{"id":836,"date":"2026-08-12T14:42:43","date_gmt":"2026-08-12T14:42:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=836"},"modified":"2026-08-12T14:42:43","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T14:42:43","slug":"trumps-iran-disaster-is-making-all-his-cronies-look-like-fools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=836","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s Iran Disaster Is Making All His Cronies Look Like Fools"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Ever since the 2024 election, two mutually hostile conservative foreign-policy camps have raced to claim Donald Trump\u2019s victory as a mandate for their respective views. There are the \u201crestrainers,\u201d a coalition defined by a skepticism of interventionist wars like George W. Bush\u2019s 2003 invasion of Iraq and by a deep distrust of Israel and its lobby in Washington. And there are the latter-day neocons\u2014the ones who haven\u2019t defected to the Democratic Party, at least\u2014who regard Israel as America\u2019s indispensable ally and remain committed to the military overthrow of its enemies in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

Read more Boots Riley\u2019s Communist Heist Film<\/a><\/p>\n

Each camp openly disdains the other. The restrainers see the neocons as Israel Firsters and warmongers, while the neocons see the restrainers as antisemites and isolationists. Both camps have power bases within the Trump administration: Vice President JD Vance and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, for instance, are known to be close to influential restrainers like Tucker Carlson and American Conservative<\/em> executive director Curt Mills, while Secretary of State and national-security adviser Marco Rubio has been influenced by neocons like Elliott Abrams (who served in Trump\u2019s first administration) going back more than a decade. Both camps, if they squinted hard enough, could argue that Trump supports their goals. And both camps keep being made to look foolish by Trump\u2019s actual policies.<\/p>\n

When Trump returned to power, the restrainers seemed to be ascendant. A New York Times<\/em> article the week after Trump defeated Kamala Harris asserted that Rubio and other top picks for Trump\u2019s national-security team, including Pete Hegseth (now defense secretary) and Mike Waltz (now UN ambassador), had shifted from \u201cneoconservatism\u201d in favor of \u201cAmerica First.\u201d The week before he took office, Trump and his special envoy Steve Witkoff got Israel to agree to a ceasefire with Hamas, shaming the Biden administration and Israel\u2019s maximalist supporters, who had backed more than a year of genocide in Gaza. And in February 2025, Trump and Vance insulted and demeaned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in front of a press pool in the Oval Office, suggesting a break with the Biden administration\u2019s support for Ukraine against Russian aggression\u2014support that the neocons had generally endorsed alongside liberals. \u201cThis just does not sound like a guy who wants to get involved in an insane war with Russia or Iran,\u201d an optimistic Mills tweeted about Trump in March 2025. Writing in The Nation<\/em> that month, Matt Duss, former foreign-policy adviser to Bernie Sanders, argued that Rubio\u2019s cynical embrace of Trump showed that maybe the two camps weren\u2019t so different.<\/p>\n

But the triumph of the restrainers was short-lived. Trump and Zelensky worked things out, and in recent months Ukraine has actually been able to go on the offensive against Russia. By mid-2025, Trump was bombing Iran alongside Israel, and this year he\u2019s deployed US military might with imperial abandon. In January, Trump, with substantial involvement from Hegseth and Rubio, kidnapped Venezuela\u2019s president and installed a puppet government that Rubio now personally controls. Fresh off that apparent success, in February, Trump accepted Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s invitation to launch a regime-change war against Iran, something Israel and the neocons had unsuccessfully lobbied multiple administrations to do for literally decades. The result has been a disaster for America, the Middle East, and the entire world, as anyone who\u2019s tried to buy gas or groceries this year can tell you. It has also been a series of humiliations for both the restrainers and the neocons, as Trump has managed to disappoint both camps through months of abrupt and ill-conceived reversals.<\/p>\n

Read more How Occupy Wall Street Still Explains Politics Today<\/a><\/p>\n

John Podhoretz, the pugnacious editor of the flagship neocon journal Commentary<\/em>, exemplifies this whiplash. In June 2025, he was thrilled that his father, longtime Commentary<\/em> editor and Trump fan Norman Podhoretz, was still alive to see Trump bombing Iran (Norman died six months later), and in July he memorably dismissed critics of MAGA antisemitism by tweeting, \u201cTrump bombed Iran. He can say Shylock 100 times a day forever as far as I\u2019m concerned.\u201d A few days into the 2026 Iran war, when Mills wrote on X that Trump and his administration \u201cactually don\u2019t know what they\u2019re doing. Conned and bullied by Israeli hawks and Capitol Hill neocons,\u201d Podhoretz replied by calling Mills \u201cthe Aristotelian fulfillment of the Platonic conception of clownish idiocy.\u201d<\/p>\n

And then the worm turned again. In mid-June, Trump suddenly pivoted to a peace agreement with Iran without Israel\u2019s approval\u2014essentially a return to Obama\u2019s Iran deal, which Trump had pulled out of during his first administration, except that his new agreement was more generous to Tehran\u2014causing a total meltdown at Commentary<\/em>. \u201cI honestly don\u2019t know if this could be worse!\u201d Podhoretz ranted on his staff podcast. \u201cHe has choked! He has chickened out!\u201d (\u201cThe Iran Deal is a victory for Trump!\u201d was Mills\u2019s response.) Podhoretz needn\u2019t have worried, though: Less than a month later, and at the time of this writing, the peace agreement had collapsed and America and Iran were once again exchanging fire over the Strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lesson here, not only for restrainers and neocons but for anyone who imagines (including elements on the left) that Trump can be an instrumental champion of their preferred policy agenda. As cringe as the \u201cBlue MAGA\u201d wing of the Democrats and the \u201cNever Trump\u201d conservatives of The Bulwark<\/em> may seem, they at least have the virtue of consistency: For a decade and counting, they\u2019ve accurately identified Trump as the flaky demagogue he\u2019s always been. Everything Trump Touches Dies<\/em>, the title of the 2018 book by former Republican strategist turned Never Trumper Rick Wilson, has been a pretty reliable mantra, whatever anyone thinks of Wilson or the book itself. Yet with Trump\u2019s every course correction, the right\u2019s foreign-policy minds keep convincing themselves that they\u2019re special and that this time will be different.<\/p>\n

Read more This Is the First Article We Ever Published About the Internet<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Nation Magazine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":835,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cultural-contradictions"],"yoast_head":"\nTrump\u2019s Iran Disaster Is Making All His Cronies Look Like Fools - Atlas Living Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=836\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trump\u2019s Iran Disaster Is Making All His Cronies Look Like Fools - Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Nation Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=836\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-08-12T14:42:43+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=836#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=836\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/f6233854b1f92a6d21147fe5d5e58abc\"},\"headline\":\"Trump\u2019s Iran Disaster Is Making All His Cronies Look Like Fools\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-08-12T14:42:43+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=836\"},\"wordCount\":1027,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=836#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/08\\\/19c4445a8b1e82b5980e1339848767b5.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Cultural Contradictions\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=836#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=836\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=836\",\"name\":\"Trump\u2019s Iran Disaster Is Making All His Cronies Look Like Fools - 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