MAGA Is All In on Trump’s War With Iran
Like me, many of you may have been surprised and dismayed by Donald Trump’s incredibly non-nuanced claims about the results of his airborne attack on Iran. Before there was any confirmation of the damage inflicted on that country’s nuclear-weapons infrastructure, the president was claiming “the strikes were a spectacular military success” and that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” And before anyone had any idea what Iran would do in response, Trump was thundering that “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace.” Was this just the typical Trumpian exaggeration and spin, often veering into lies, that he routinely applies to everything from economic indicators to crime statistics to election results?
Perhaps, but there may be something else going on: an effort to convince his MAGA base that the war with Iran isn’t really a war. After all, prior to the strikes, there was a deep ambivalence among Trump supporters about engaging Iran militarily, much less becoming the junior partner to Israel in a war that was already well underway. That’s not surprising, since Trump himself has long criticized his GOP predecessors, particularly those in the internationalist tradition epitomized by Ronald Reagan, for blundering into “forever wars” in the Middle East. One way of dealing with that problem is to challenge the terminology. Both Vice-President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio hastened to assert that despite the massive air attack, the United States is not “at war” with Iran. That’s in accord with Trump’s own denial that there are any other U.S. military plans in the works.
You can see how this non-war war fits nicely into the peculiarly Jacksonian doctrine of national security that Trump has embraced since formally entering politics a decade ago. The idea is to deter any hostile activities toward the U.S. by an policy of nonintervention in other countries’ problems, paired with the credible threat of insanely lethal violence against any country that dares mess with Uncle Sam. Maintaining that credible threat requires insanely lethal acts of violence now and then to ensure America’s adversaries we aren’t kidding and keep them in a state of uncertainty and fear about when America may choose to kill as many of their people as possible. The lack of any strategic vision behind such sustained threats and their occasional execution can become a real problem, but that’s not something “America First” types have thought about very deeply.
The other reason it makes a sort of crude sense for Team Trump to deny we’re at war is that if there is any retaliation from Iran for this attack, subsequent acts of lethal violence by the U.S. can be rationalized as self-defense rather than continued aggression. Officially, at the moment, the attacks by our bombers and missiles was a one-off action that didn’t begin any war but might contribute to ending the war between Israel and Iran. So Trump can pose as both an intended keeper of the peace — even if his idea of peacekeeping involves the largest conventional bombs in the world and a few dozen cruise missiles — and a righteous defender of the homeland if the very likely retaliation occurs.
The trouble for Americans (particularly U.S. troops stationed within reach of Iranian arms) is that it may be a good while before any of us can feel safe from the consequences of Trump’s decision to become a junior partner of Israel in this war. So it’s not the no-consequences exercise of American might that MAGA folk crave. But they will continue to dream that their own mighty Donald Trump is somehow immune from the folly that has led so many other American presidents into no-win wars that last too long, if not forever.
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