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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7297 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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The Iran War is beginning to alarm even the neocons

Robert Kagan has a new article in the Atlantic blasting Trump for the Iran War. This is somewhat significant. Kagan is an arch-neocon who supported every previous war in the Middle East. He was a major proponent of the Iraq War, acting as the media arm of the Israel Lobby. The neocons of the 00s were the mostly-Jewish “decisive voices promoting regime change in Iraq”, a pointless war that cost 3 trillion dollars, 35,000 American casualties including 4,500 dead, 200,000 direct civilian deaths by violence, and 1,000,000 excess civilian deaths in total, while indirectly leading ISIS to form among the disenfranchised and dispossessed former Ba’athist commanders (what did you think regime change consisted of?), a lapse in judgment which would cause the refugee crisis in Europe (with all the consequent rape and mayhem), the decimation of Iraqi and Syrian Christian communities, and myriad other human tragedies. It is important, I think, to continually remember how retarded that was; it is so recent, yet never sufficiently referenced in its full scope. (“Another Iraq”, yeah, but do you remember precisely how dumb that was?). Kagan’s criticism of the Iran War is interesting also because it retroactively informs us about the thinking behind the necon’s push for Iraq, given his prominence in that elite circle.

No state in the Middle East (including Iraq in 2003 and Iran today) ever posed a direct threat to the security of the American homeland. Iran has no missiles that can reach the United States and, according to American intelligence, would not until 2035. Access to Middle Eastern oil and gas has never been essential to the security of the American homeland. Today the United States is less dependent on Middle Eastern energy than in the past, which Trump has pointed out numerous times since the Strait of Hormuz was closed.

The United States has long sought to prevent Iraq or Iran from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, but not because these countries would pose a direct threat to the United States. The American nuclear arsenal would have been more than adequate to deter a first strike by either of them, as it has been for decades against far more powerful adversaries. What American administrations have feared is that an Iran in possession of nuclear weapons would be more difficult to contain in its region, because neither the United States nor Israel would be able to launch the kind of attack now under way. The Middle East’s security, not America’s, would be imperiled. As for Israel, the United States committed to its defense out of a sense of moral responsibility after the Holocaust. This never had anything to do with American national-security interests. In fact, American officials from the beginning regarded support for Israel as contrary to U.S. interests. George C. Marshall opposed recognition in 1948, and Dean Acheson said that by recognizing Israel, the United States had succeeded Britain as “the most disliked power in the Middle East.” During the Cold War, even supporters of Israel acknowledged that as a simple matter of “power politics,” the United States had “every reason for wishing that Israel had never come into existence.” But as Harry Truman put it, the decision to support the state of Israel was made “not in the light of oil, but in the light of justice.”

Even the threat of terrorism from the region was a consequence of American involvement, not the reason for it. Had the United States not been deeply and consistently involved in the Muslim world since the 1940s, Islamic militants would have little interest in attacking an indifferent nation 5,000 miles and two oceans away. Contrary to much mythology, they have hated us not so much because of “who we are” but because of where we are. In Iran’s case, the United States was deeply involved in its politics from the 1950s until the 1979 revolution, including as the main supporter of the brutal regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The surest way of avoiding Islamist terrorist attacks would have been to get out.

America’s interests in the Middle East have always been indirect and secondary to larger global aims and strategies. During World War II, the United States led a coalition of nations that depended on the greater Middle East for oil and strategic position. During the Cold War, the United States assumed responsibility not only for the defense of the Jewish state but for the defense and economic well-being of European and Asian allies who depended on Middle Eastern oil. After the Cold War, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the George H. W. Bush administration believed that failing to reverse that aggression would set an ominous precedent in the aborning “new world order.”

That sense of global responsibility is precisely what the Trump administration came to office to repudiate and undo. The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy, which has dramatically shifted the focus of American policy from world order to homeland security and hemispheric hegemony, appropriately downgraded the Middle East in the hierarchy of American concerns. A United States concerned only with defense of its homeland and the Western Hemisphere would see nothing in the region worth fighting for. In the heyday of “America First” foreign policy during the 1920s and ’30s, when Americans did not regard even Europe and Asia as vital interests, the idea that they had any security interests in the greater Middle East would have struck them as hallucinatory.

One would be hard-pressed to find any nation in the world that has been reassured by the Israeli and American war against Iran, other than Israel itself. According to The Wall Street Journal, Gulf state leaders are “privately furious” with the U.S. for “triggering a war that put them in the crosshairs.” Despite its impressive power, the United States was unable to protect these countries from Iran’s attacks; now they have to hope that Trump will not leave them to face a weakened yet intact and angry Iranian regime but will instead double down on America’s long-term military commitment to the region, including by putting ground troops in Iran. Israelis should also be asking how far they can count on the Americans’ dedication to this fight. A United States capable of abandoning long-standing allies in Europe and East Asia will be capable of abandoning Israel too. Can Israel sustain its new dominance in the region without a long and deep American commitment?

The unintended effect of the war, in fact, may be driving regional players to seek other great-power protectors in addition to the United States. Trump himself has invited the Chinese to help open the strait, and the Chinese are actively courting the Arab and Gulf states. The Gulf states are not averse to dealing with Beijing and Moscow. Neither is Israel. It sold management of a container terminal in the port of Haifa to a Chinese company, despite objections from the U.S. Navy, which uses the port. Israel, practically alone among American allies, refused to take part in sanctions against Russia when it invaded Ukraine in 2022. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ran for reelection in 2019, some of his campaign posters showed him shaking hands with Putin under the tagline a different league. No one should blame Israelis for this. They are an independent nation and can be expected to do what they feel they need to do to survive. Americans may have a sentimental or religious attachment to Israel, but Israelis cannot afford to be sentimental in return.

That is especially true given this administration’s cavalier attitude toward international responsibilities. The Iran war is global intervention “America First”–style: no public debate, no vote in Congress, no cooperation or, in many cases, even consultation with allies other than Israel, and, apparently, no concern for potential consequences to the region and the world. “They say if you break it, you own it. I don’t buy that,” Senator Lindsey Graham, arguably Trump’s most influential adviser on the war, said.

For Europeans, the problem is worse than American disregard and irresponsibility. They now face an unremittingly hostile United States—one that no longer treats its allies as allies or differentiates between allies and potential adversaries. The aggressive tariffs Washington imposed last year hit America’s erstwhile friends at least as hard as they hit Russia and China, and in some cases harder. Europeans must now wonder whether Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran makes it more or less likely that he will take similarly bold action on Greenland. The risks and costs of taking that undefended Danish territory, after all, would be far less than the risks and costs of waging the present war. Not some EU liberal but Trump’s conservative friend, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni recently warned that American actions have produced a “crisis in international law and multilateral organizations” and “the collapse of a shared world order.”

[…] Friends and allies will be ever less willing to cooperate with the United States. This time, Spain refused American use of air and naval bases in its territory. Next time, that could be Germany, Italy, or even Japan. Nations around the world will come to rely not on American commitments and permanent alliances but on ad hoc coalitions to address crises. No one will cooperate with the United States by choice, only by coercion. Without allies, the United States will have to depend on clients that it controls, such as Venezuela, or weaker powers that it can bully.

Funnily enough, one of Kagan’s last predictions just came true: Italy joined Spain in closing down its airspace this morning.

Is this not rather a sign of TDS? Kagan spends decades advocating war with Iran, hates Trump; Trump delivers war with Iran, now Kagan is against the war. It’s not that Kagan was ever wrong or ever changed his mind see, it’s just that Donald Trump is wrong about whatever it is we’re talking about today.

I think when the neocons wanted war with Iran, it certainly wasn't this kind of war.

This is honestly the problem I have with a lot of Trump 2.0. In broad strokes, a lot of the things the administration are doing could be sensible policies if done well, but instead Trump 2.0 seems intent on doing things in the most foolish and ill-considered way possible.

One of the examples that just gets me is the Harvard situation. Telling Harvard to not be racist was totally reasonable (especially since there was already Supreme Court precedence that what Harvard was doing was not legal), but following that up with, "Oh, and you've got to hire who we tell you to, and give us control of your admissions process so you admit more conservative students" was cuckoo bananas. The Trump administration somehow managed to make Harvard look sympathetic in all of that, and that was no easy feat.

but following that up with, "Oh, and you've got to hire who we tell you to, and give us control of your admissions process so you admit more conservative students" was cuckoo bananas.

How? Academics throughout the country openly admit they discriminate not political/idealogical grounds. What exactly is wrong with telling them to knock it off, if they want to keep getting federal goodies?

I would be okay with us passing a law that prevented discrimination on the basis of political ideology (some jurisdictions in the US already have such laws.) I might even be convinced that individual states passing laws to ensure more viewpoint diversity in state colleges could be a good thing.

But a single individual unilaterally twisting an existing law in order to interfere with hiring and firing decisions of a university in a way that interferes with the basic educational mission of that university is a bridge too far for me. I think universities need to change, but it should be done through gradual reforms or a new march through the institutions, not imposed all at once in a top down way for a variety of reasons.

Wasn't the dear colleagues letter exactly that?

I too would prefer congress establish those limits, but I believe the only way to get there is to have someone make so many intolerable policies following that, that the side that started this with that letter is sickened enough to not want to touch that rail again.

What's wrong with that? Having more conservative intellectuals at the highest level is, if anything, good for national stability- democracies with weak conservative wings deteriorate very fast, much faster than overwhelmingly conservative democracies(Japan etc).

But a single individual unilaterally twisting an existing law in order to interfere with hiring and firing decisions of a university in a way that interferes with the basic educational mission of that university is a bridge too far for me

Is it? Isn't there some conservative college, who's name escapes me, that makes a point of not accepting any federal help so they aren't on the hook for Title IX, and all the other federal fuckery, and the Dems are still always looking for ways to force them to run it their way? Why is it so beyond the pale to put conditions on a university that does get federal money, then?

You're thinking of Hillsdale College.

That's the one! Was at the tip of my tongue, thanks!

Isn't there some conservative college, who's name escapes me, that makes a point of not accepting any federal help so they aren't on the hook for Title IX, and all the other federal fuckery, and the Dems are still always looking for ways to force them to run it their way?

There was, Bob Jones University. They lost not just Federal funds but their tax-exempt status, and then knelt at the altar of equality.

Meanwhile, the University of California and others have explicit political tests for their faculty (in some cases also being fig-leaves for RACIAL tests), and that's fine. It's all who/whom and all very tiresome, and if Trump refuses to let them continue doing that he's not breaking any precedent except in aiming that power at the left for a change.

Why is it so beyond the pale to put conditions on a university that does get federal money, then?

I'm happy for federal money to come with strings attached. But within our system, I would prefer if the strings came from Congress and not from a unilateral action from the president.

It was wrong when Obama tried to do it with the Dear Colleague letter, and it is wrong when Trump tries to do it with the Harvard letter.

In many ways, I would prefer the federal government to stop funding universities altogether, so they couldn't use the withdrawal of funds as a threat against them. But in the context where the funding exists, I do think it should be handled in a way consistent with the principles of our constitutional republic as far as possible.

It was wrong when Obama tried to do it with the Dear Colleague letter, and it is wrong when Trump tried to do it with the Harvard letter.

The problem is that Obama didn't just try, he actually did it, so it's just a normal part of business now, even if you or I are against it in principle.

No offense, but this seems completely unworkable to me. The universities are already simply ignoring existing laws when it suits them, they'll just ignore those, too. They might at most need to find a paper-thin excuse that will allow already sympathetic judges/lawyers to sign it off, but I'm not sure even that is necessary.

A new march is impossible, since the old one was only possible thanks to the conservative old guard allowing it. Which is also the reason they lost to the trumpist new right.

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