The ‘restrainer’ Right and the progressive Left sound an awful lot alike on Israel and Iran — but they are on the margins.
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- “Talks to address Iran’s nuclear program were planned for Sunday. Instead Netanyahu launched illegal strikes on Iran, killing a top ceasefire negotiator, undermining U.S. diplomatic efforts & putting countless innocent lives at risk. We can’t be dragged into another Netanyahu war.” [Bernie Sanders]
- “This is insane. Regime change will result in a bloody civil war, killing hundreds of thousands and creating another massive Muslim refugee crisis. Topping a leader is NEVER as easy you think. It almost always results in further involvement, a civil war, and chaos. Resist this!” [Charlie Kirk]
- “This is all so unnecessary. All of it. Everywhere.” [Ben Rhodes] “Trump was either totally humiliated by Bibi or has been lying about his commitment to ending wars. Either way, this is an utterly pointless, dangerous, and immoral action.” [Rhodes] “War is breaking out because Trump pulled out of the Iran Deal and got humiliated by Netanyahu while trying to negotiate his own, and he’s gonna have a military parade for his birthday. The weakest strongman.” [Rhodes] “This war will above all harm innocent people for no good reason. We live in truly cruel, perilous and stupid times.” [Rhodes]
- “It’s a lie. In fact, there is zero credible intelligence that suggests Iran is anywhere near building a bomb, or has plans to. None. . . . America’s record of overthrowing foreign leaders is so embarrassingly counterproductive that regime change has become a synonym for disaster. . . . It goes without saying that there are very few Trump voters who’d support a regime change war in Iran.” [Tucker Carlson]
- “This is deeply disturbing. . . . I think here it’s important to say we need more negotiation, we need deescalation. We need to get to a deal.” [Elizabeth Warren]
- “The most predictable war, plausibly ever. I’m so sick of Israel and those who pretend its actions are normal or even remotely justifiable. This country has a bloodlust like no other. Have an issue with this tweet? I literally do not care. Think defending Israel’s demonic actions is going to guarantee you a spot in heaven? Double your indulgences and sign your offspring up to die for Netanyahu. Leave the rest of us the hell alone.” [Candace Owens]
- “The Israeli government bombing Iran is a dangerous escalation that could lead to regional war. War Criminal Netanyahu will do anything to maintain his grip on power. We cannot let him drag our country into a war with Iran. Our government must stop funding and supporting this rogue genocidal regime.” [Rashida Tlaib]
- “Say what you will about neocons, but their ability to seamlessly replace a disastrous, unpopular war with a brand new one is unrivaled.” [Sean Davis] “Lindsey Graham never had a bad idea he wasn’t willing to get other people killed for so he could preen on TV.” [Davis]
- “Any Democrat who supports this war with Iran needs to be primaried. Our generation grew up going through two multi trillion dollar wars we should have never been involved in. We are not fucking going back to that. If you think this is a good idea read a history book.” [David Hogg]
- “Israel is trying to get Iran to attack us just like your bitchy ex who tried goading some dude in a bar to fight you” [Tim Pool]
- “The real story is that blood-thirsty neocons exploited Trump’s jealous hatred of Obama to convince him to rip up the JCPOA, precisely so we’d arrive at the crossroads we’ve reached today. He’s giving them what they used him for.” [Brian Beutler]
- “Tacky jingoism. Will end in tears. And who cares about “total control of the skies over Iran?” Is that what tens of millions of frustrated and desperate Americans put their faith in this person to achieve? I missed that part. Though heard a lot about ‘no more endless wars.’” [Curt Mills]
- “So . . . does Iran have a right to defend itself?” [Mehdi Hasan]
- “We should commence airstrikes on Tel Aviv immediately.” [Darryl Cooper]
- “The U.S. should not join a war against Iran, and I will ask the Senate to stop such a reckless idea. Have we learned nothing from 20+ years of war in the Middle East?” [Tim Kaine]
- “I’ll admit I didn’t think I’d see every discredited, lazy, mendacious GWOT slogan from 2003 suddenly reemerge less than 6 months into Trump’s second term, but here we are.” [John Daniel Davidson] “If Israel can’t destroy Fordow without the U.S. military they should have thought about that before launching unilateral strikes on Iran. We didn’t vote for this and we don’t want it.” [Davidson]
- “Donald Trump telling [Iran] to come back to the negotiating table now is a joke…I supported him, I apologize for doing so. He should be impeached and removed for this one.” [Dave Smith]
- “What in the world does this mean @SenSchumer? ‘I believe Congress and Senate Democrats, if necessary, will not hesitate to exercise our authority.’ This is why your numbers are toxic with our base. They want us to be the anti-war party again.” [Ro Khanna]
- “Will the Strait of Hormuz be the new Gulf of Tonkin?” [Jack Posobiec]
- “Israel’s attack on Iran, clearly intended to scuttle the Trump Administration’s negotiations with Tehran, is further evidence of how little respect world powers — including our own allies — have for President Trump.” [Chris Murphy]
- “Trump has now praised Israel’s strike, affirmed US material support; and Israeli media is reporting his public opposition was a disinformation campaign to mislead Iran[.] So in other words Trump, not Israel, has made a mockery of all of us wanted to avoid this war.” [Saagar Enjeti]
- “The overwhelming consensus among Democratic lawmakers commenting on Israeli attacks on Iran tonight is that Netanyahu is sabotaging diplomacy and recklessly risking a war. The next step should be to make clear: No US help, no US forces, and no US taxpayer funding for Bibi’s war.” [Dylan Williams]
- “Almost every significant populist MAGA influencer — @RealAlexJones @TuckerCarlson @scrowder @Stevebannon_sk @Peoples_Pundit @mtgreenee @mattgaetz @Cernovich @JackPosobiec etc. — agree that @realDonaldTrump should stay out of direct further involvement in the #IsraelIranConflict” [Robert Barnes]
- “Who pushed it now? Who runs this city — Obama or Trump — it doesn’t matter. If we don’t stop it now, we lose the country.” [Steve Bannon]
- “Netanyahu wants a broader war. . . . This was inevitable, given the U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. Arms embargo now.” [Nina Turner] “We warned of this” [Turner]
- “Anyone slobbering for the U.S. to become fully involved in the Israel/Iran war is not America First/MAGA. Wishing for murder of innocent people is disgusting. We are sick and tired of foreign wars. All of them.” [Marjorie Taylor Greene]
- “What’s driving this war is not the fear that Iran won’t sign a nuclear deal but the fear that it will.” [Jeet Heer]
- “The American Communist Party stands with the revolutionary Iranian people against Zionist and imperialist aggression!” [American Communist Party]
I could go on, but you get the idea. The reality is that both of these factions have a fundamentally similar view of America’s role in the world, in which American power is a bad thing, and American victory at best unthinkable, and at worst an outcome to be actively avoided. Both built their foreign policy worldviews over the past two decades entirely in opposition to the Iraq War. What unites Barack Obama, JD Vance, and their circles is that Obama and Vance both made their careers around denouncing that war — in Vance’s case, to the point of dismissing any possible distinction between the Iraq and Ukraine conflicts. It’s not surprising that both factions have used a lot of similar rhetoric in arguing for essentially the same nuclear deal with Iran. While both groups include many voices who are not antisemitic, both include many who are.
Both groups hate to be reminded how much they have in common. They are right, of course, that occasions for military action tend to drive a wedge into the Democratic Party’s coalition by separating the reliably anti-war progressives from the party’s more centrist elements, and with the growth of the anti-interventionist faction on the right, the same can be said for the Republican Party’s coalition. But while that division tends to be more painful for the party in power, it doesn’t go away just by doing nothing and letting American interests be trampled.
The Heir Apparent
This is a particularly painful moment for Vance, for a couple of reasons. First, Vance has long conducted his foreign policy arguments by means of scorched-earth ad hominem rhetoric that personalizes every argument, never allows for the possibility of good-faith disagreement uncorrupted by bad motives, and is especially aggressive in attacking Republicans and conservatives — not only individually but in terms that make plain his loathing for anyone who holds positions that have a long and deep base of support on the right and in the GOP. That rhetorical style is distinguished by its lack of an exit strategy: Having deployed it, there’s no way to justify changing one’s mind, no path to agreeing to disagree for the sake of party unity, and no rationale to explain why two of your allies come to different conclusions unless you are ready to burn bridges with one of them.
I grant that there are quite a few people who have come honestly and sincerely by the view that war is so terrible, and its effects so unpredictable, that we should allow all sorts of other horrors to occur rather than initiate it. I accept that some pundits may not extend any charity towards their adversaries. But political leaders are usually more willing to accept that voters who are not on their side on everything might be sincere, and might even be potential supporters. Vance does not.
Vance starts off with the pole position to be the next leader of the Republican Party in 2028 (assuming he does not become president by misadventure before then), but his is a path few have successfully navigated; a one-term vice president hasn’t succeeded his boss since Martin Van Buren in 1836. The non-negotiable prerequisite for Vance is to remain in favor with Trump, and while Trump prefers to make Vance keep working for that approval, he’s thus far been in no danger of losing it. But while Vance is a dissenter from even the Trump-era GOP mainstream on a number of fronts, foreign policy is the area in which he is most vociferously harsh toward a big chunk of the party’s voting base and its elected officials. His rhetorical style leaves no room to make peace with them, and he shows no sign of doing so. He recently attacked one critic on Twitter/X as a “loser (who supported Desantis in the 2024 primary),” a sign of how quick Vance is to write people out of the party for insufficient personal loyalty to Trump — even and perhaps especially people who have fought tirelessly for conservative causes and championed successful Republican leaders.
In order to square the circle of winning the nomination while heaping abuse on those voters, the one thing Vance absolutely cannot afford is a breach between Trump and the Tucker Carlson foreign policy crowd, with whom Vance is so close that he hired Carlson’s son for his staff. But right now, that’s exactly where we are, which has put Vance in the highly uncomfortable position of trying to sell a stance that he would denounce if it came from anyone but Trump, and spin that as anti-interventionism:
First, POTUS has been amazingly consistent, over 10 years, that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Over the last few months, he encouraged his foreign policy team to reach a deal with the Iranians to accomplish this goal. The president has made clear that Iran cannot have uranium enrichment. And he said repeatedly that this would happen one of two ways–the easy way or the “other” way. . . .
Iran could have civilian nuclear power without enrichment, but Iran rejected that. Meanwhile, they’ve enriched uranium far above the level necessary for any civilian purpose . . . enriching right to the point of weapons-grade uranium. I have yet to see a single good argument for why Iran needed to enrich uranium well above the threshold for civilian use. . . .
Meanwhile, the president has shown remarkable restraint in keeping our military’s focus on protecting our troops and protecting our citizens. . . . People are right to be worried about foreign entanglement after the last 25 years of idiotic foreign policy. But I believe the president has earned some trust on this issue.
Of course, the horseshoe crowd isn’t buying any of this, and like Vance, they tend not to frame arguments in terms that allow for good faith disagreement. Vance telling them to trust “the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is hardly a rightwing organization,” is not going to endear him to the right-wing restrainer types, who hate and mistrust international organizations. Like Democrats trying to navigate the Gaza war, Vance is already in a bind, plus he has to go wherever Trump leads. Thus far, unlike Tulsi Gabbard, he has avoided signaling that he’s at odds with where Trump is headed. The likely result of that would be, as with Gabbard, getting ignored and cut out of the loop.
That may be the shrewder move for Vance’s positioning, although it doesn’t fix the long-term problem of needing to keep Carlson and his ilk from taking out their frustrations at Trump on Vance. This is one of the worst possible fights for the restrainer faction to pick. For some time now, even many who define themselves as anti-interventionists (such as Vance) have made something of an exception for backing Israel, in part due to its long-term ethnic, cultural, and religious ties to the American electorate and in part out of the perception that Israel is typically capable of handling its enemies with minimal American assistance. Moreover, Iran’s current regime has been a noisy and lethal enemy of the United States unceasingly for 45 years. For now, at least, Republicans and the general public are apt to side strongly with Trump and with Israel, isolating both the restrainers on the right and the progressive doves on the left. That may be a particularly bitter pill for the former group, who entered this administration hoping to run American foreign policy for the first time in living memory.
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I was going to post something about the "horseshoe coalition" -- that people on the far left and the far right tend to join up at the ends of the horseshoe -- but Dan McLaughlin did it above, far better than I could have.
