish consensus was facing perhaps its most serious challenge in decades.

At times since January, it has seemed the America Firsters were winning. In April, when Israeli officials presented Trump with a plan to strike Iran, he rejected it in favor of pursuing negotiations over their nuclear program instead. Pro-Israel hawks were deeply worried about the concessions Trump’s team might make.

But as talks stretched on without success and Israel became more determined to strike, Trump decided not to stand in their way. The Israeli operation began Thursday night, killing many top Iranian military leaders and targeting nuclear sites. The hawks were overjoyed. Trump officials initially characterized the attack as a unilateral Israeli decision. But soon, the president began taking some credit for it, though he insisted a deal with Iran was still possible.

Carlson had spent months urging Trump not to get involved. “The greatest win would be avoiding what would be the true disaster of a war with Iran, which would not stay in Iran, of course,” he told me in an interview at the beginning of this month. He’d warned that US participation in a strike would be “suicidal” and that “we’d lose the war that follows.”

The US is not at war with Iran yet. But the chances we’ll be drawn into one are rising. So though Democrats generally despise the America Firsters’ domestic politics, dismiss them as bigots and xenophobes, and are appalled by their calls to abandon Ukraine — it’s worth noting that they’re the leading GOP figures opposing war with Iran.

The America Firsters have also called for rethinking the US’s approach to the world more broadly. That not only includes questioning our involvement in NATO, but also questioning the logic that could lead the US into a major war with China over Taiwan. Generally, they doubt that trying to run the world helps Americans.

The hawks dismiss them as dangerously naive, arguing that pulling back US involvement abroad would actually make war more likely — our enemies will run rampant, they say, if we don’t check their influence.

The America Firsters argue just the opposite: that it’s our meddling attempts to run the world as if we’re still the sole superpower that court disaster. “We’re not going back to a unipolar world,” Carlson told me. “It’s not going to happen. But I guess we could have a nuclear war over it — and we may.”

Inside this story

• How JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump Jr. came together to oppose aiding Ukraine — and then gained influence over Trump’s second term
• The leaks, firings, and factional knife-fighting roiling Trump’s foreign policy appointments
• The right’s tense debate over whether to seek a deal with Iran or back an Israeli attack
• The qualms some on the right have over US military strategy to check China in Asia
• Have the hawks now gained the upper hand in influencing Trump?

The power of the hawks

In many ways, this is just the latest flare-up of a long-running tension inside the American right — one that’s existed since the US emerged as a major global power at the start of the 20th century.

Back then, hawkish interventionists pushed for the US to join both world wars and protect the peace afterward. But the isolationists didn’t want to get bogged down in intractable foreign conflicts or send their sons to die in foreign lands. They supported, they said, America First. World War II gave the interventionist hawks the upper hand, and in the Cold War, the hawks held sway again, arguing the US had to intervene abroad to prevent communism from overrunning the world.

The ’90s brought a brief revival of isolationism championed by figures like Pat Buchanan, who questioned why, with communism defeated, the US needed such extensive overseas involvement. But 9/11 cemented the hawks’ dominance again, confirming to many that the US had to fight foreign enemies over there, or they’d fight us over here. Buchanan criticized President George W. Bush’s Iraq War as the work of a “cabal” that included “neocons,” but few on the right cared.

Keywords of the right’s foreign policy debate

• Neoconservatives: Critics of the hawks frequently call them “neocons,” which is nowadays mainly a pejorative meant to disparage them as plotting to embroil the US in foolish wars. Back during President George W. Bush’s administration, the neoconservatives were a subgroup of hawkish intellectuals who argued that war to depose the Iraqi government could help spread democracy across the Middle East. (Typical hawks don’t necessarily share this rosy view of spreading democracy.)
• America First: Many skeptics of intervention abroad have long used the phrase “America First” to describe their views. President Woodrow Wilson used the slogan in his 1916 reelection campaign — though, after winning, he entered World War I. Later, as World War II raged, the America First Committee argued vociferously against US involvement. Its most prominent member was the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, who said in a speech that “the Jewish” were among those pushing the US toward war. Trump revived the “America First” term during his first presidential campaign to signal a break with the GOP establishment.

Carlson, then the co-host of CNN’s Crossfire, had supported the war. But on a December 2003 trip to Iraq, in which he spent time outside the Green Zone, he soured on it: “I saw the opposite of what I expected to see, chaos and confusion and disorder and violence,” he told me. The following year, he was quoted in the New York Times voicing regret: “I supported the war and I now feel foolish.” The pushback from the right, he says now, was furious: “I was absolutely hated for that by people I knew well and worked with and was friends with.”

Indeed, the adamant pro-war consensus among GOP elites and rank-and-file Republicans persisted even as conditions in Iraq worsened. And hawkishness continued to reign supreme on the right: Republicans criticized President Barack Obama for showing weakness toward Iran and Russia or for withdrawing from Iraq too soon. The only foreign policy critique they could imagine was a hawkish one, and the only solution was more hawkishness.

Saying the Iraq War was a mistake or failure was unthinkable. Until, that is, Trump said it.

During his first presidential bid, in 2015, he trashed the war as a debacle and a “tremendous disservice to humanity” — suddenly giving the isolationists in the party, long an irrelevant fringe, a new life. In this, he was voicing what an increasing number of Republican voters had come to believe — that the war had failed.

Trump’s heresies went further. He wanted to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan and Syria. He had friendly things to say about Russian President Vladimir Putin — which was so unusual for a mainstream politician that many wondered whether he was being blackmailed or bribed. He disdained NATO, widely viewed as the protector of peace in Europe, as an expensive waste. Yet he also had some more typical hawkish instincts, calling for more confrontation of China and Iran and promising to “bomb the shit out of” ISIS.

Yet while Trump embraced the “America First” label in practice, much of his first-term policy was steered by the hawkish establishment — sometimes to Trump’s enthusiasm, sometimes to his frustration.

His “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran escalated a tit-for-tat shadow war; eventually, Trump had top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani assassinated and a full war

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