Trump Himself Is the Trump Movement's Iraq War

Regime change in America was also a bad idea

As the Iran War has metastasized, a number of conservative intellectuals who strongly supported President Trump have started jumping ship. Christopher Caldwell, for example, has declared that the Iran War spells the end of Trumpism as a movement. Ann Coulter, fed up at what her intended anti-war vote has led to and despairing of there ever being an alternative to what she voted against, has turned to mockingly prophesying further Trump wars against Myanmar, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Sohrab Ahmari, belatedly realizing that Trump has some serious character flaws that have been obvious to the rest of us for forty years, has pronounced that “Trump was never the one.” A common thread is the comparison of the Iran war to George W. Bush’s war on Iraq, and a belief that, by pursuing a similar war of choice for regime change in the Middle East, Trump is betraying the intellectual foundations and the clear and specific policy goals of the movement he started.

I rejoice when any public intellectual admits error, something that happens far less often than it ought to do. But I’m not sure they’ve identified their error correctly, because their analogy isn’t quite right. The Iran War isn’t the right event to analogize to the Iraq War. Rather, Trump himself, and the whole idea of using him as a vehicle for transforming America from the top down, is what is analogous to the Iraq War, and was from the beginning.

From his first campaign, but even more so in his third campaign for the presidency, the aim of the Trump movement has been more than a change of course in policy; its aim has been regime change in America. Animated by the belief that the existing order was so rotten and so oppressive that it would be both simple and beneficial just to smash it, many of Trump’s intellectual supporters aimed to do just that, and then to watch something better, freer and more truly American bloom in its place. These folks engaged in the same extreme threat inflation and aggressive loyalty policing that the Iraq War-era neoconservatives did to stifle criticism of their project, and they demonstrated the same insouciance about the possibility of anything going wrong. But they also made a more fundamental error in common. They believed that their own justifications for supporting Trump were the actual reasons why the Trump phenomenon was happening, and therefore had something to do with why Trump himself was doing what he was doing. And in this, too, they resembled the neoconservatives who provided the intellectual justification for the Iraq War.

The justifications for that war were manifold. We would neutralize a supposed threat of weapons of mass destruction. We would topple a dictator and spread democracy. We would establish an American beachhead for possible future operations against Iran. We would protect Israel, and thereby open up space for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on terms acceptable that country. We would secure American control of a portion of Persian Gulf oil, and thereby hedge against the possibility of instability in Saudi Arabia. Most expansively, we would transform Arab Muslim civilization itself, birth a liberal, secular, capitalist republic in the heart of the Arab world that would be an inspiring alternative to rising Islamist movements. As analyst Laurent Murawiec famously and ludicrously put it in a 2002 presentation to Richard Perle’s Defense Policy Board, “Iraq is the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot, Egypt the Prize.”

Such a multiplicity of justifications should have aroused suspicions from the beginning, but at least some of them convinced many people—myself, I am ashamed to admit, included. But these justifications were not the reasons why the war was fought, because those reasons were more primitive and emotional. America needed to do something, something big, bold and aggressive, to ensure that nothing like 9-11 would ever happen again. The neoconservatives had a host of arguments—too many arguments—why war in Iraq was that something, so that’s what we did. But the need to do came first; the reasons were secondary.

That might be true of the Iran war as well—but more importantly from the perspective of understanding these erstwhile Trumpists’ errors, it was true with Trumpism itself. Of course there were people who supported Trump because they wanted a more restrictionist immigration policy, or because they wanted a more restrictionist trade policy, or because they wanted an “America First” foreign policy, whatever that might be. There were certainly intellectuals who were eager to argue for these things, and to argue that Trump’s electoral success simultaneously proved their popularity, their wisdom, and their imminent and successful enactment, because this was why they wanted to change the American regime in the first place—or so they believed. It’s possible that they didn’t fully know themselves why they were really supporting Trump, didn’t realize that they too were substantially motivated by something more primitive and emotional. But even if they understood themselves completely, they were still self-deluded, because Trump himself was and is obviously and transparently all about those base and primitive emotions, and the movement he engendered is about him, full stop. From the start, all of these intellectual justifications amounted to so much back-filling, attempts to impose a coherence that was never really there. That is why I say that their support for Trump was like neoconservative advocacy for the Iraq War, an intellectual delusion wrapped around something purely atavistic.

Rather than being analogous to the Iraq War, Trump’s war in Iran is perhaps more analogous to Abu Ghraib, something ugly enough and reminiscent enough of the regime we had fought to topple to reveal something fundamentally rotten in the whole enterprise, and that turned certain pro-war intellectuals against the American war in Iraq. Not many changed their minds immediately; most of them stuck with the war for much longer, and many of those who did come to conclude that the war was a mistake did so, at least initially, on a narrow basis: we fought it with the wrong strategy, or with the wrong people in charge, or perhaps we even picked the wrong target. Only a few pro-Iraq War intellectuals came to reexamine their premises in a truly deep way.

I’m glad some Trump-supporting intellectuals are getting off the Trump train at this station. My question, though, is how deeply they will reexamine the premises that led them to get on the train in the first place. No, it turns out Trump is not “the one.” Will they realize, though, that there is no “one,” that a cult of personality is a bad thing regardless of the personality (and will be most likely to form around the worst kinds of personalities)? Will they realize that decapitating a regime—in America as in Iraq or Iran—is not a good way to transform a country, but a reliable way to destroy it? Will they realize that there are no final and decisive battles, that total victory is impossible, and that there is no alternative to politics, not even war, which is just the continuation of politics with the addition of other means?

The Trump movement is not dead because, as Damon Linker points out, Trump retains the overwhelming support of the MAGA and Republican faithful, but also because it never really had an intellectual foundation that could be betrayed as the pro-Trump anti-Iran War intellectuals think it has been. Caldwell in his piece avers that “Trumpism is about democracy or it’s about nothing.” There are people who said the same thing about the Iraq War. If that’s the choice, then they were both about nothing, and were always about nothing.

That isn’t the choice of course; both the Iraq War and the Trump movement were about something, just not the kind of things their intellectual water-carriers imagined. But if democracy is what Caldwell actually cares about, I’m confident he could find plenty of allies who do too, on the left, on the right and in the multiple centers of the American political spectrum. I hope his post-Trump trajectory leads him to seek them out, and work together with them to build one, from the ground up this time.