A treacherous week for America First (and Israel, too)

President Donald Trump’s broad coalition faces the hardest test of his second administration this week, all depending on what the president commits the country’s armed forces to over the next few days.

On one side of the MAGA coalition, Iran hawks, military interventionists, and remaining neoconservatives are excitedly watching for their long-awaited collapse of the ayatollahs’ regime. On the other, America-firsters, skeptical non-interventionists, and the handful of the coalition’s actual isolationists watch with worried eyes.

Just consider the pros and cons. Foreign entanglements are rarely clean and simple, and a lot rides on the next few days.

From a certain point of view, it is the best of times to attack; from another, it is the worst of times — for both MAGA and the historically close American-Israeli relationship. So let’s examine the pros and cons.

Pro: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Trump are both credible wartime leaders. Israel’s longest-serving prime minister has a long history of successful hawkish intervention where he felt necessary, and Trump is no slouch either.

In Trump’s first term, the president proved the Washington blob wrong when he swiftly dealt with the Islamic State’s “caliphate,” bombing its forces into submission and hunting its leader down “like a dog.”

In Syria, too, Trump enforced the red lines he drew — but didn’t involve the United States any further than that. And in Afghanistan his famed MOAB strike helped bring the Taliban to the table.

Both men have repeatedly warned Iran for a decade that it was on the path to a war they’d gladly bring it, and here we are.

To the hawks, Trump and Netanyahu seem a match made in heaven for realizing their dreams of crippling Iran’s nuclear capabilities or even ousting the regime entirely. But wait just a minute and consider why Trump is back in office in the first place!

Con: Trump was elected first in 2016, then again overwhelmingly in 2024 on great big waves of discontent.

That anger, first rippling in the Tea Party movement and then apparent from Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders’ first and only authentic campaign, stretches across tax policy, education policy, foreign policy, outsourcing, DEI, immigration, and the Democratic Party’s obsessions with social issues. It can all be boiled down to “the elites do whatever they want without any regard for what will actually help Americans.”

Bombing Iran’s nuclear program into the Age of the Steam Engine might be the right thing to do for an ally in need. It might be smart foreign policy, when it comes to America’s red lines being taken seriously. It might even be just. But you really, truly have to stretch far and wide into the future and all the many paths it can take to divine how intervention helps Americans here at home.

That’s a problem. It’s a big reason you see such discontent and even rage bubbling up all over the America First and MAGA right, from Tucker Carlson to the Federalist’s Sean Davis to the anonymous X poster down the way.

Some of these types think war not only doesn’t serve American interests but actively threatens our safety by unleashing broader conflict. Others recognize the promises we heard in the lead-up to Afghanistan and Iraq: that this is different from Vietnam and we won’t get bogged down because we’re way smarter now.

The reality is that a large segment of voters never signed up for another Middle Eastern war. They want the government to focus on problems at home for a change.

This discontent doesn’t just jeopardize the MAGA coalition’s unity; it jeopardizes broader domestic support for our alliance with Israel, which is already under strain among the Democrats.

None of the latter MAGA camp are happy right now, but a very short war made up of successful strikes could change a lot of their minds. Trump is just the sort of man to deliver that possibility.

Pro: Trump's done this before, in Afghanistan and Syria. The reason he has such credibility on the national stage is that unlike his two Democratic predecessors, he delivers overwhelming force exactly when he says he will.

Let’s say American bombs could reach Iran’s football-field-deep mountain uranium enrichment plant and we blast it and go home, leaving in place an Iranian regime still clinging to power but set back decades from developing nuclear weapons.

Is Trump the man to break the curse of the Middle East? A wise man once told me the number-one trick to never getting divorced is simple: Never get divorced, even — especially! — when times are tough. Maybe all it takes to not get entangled in nation-building is not to get entangled in nation-building — especially when times are tough.

Since right around the time he descended the golden escalator 10 years ago, the president has told the Iranians to stop enriching. The United States has made that demand for decades longer still.

Now the bill has come due. Unlike previous U.S. presidents, this one collects. Wasn’t one of the driving issues of both 2016 and ’24 the Democrats’ foreign policy weakness, from “pallets of cash” and “red lines” under Barack Obama to the sloppy retreat from Afghanistan under Joe Biden? What no American voted for, however, is another 20-year war in the Middle East.

Con: Reports suggest Israel wanted to take out Iran’s supreme ayatollah but that the United States blocked the operation. The president later posted on Truth Social that we know the ayatollah’s location and will kill him if he makes a wrong move.

But what happens if he’s killed and the Iranian regime doesn’t recover? What if the entire state collapses? The regime has endured for five decades, but tyrannies often seem invincible — right up until their leaders flee to exile through Moscow International Airport.

Iran has a sophisticated society, far more advanced than Iraq’s and nothing like the tribal chaos of Afghanistan. It’s also a much older civilization. But it’s not a unified Persian monolith. Between 35% and 40% of the population — including the ayatollah’s own late father — belongs to one of the country’s many ethnic minority groups.

Maybe that wouldn’t come to any violence, and maybe Iran’s oil could pay for reconstruction. Some Iranian dissidents and expats hope Reza Pahlavi, the 46-year-exiled crown prince of Iran and eldest son of its last shah, could return. He’s the current head of the National Council of Iran, a secular, United Nations-friendly group that claims to represent millions of Iranians.

The problem is we don’t know, do we? Sure, the crown prince’s father ruled Iran at the peak of its domestic freedoms, but he was ousted by a violent domestic revolt. Iran’s hard-line regime makes it more than a little challenging to gauge domestic opinion, and lots of exiled leaders have promised the West they’d be greeted with ticker-tape parades upon their triumphant returns.

But few have pulled off such a feat without the U.S. military marching behind them, and in Iraq and Afghanistan, both exiled governments ended in failure even with American GIs dying in the streets to maintain their power. And don’t forget that during the half-century they’ve spent in exile, the council backed Iraq in its disastrous war on Iran.

So let’s assume the worst: civil war, with Iranian refugees flooding into Europe. Who steps in?

Israel has neither the ability, the mandate, nor the care to do so. Nearby China certainly doesn’t care and would probably just profit and steal along Iran’s periphery. Russia remains bogged down in Ukraine, and Europe simply cannot afford to bring stability.

So it would fall to us. Nation-building once more, whether we like it or not.

It needn’t come to that. Trump won in 2016 and ’24 saying his predecessors started conflicts but that he would end them with strength. In that sense, his involvement in this conflict isn’t really a departure from what he ran on — so far.

Trump’s foreign policy only works when allies and adversaries believe he’s willing to respond with overwhelming force when challenged. Under his leadership, the United States regains the ability to tell the West how much to spend on defense — and the world how to trade with us. Foreign leaders know he won’t hesitate to use the big stick.

Maybe he can land this plane. Just consider the pros and cons. Foreign entanglements are rarely clean and simple, and a lot rides on the next few days — both foreign and domestic.

Daniel McCarthy in the Spectator: Trump won’t be dragged into a regime-change war

Blaze News: Israel’s strategy now rests on one bomb — and it’s American

Blaze News: Massie, Dems seek to limit presidential war-making authority amid talk of Iranian regime change

ABC News: Exiled Crown Prince Reza sees 'best opportunity' to get rid of regime

The Spectator: Has Trump sided with the hawks?

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