On the evening of June 16th, three days after the outbreak of the war between Israel and Iran, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social: “Somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that, ‘IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!’” The former Fox News host turned independent podcaster, who is generally aligned with the Trump administration (at least on most issues), has been among the most vocal critics of any further potential American involvement in the Middle East, as well as a frequent opponent of Israeli foreign policy. Along with commentators such as Candace Owens, Tim Pool, the Hodgetwins, and Jack Posobiec, Carlson is one of the leaders of the primarily online movement that appears to oppose a priori any American military use. This group denounces anyone, even those who believe that sometimes limited military intervention must be considered when all else fails, in hysterical terms, labelling them “warmongers” and the like.
For commentators such as these, many of whom came of age amid the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a healthy scepticism about American interventionism in the Middle East is eminently reasonable. (This is particularly true when reflecting on the War in Iraq, with the invasion of Afghanistan following the September 11th attacks being something of a different matter.) Carlson, who was a staunch supporter of the invasion of Iraq at the time, can be forgiven if his motivation is to avoid repeating something similar. The war, after all, claimed more than 4,400 American lives and wounded nearly 32,000, while also leaving hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead or maimed. And, crucially, it was later determined that Iraq did not, in fact, possess a “weapon of mass destruction”. The war had been called for under false pretences. It seems the Bush administration was intent on toppling Saddam Hussein, going so far as to lie to the American public in order to generate support for an invasion. One can appreciate why any American, especially a media commentator who ardently defended an invasion that turned out to have been based on mendacity, would seek earnestly to avoid replicating a catastrophe like that one.
But there is also the phenomenon of overlearning history’s lessons. While one learns in school aphorisms such as“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, perhaps we should also be reminded that not every takeaway from history’s follies ought to be transmorphed into an iron-clad, inviolable law. While it is surely typically advisable to avoid inserting one’s nation into wars unless absolutely necessary or seeking to engineer anew a society in a country one does not fully understand, that ought not imply that there is no situation in which military action might be justified. How about if, for instance, the United States could eliminate a nascent nuclear weapons program with the potential to claim an untold number of lives without a single American injured? Imagine if we had been able, for instance, to nip North Korea’s nuclear program in the bud.
President Trump, who campaigned in part on a strong opposition to American adventurism, particularly in the Middle East, is no stranger to the arguments Carlson is making, and Carlson and his ideological kin frequently advance the view that they are “keeping Trump true to his campaign promises”. But, as President Trump has made clear time and again (even before initially running for President in 2015), preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon ought to be a chief objective of American foreign policy. And should diplomacy, the first line of attack, fail, then military action (targeted and limited) could very well be justified. Doing so would also project American strength and a willingness to engage in affairs beyond its shores.
Since I do not receive intelligence briefings, I am ill-equipped to weigh in as to whether or not Iran was truly on the cusp of acquiring a nuclear weapon this month, as had been suggested by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Trump, and other proponents of immediate military action. (Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has stated that she believes her comments in March of this year to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence suggesting that Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons was not imminent were taken out of context by “the dishonest media”.) But, on June 12th, the day before Israel began its initial military operations, the International Atomic Energy Agency did find that “Iran’s many failures to uphold its obligations since 2019 to provide the Agency with full and timely cooperation … constitutes non-compliance with its obligations under its Safeguards Agreement with the Agency.” Whether a nuclear weapon was going to be ready for delivery next week, next month, or next year, Iran was surely hellbent on developing a nuclear weapon.
Those dogmatically opposed to any military action whatsoever confidently professed that any action on the part of the United States was akin to starting a third world war or, at the very least, ushering in a quagmire along the lines of what occurred in Iraq in 2003. This was despite the fact that similar doomsday proclamations did not come to pass in January of 2020 when the first Trump administration killed Qasem Soleimani, the then-leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, with a drone strike. At the time, I similarly critiqued a collection of commentators I dubbed the Aaron Maté club for its rush to judgment and immediate prognostication of a full-blown invasion of Iran, even within minutes of the strike, and while it was still unclear what had actually transpired. Not every event in the Middle East constitutes Iraq 2.0; it is not forever 2003.
It still remains to be seen as to the degree to which the June 22nd American strikes on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan will be successful in either setting back Iran’s nuclear capabilities or strongly deterring the Iranians from proceeding. Opinions on this differ at present, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been seeking to counter any scepticism about the strike’s effectiveness by labelling the military operation as having been “historically successful”. But one thing that did not happen was World War III, a boots-on-the-ground invasion of Iran, or any of the worst-case scenarios forecasted by those commentators who, while draping themselves with the banner of “America First”, fail to consider that the world is dynamic, malevolent actors exist, and a preference for being anti-war can be imperilled by the existence of an adversary intent on war.
As the social media personality Taftaj noted, “Pacifism is one of those juvenile philosophical positions which seems good on paper but totally falls apart when you think about it for more than two seconds. Either you let bad actors do whatever they want or you simply outsource the violence on your behalf to another party.”
It is perhaps for this reason that Leon Panetta, who served as one of President Barack Obama’s Secretaries of Defense from 2011 to 2013, bucked the enormous partisan pressure on him to condemn the strike, suggesting that once it became clear Iran was not interested in engaging in diplomatic negotiations about discontinuing its nuclear ambitions, “the U.S. didn’t have any alternative but to conduct this type of attack”. (Other national security appointees who had served in both Republican and Democratic administrations also praised the strike.) And Israel and the United States collaborated masterfully, wherein Israel loosened Iran’s air defence for days, clearing the way for American B-2 bombers to reach Fordow unmolested.
There is nothing particularly America First about standing by while one of America’s chief adversaries develops a nuclear arsenal.
Again, we will see how everything unfolds over time, but, as it stands now, President Trump seems to have masterfully reached an ideal scenario: Iran’s nuclear ambitions were crippled without a singular American casualty, and then instead of World War III erupting, Iran and Israel shortly thereafter agreed to a ceasefire. Now, building on that momentum, there is talk of more Muslim-majority nations normalizing diplomatic relations with Israel. While the Obama and Biden administrations sought endlessly to appease Iran, and in easing sanctions provided the Islamic Republic’s government with money that could be put to nefarious uses, the Trump administration sent Iran a clear message: The United States will act decisively to prevent your acquiring a nuclear weapon.
I will close – in the spirit of my previous essay defending Congressman Thomas Massie’s criticism of President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” – by cautioning against ostracizing Carlson and his compatriots from the conservative movement, as some voices have called for in light of the apparent success of the June 22nd strikes. As I indicated at the outset, scepticism about intervention in the Middle East is reasonable, and cautions ought to be engaged with. As we know from reading J S Mill, even in the act of rejecting another’s argument, we hone our own. Instead of the focus being on casting critics of the strikes out of the movement, it should be on a more important point: just as there is a danger in failing to learn the lessons of history, there is also the risk of overlearning them.
