The American Conservative Editor Jim Antle writes, “Thursday night was the night Donald Trump became president. You can imagine the hyperbolic hosannahs that would have been sung if Trump had gone ahead with his planned strikes against Iran, adding to the list of undeclared presidential wars. Instead he pulled back.”
“Hyperbolic hosannahs,” indeed. Who might have led this pro-war chorus?
Conservative pundits Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin.
When President Trump decided not to strike after being informed it could potentially kill 150 civilians, he explained on Twitter, “10 minutes before the strike I stopped it, not … proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone.”
A disappointed Shapiro tweeted in reply, “Disproportionate response to attacks on US assets are a good way of showing our enemies that we will mash them if they continue to escalate. The US doesn’t want war. You know who doesn’t want war even more? The ayatollahs who will find themselves quite dead if war occurs.”
In other words, “mash” them to show these pesky foreign countries we mean business, because such strategic military intervention including regime change has always worked out so well for us in the past (Thanks again, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton).
Levin was similarly irritated Trump didn’t strike. He might have been even more upset people were picking on John Bolton. “There’s now a clear campaign against John Bolton. I’m sure China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran love it when they hear people trashing John Bolton,” Levin said.
Levin’s defense of the national security adviser alone speaks volumes about what kind of “conservative” impulses the talk show host still has when it comes to foreign policy.
No issue defined George W. Bush’s presidency more than the Iraq War. After the majority of the country, including most of our veterans, eventually came to the conclusion that the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq had been a colossal mistake, that settled fact would help set the stage for the next Republican president who would reject the entire Bush-Cheney GOP brand in no uncertain terms.
Trump said there should be no more nation-building, no more policy of regime change, no more endless wars. Iraq would forever be the example America should avoid at all costs. However much the president has actually stuck to his own promises is another debate.
Needless to say, this is not the kind of thinking that appears to guide the foreign policy preferences of Shapiro and Levin.
Both were major advocates for the Iraq War, and unless I’m mistaken, remain unapologetic about it today. The closest Levin has come to saying the Iraq War was wrong appears to be that we should have attacked Iran instead in the first place.
Whatever “owning the libs” talents both men have that conservatives admire — it should be noted that MSNBC’s top liberal, Rachel Maddow, shares Shapiro’s concern about the Trump administration’s credulity — it doesn’t change the fact that on foreign policy they subscribe to the old Bush pro-war philosophy that “America First” forcefully rejects.
Ponder this: Trump promised in his campaign, essentially, that the U.S. would finally stop “shooting first and asking questions later.” Right now, Shapiro and Levin are annoyed that the president asked a crucial moral question before shooting first on Iran. Trump, to his great credit on Thursday, made a practical and humane inquiry to his generals — one that is in line, however unintentionally, with Christian just-war theory — that led him to reverse the attack out of moral concern.
Any competent leader should ask such a question. Furthermore, caring about the sanctity of life probably shouldn’t be limited just to the issue of abortion.
In some respect, perhaps Shapiro and Levin should be cut some slack. Advocacy and defense of the Iraq debacle had defined the Republican Party for the entire eight years Bush was in office. While a majority of GOP politicians might support Trump today in a broad sense, many, and perhaps most, still politically identify with Bush’s legacy. That includes many conservative pundits. You can throw Sean Hannity into that mix as well.
Conversely, Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson, who fully embraces Trump’s “America First” foreign policy philosophy and who takes great delight in beating the crap out of Bolton (sorry, Mark), was reportedly instrumental in helping the president make the right decision on Iran Thursday night. Conservative pundits such as Laura Ingraham and, even today, Ann Coulter seem tired of “forever war” too. The libertarian faction within the GOP, led by Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, cheer on the president’s more realist impulses, as do populist Republicans such as Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida.
The battle over what the conservative approach to war should look like continues. Many on the Right applaud Trump for resisting the Washington foreign policy establishment’s reflexive hawkishness, particularly last Thursday.
Others on the Right defend the Old Guard’s foreign policy reflexively while pretending to be anti-establishment.
Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.
