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This year has delivered a nonstop string of humiliations for MAGA isolationists as Trump has increasingly turned towards military measures. A few days ago Tucker Carlson claimed Trump captured Maduro for the explicit purpose of legalizing gay marriage in Venezuela (???). Tulsi Gabbard has arguably had it even worse, as her 2019 opening speech for her presidential campaign criticized Trump's flirting with regime change in Venzeula and Iran, yet she happily serves in the Trump administration and even supports Trump's policies. A report by Bloomberg today states that she was actually excluded from meetings discussing the Venezuela op, with her Director of National Intelligence (DNI) position jokingly being recast as "do not invite". Presumably the rest of Trump's team thought she might leak the details, or even commit outright treason by informing the Venezuelans beforehand.
It's hard to have principles when the MAGA movement is a cult of personality with an extremely narrow window of what's deemed acceptable to criticize Trump for. Over the coming few years I expect more MAGA isolationists to debase themselves with positions that are basically "actually interventionism is fine as long as it's Trump doing it, after all it hasn't turned into an Iraq-tier disaster yet."
I’m confused if you’re criticizing the isolationist faction or the interventionist faction here as you’re mixing the two together in your last sentence. And you’re providing examples of criticism while claiming there’s an extremely narrow window of criticism, which doesn’t make sense. In any case, we live in a two party system, so each party comprises strange bedfellows, like those who want American Imperialism and those who want strict interventionism, or those who want it in some cases but not every case.
IMO Venezuela is indeed very different from Iran / Ukraine. We didn’t cause harm to their citizens, whereas our pressure in Ukraine destined hundreds of thousands of young men to perish in absolute agony and demographically destroyed an entire nation. Our intervention in Iran could destroy an ancient and high-science civilization for little reason except that it benefits Israel and KSA. (Just months before Israel killed Persian scientists and their families while they slept in their beds, Iran was publishing about their important nuclear medicine products which formerly only Germany was able to produce). Personally I am all for Venezuela-type resource grabs and even taking Greenland, but I don’t want to see hundreds of thousands of guys just like me be slaughtered in Ukraine, or see science take steps back because of Israeli neuroticism and expansionism. There are reasonable utilitarian grounds for this imo
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