President Donald Trump decisively shattered the neoconservatives’ decadeslong stranglehold over the Republican Party during his first term as president. If the sixth National Conservatism Conference is any indication, he has already succeeded in his second term at purging the GOP of the America Last isolationists who thought they could hijack the Make America Great Again movement.

Trump’s radical remaking of the GOP was nowhere more apparent than in a debate over the United States’s relationship with Israel and Iran. On the one hand, you had Max Abrahms, one of the single most cited professors of terrorism studies, defending Trump’s extraordinary elimination of Iran’s nuclear weapons capability. The mild-mannered Abrahms gave an academic evisceration of both the neoconservative failures of the aughts that enabled Trump’s rise to political power and the paleoconservative isolationists who have united to project that Operation Midnight Hammer would trigger World War III and cause millions of American casualties.