Why does the MAGA base now seem to approve of an approach to war they supposedly sought to reject?
Why does the MAGA base now seem to approve of an approach to war they supposedly sought to reject?
T he American military buildup around Iran is at levels unseen since either the 1991 or 2003 wars with Iraq, but at this writing, the war — if there is to be a war — is not begun. Whether it comes or not — or has already come, by the reading — we may already discern particular lessons from it. We must look at what is happening, and also what is not.
What is not happening, emphatically and notably, is meaningful expressions of discontent or opposition to a prospective war that bears all the hallmarks of the wars President Donald Trump was supposedly elected to stop: a war of choice, a war in the Middle East, and a war of (quite possibly) regime change. This sort of war was supposedly the province of vanquished factions of the conservative movement, signified by the names Bush, Cheney, and McCain. Yet the coalition and the base that rejected them express little opposition to this president now as he stands upon the precipice of an epochal gamble.
It is not that there is no opposition whatsoever: Dismay at this prospect was a headline item on Rod Dreher’s eponymous newsletter. But the base isn’t there. As Mark Penn and Andrew Stein wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week, self-described MAGA Republicans are at least as approving of President Trump’s war-related decision-making as “traditional” Republicans, and sometimes more so. On the raid on Caracas, 78 percent of MAGA Republicans approve versus 68 percent of traditional Republicans. On military aid to Ukraine if Russia fails to negotiate, 70 percent of MAGA Republicans approve versus 71 percent of traditional Republicans. We may expect similar numbers vis-à-vis Iran.
How to explain it?
One explanation is in the nature of American engagement with foreign affairs in general, with war as a part of the whole. This engagement is simply not the same as Americans’ engagement with what might be termed domestic or “dinner-table” issues; it is not prospective nor driven by expectations, but rather retrospective, shaped by outcomes and results. It is moreover felt and experienced differently from other issues that reach into daily lives with much more presence and immediacy. The political scientist Carl Joachim Friedrich, in his 1950 edition of The New Image of the Common Man, captured it well when he wrote that “[t]he decisions in [foreign affairs] are of a nature that removes them from the average man’s grasp. Nor do they bear any striking relationship to his folkways, traditions, and beliefs[t]he common man . . . shuns foreign policy.” This being so, Americans largely do not assess foreign affairs, even impending wars, based upon what may happen, but upon what has. For the politician, gloria victoribus, vae victis.
A conclusion follows from this on the nature of the right and foreign policy, on which many bets were laid within the Washington, D.C., hothouse throughout the past decade. Those bets tended toward the belief that movement conservatism’s orientation on war and peace would revert to a prewar status quo ante, not of isolationism as such but of disengagement and — in the charitable interpretation — Jeffersonian avoidance of foreign entanglements. Major institutions were captured by this idea, which had the effect of dissociating them from the very real American strategic blunders of the past generation. Yet its embrace missed the fundamental nature of Americans themselves, who are in this respect more Hamiltonian and Jacksonian than Jeffersonian. They don’t dislike war as such: They dislike losing wars, and they dislike needless wars. But they are game for a new scrap in a good cause, and as we see now, they regard the possible destruction of the Iranian regime with equanimity.
That equanimity, among some few Americans possessed of age or experience, may be partially explicable by bitter memories of Americans blindfolded in the embassy, of the wreckage of Desert One, of the mass murder of United States Marines in Beirut, and of Americans battling their way through IED gauntlets on Iraqi roads.
The nature of the force assembling in the region further explains the absence of meaningful opposition to the prospective war. There is a military buildup, to be sure, but it is not the whole of the military. The sword poised over Iran is America’s naval and air forces, not its army. There is no Guard or Reserve call-up, no tearful departure of troops. It is qualitatively different from an invasion-and-occupation force, because navies and airpower can achieve neither. What we see here is a punitive expedition featuring the sharp end of sophisticated systems. The Americans paying attention, albeit a minority of the whole, see this and know what won’t happen as much as they do not know what will. What won’t happen is years of counterinsurgency, because the force for it was never there. This is a known model for Trump warmaking, and if the force off Iran is orders of magnitude larger than that off Venezuela, the constraints upon action are the same.
Finally, that known model also yields a benefit of the doubt extended to the president. The self-proclaimed peacemaker has resorted to war fairly often: across both terms, in Syria, in Yemen, in Iraq, in Iran, and in Venezuela, sometimes on multiple occasions in each country. Yet in no case has his warmaking generated an occupation or a land war of meaningful length. The president is comfortable with his Article II powers as commander in chief and uses them liberally but also with prudence. This, too, is seen by those paying attention, and even with a maximal assumed goal of regime change in Iran, it grants him the benefit of the doubt.
If war with Iran comes, then the imperative for America’s political leadership is not bounded by the expectations of “restrainers” or “realists” or “neocons” or any other policy or ideological faction, but by the fundamental demand of Americans at large: Just win.