JD Vance once compared Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel to that trigger-happy group around George W Bush who invaded Iraq, otherwise known as Maga’s chief nemeses: the neoconservatives. Or at least, that was how he framed the Israeli war leader in an interview last year.
The vice-president quietly heads the isolationists within the administration. The neocons fought an armed retreat in Trump’s first term, which the isolationists are now hoping to turn into a rout. Remember those leaked Signal chats from March? Vance was against bombing the Houthis while the then national security adviser Mike Waltz supported the campaign. Waltz has since been put out to pasture at the United Nations. But the war erupting between Israel and Iran could upset this balance. It threatens to drag Trump into a conflict he promised to avoid – and relegate the isolationists within his administration.
The genesis of Maga isolationism lies in the Middle East. Vance came to see his deployment in Iraq with the marines in 2005 as part of an unjust war. Like many in his generation, he thought the lies peddled before the invasion were a betrayal of the ordinary working man back home, neglected by the state, and then sent to die in the desert. He told Politico before he became Trump’s running mate that the Iraq War was rooted in nothing more than America’s need to “fuck something else up” after 9/11. Breezily subduing the Taliban did not scratch America’s desire for retribution. Nor did it meet the neocons’ expectations. They pushed for Iraq next. With more time, they would have found a way to “liberate” Iran.
The vice-president went on to say the same dynamic – a similar bloodthirst – may be gripping post-7 October Israel. Remember: Netanyahu said in 2002 that invading Iraq would bring “enormous positive reverberations on the region” and now couches his onslaught against Tehran in the language of liberation.
“Israel expected to lose more troops [against Hamas], and I think they’ve had a more successful military operation than they expected to,” Vance told Politico in March 2024. “And if I have a big fear for Israel, right now, it’s [about] the same exact dynamic – that they’re going to need to try to fuck something else up, because the psychology impact of October 7 was so, so powerful.” Vance would never publicly criticise Israel like that now, but he clearly sees the US’s past mistakes reflected in Israel’s belligerent fury.
The pro-Palestinian left and the isolationist right want the same thing – distance from Israel – but for different reasons. While both point to Iraq as the moment they lost faith in Middle Eastern adventures, the isolationists deplore naive internationalism which sacrifices American lives, whereas the left condemns what it sees as a genocidal regime in Jerusalem. This oblique alignment meant that Trump’s victory could be a pyrrhic, ironic win for the left because disengagement with Israel was better than complicity in the destruction of Gaza.
Trump promised nothing less than peace on Earth during the campaign: the Ukraine war was to end, and comity was supposed to break out in the Middle East. (He seems indifferent to the savage war in Sudan which has killed tens of thousands of people.) That legacy would be secured through a deal in which Iran agreed not to build a nuclear bomb. The next round of negotiations was planned for 15 June. But then Israel killed Iran’s top negotiator in an airstrike. Diplomacy becomes much harder when your interlocutor has no pulse. Or as Trump put it, “they didn’t die from the flu”.
Trump’s response has been muddled. He tried to save face by spinning the strike as a final warning to the Iranians. To his isolationist supporters, he said a nuclear Iran makes peace impossible. As Steve Bannon mused to me last week, before Israel’s assault, Trump is actually a “moderate” within the movement. Bannon thinks 80 per cent of Maga sits to his right. Trump masks more radical ideas – such as an alliance with Russia – by uniting a disjointed coalition through his charisma and mafioso management style. He sits above his competing courtiers like a capricious sultan with a fetish for gold plate.
The problem for Trump is that Israel’s war threatens his domestic agenda. Cheap oil was his panacea for inflation and any price increases inflicted by tariffs. His officials want to resurrect the Monroe Doctrine and prepare for war with China, not expend Tomahawk missiles knocking out Iranian missiles over Jordan.
Iran’s nuclear scientists were killed the day before tanks and troops paraded through Washington DC. It was Trump’s birthday. The timing was totemic for those in Maga who think marines in the Middle East should be redeployed to the streets of Los Angeles. You could rewrite the America First slogan as “militarism at home, not abroad”. But then Israeli bombs forced Trump to rethink. The remnant neocons in the Republican Party – such as Senator Lindsey Graham and the former national security adviser John Bolton – are keen to, in Graham’s words, help Israel “finish the job”. For a diminishing group in Washington, regime change has always been the only way to ensure a theocratic regime did not acquire nuclear weapons.
Like Bush, Trump may become a president who was elected to fix America but ends up ordering troops to the Middle East. This war has become a test of whether the neoconservative age is over.
[See also: Impunity is fuelling Israel’s spiralling aggression]
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This article appears in the 18 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Warlord