Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know.
Over the last week, President Donald Trump has responded to Israel’s war on Iran with a familiar antagonistic tone.
Instead of pushing for calm and peace, Trump sent out a flurry of social media posts about how the Supreme Leader of Iran was an “easy target” and that “our patience is wearing thin,” along with a proclamation that “we now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran.”
Trump’s tone echoed the rhetoric of the late GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who was often at odds with Trump, when he “joked” in 2008 that he would “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”
Trump’s language also echoes the national debate in the years preceding the launch of the Iraq War in 2003, during which the attempt to find a peaceful solution by French and German leaders was ridiculed on the right. Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets like Fox News and the New York Post echoed this notion, referring to leaders dissenting from the war as an “Axis of Weasels.”
And a few years before that, President George H.W. Bush bragged at the end of the first Gulf War that the United States had kicked the “Vietnam syndrome,” a reference to the brief period after the Vietnam War—in which more than 58,000 Americans died—when the public had significantly soured on overt warmongering.
Similarly, his predecessor, President Ronald Reagan, went as far as proposing the “Star Wars” defense system as a way to intercept Russian missiles from space.
But Republicans have often gone after Democratic leaders for pursuing diplomacy over conflict. The right derided President Barack Obama’s actions to secure a deal with Iran to dissuade it from building nuclear missiles. Soon after his inauguration in 2017, Trump threw out that deal, likely sending Iran down a more antagonistic path.
The conservative strategy on international affairs is best described as simplicity. Trump embodied this ethos when he campaigned in 2016 on simply seizing Iraq’s oil as the spoils of the U.S. war there, which experts immediately pointed out would be a war crime.
Conservatives have argued that nations like Iran and Iraq can simply be bombed into submission and regime change, with nice and tidy resolutions leading to U.S. policy goals. But more than 20 years after President George W. Bush invaded Iraq over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, both the Middle East and the United States continued to deal with the deadly fallout. Instead of “weeks” of combat as predicted by the Bush administration, it took years for the war to end with a massive death toll on all sides.
Diplomacy is hard work. Leaders like President Jimmy Carter used a lot of time and his own political capital to work toward international agreements like the 1978 Camp David Accords. And even then, peace is not guaranteed.
Sometimes war ends up being necessary, when all other options are exhausted. But the right believes that diplomacy is weak and negotiation is to be mocked, derided, and shunned.
But history proves that bombing first, deceiving the public, and pretending to be tough without thinking things through leads only to disruption, further conflict, and—most concerning—mass death.
Campaign Action Oliver Willis June 22, 2025 at 12:00AM From Daily Kos
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