Ben Shapiro and Nick Fuentes knew what they were getting with Trump. Why didn’t the Anti-War Right?

When it comes to US foreign policy, particularly with regard to Israel and Iran, if your media diet consisted of self-proclaimed “dissident” and “truth telling” sources, you were being misled about Donald Trump. If you were listening to figures like Tucker Carlson, it is very easy to imagine you being incredibly shocked at the war President Trump launched on Iran.  

The “No New Wars” President was how he was billed by an entire ecosystem of media grifters and delusional fake-experts making educated wishes about geopolitical realities. It was reckless, stupid, and evil, but worse than that, it was wrong. The history just did not support this fantasy version of Trump that these media grifters invented. A lot of them have ostensibly turned against Trump now that the lie is unsustainable, but I actually don’t think they thought they were selling a lie. I feel like a lot of them were willing a childish fantasy of theirs into being by imagining that actually, the reprobate President had a real grasp on world affairs and wouldn’t betray their faith. The funny thing here is that by launching this war, Trump was actually being true to how he governed in his first term. The support for him from the “anti-war” Right despite this, is baffling.

The truth is, Trump was never an anti-war President. His actual record showed the opposite, to the extent that one could argue he was orienting the world towards inevitable gigantic conflicts like we’re seeing now. He may actually be our first pro-war President since FDR, except with far less moral basis. Besides severely ramping up the drone war, escalating every war the US was already involved with, and directly aiding Saudi atrocities in Yemen, he made two giant moves to set the entire Middle East on fire. These twin disasters are at the heart of what is tearing the region apart today, and both happened in his first term. They were exiting the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and facilitating the Abraham Accords.

The JCPOA, better known as the Obama Nuclear Deal with Iran, was an agreement wherein Iran would essentially dismantle its means of building a nuclear weapon in exchange for economic sanctions relief. It was a hard-nosed foreign policy move with real trade-offs made in order to avoid the larger conflict we are dealing with today. Its critics at the time, chief among them Donald Trump, pretended it was a pathetic capitulation to the Iranian regime made for no discernable reason. To be sure, there were risks in the agreement, in that it gave Iran greater means of supporting the incompetent Assad regime as it was massacring its own citizens in Syria, but it prioritized avoiding the necessity of a military confrontation with Iran, which would incur enormous economic and logistical costs to America, over everything else. It was the true “America First” foreign policy move, and Trump and his cheerleaders destroyed it for no rational reasons.

The Abraham Accords were basically a military pact disguised as a normalization agreement. It integrated Israel, the UAE, Sudan, and Bahrain together in a mutual arms-selling cooperative, under the umbrella of American intelligence and defense infrastructure. It completely sidelined the Palestinian issue, which was once a pre-condition for Arab cooperation with Israel, and further isolated Iran in the region. Throughout its existence, this “peace” agreement has seen a rise in settler violence in Israel, a rise in missile strikes in the region, multiple major wars breaking out, and the closure of one of the most important shipping lanes on the planet. One could call this a failure of a peace accord if peace was ever its real goal.

The logic of the JCPOA, along with Obama’s continued arms sales to Israel, was to avoid an existential conflict in the Middle East. Iran would be discouraged from directly attacking Israel because there was both a carrot and stick involved. The stick being Israel’s military force, and the carrot being them finally having a stake in continued peace in the region. Agree or disagree with it, there was a clear logic there, and I think it’s fair to say the current situation largely vindicates this approach. The logic of Trump’s grand strategy of isolating Iran, threatening it with a multi-nation military encirclement, and offering it no incentive to reshape its behaviour besides force, seemed to be a strategy of domination in hopes of a historically unprecedented capitulation. Nations that have nothing to lose don’t commit suicide, they fight like they have nothing to lose, and this is the exact end Trump worked so diligently to arrive at.

This was all foreseeable. Trump did these moves in his first term, and no, he was not tricked into it by Benjamin Netanyahu. Perhaps he was far too credulous of Bibi’s overpromising, but at his core, he would not have taken this final step if he was not at least on some level, ideologically committed to this. I would go as far to say that opposition to the Republic of Iran is a core part of Trumpism as a project. He made castigating Obama for his de-escalation with the country the centerpiece of his entire foreign policy argument in 2016. He is shackled by the fact that the JCPOA was a relatively great deal achieved at little cost to the United States and that he can’t possibly negotiate a better deal even at a far greater cost. Whatever he tries to exit with will be compared negatively to the Obama-deal, and he can’t abide by that because it consigns his entire approach, and a core part of his presidency, to failure.

One thing the media ecosystem that created this anti-interventionist fantasy Trump can never say, is that this wasn’t foreseeable. Two very different people foresaw it perfectly. Ben Shapiro, who did not support Trump in 2016 but came to be among his greatest champions after (correctly) assessing that Trump is the most pro-Israel president in the history of the United States at the end of his first term, and Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist whose main political concern was “world Jewry” and became disillusioned with Trump after it became clear he would spend his political capital supporting Israel. These two entirely different people came to the same conclusion about something that should have been obvious, and for this reason I have zero patience for the so-called anti-war Right that boosted Trump for a third time.

Honestly, I have little patience for anti-war posturing from the American Right in general because I don’t think they’re a real political movement, and I think that it’s a political philosophy that is mostly at odds with itself. It’s not based in any real sympathy for those experiencing suffering, or pragmatism about US logistical constraints because… how could it be? American conservatism is Darwinist and opportunistic; it finds pressure points and relentlessly exploits them, and it has no sympathy for the victims because it mistakes power for moral worth. At its core, a base antisemitism is what drives the anti-war Right, and that’s just not a widespread sentiment in right-wing politics. This is a harsh thing to say about a movement of thousands of people, but how else could one explain Patrick Buchanan’s support for South African apartheid but hatred of Israel? Or explain Marjorie Taylor Greene’s support for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine but not Israel’s many wars? These people have no moral core, just a superstitious hatred and theory of the world that is at odds with reality. They will never be reliable partners in peace.

I discussed a lot of things here today, but what I really want to impress upon people is how pathetic and useless people like MTG, Curt Mills, Tucker Carlson, and the like are. Morally vacant losers who got the biggest call of their careers wrong and actively helped get us to the point they were supposedly desperate to avoid. They are political nothings, enemies of progress, and a dead end. If they could lie to themselves about this, they’ll lie to you about anything. If there’s one solitary upside about Trump’s nature as a con-artist, it’s that the biggest marks he’s ever had were his own supporters.

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