All the Sad Hawks

Date: 2026-06-18 15:35:11 Source: XHS Tech Wire Author: JavaScript

An irony of the Iran war is that Donald Trump, whose patience for written texts and policy details is famously negligible, came to grasp the reality of the situation more quickly and clearly than his neoconservative supporters who spent years obsessing over the issue. Trump, recognizing that America has suffered a historic defeat, has abandoned his demands for unconditional surrender, and is trying to buy his way out with a memorandum of understanding that reportedly promises Tehran billions of dollars to restore the status quo ante. By contrast, the neocons, the coterie of interventionists who long ago developed a reputation as the brains of the conservative movement, have been rather slow on the uptake.

“I suspect the MOU may be less awful than the administration’s disastrous sales pitch,” Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies posted on X yesterday. (Later he conceded the deal was not better at all but, in fact, “even worse than I assumed.”) The pundit Batya Ungar-Sargon hypothesized that Trump might be “in a fugue state.” Marc Thiessen, a Washington Postcolumnist who has tried to steer Trump toward hawkery through relentless obsequiousness, termed the MOU the “Vance peace deal,” as if the anti-interventionist veep had staged a coup. An especially plaintive moment took place during Commentary’s podcast when Eli Lake, the hawkish foreign-policy analyst, cried, “What’s going on? What's going on?”

What’s going on is that the neocons misapprehended both the geopolitical situation and the president they trusted to resolve it.

The defining trait of neoconservative thought is a near-boundless faith in the efficacy of U.S. military power. This faith caused the neocons to recoil in from the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. A tougher president, they believed, would have used the threat of American might to make Iran accept much stricter terms.

[Jonathan Lemire: Trump in defeat]

At the time, the neocons insisted that their plan would not involve actually employing force. “There is an alternative, and it isn’t war,” Dubowitz wrote in 2015. “It’s a better deal.”

Trump tore up Barack Obama’s deal, but the threat of war did not produce a better deal. So Dubowitz and his allies came to believe that military force would accomplish their ends. When Trump’s 2025 bombing campaign failed to eliminate Iran’s nuclear threat, they decided a more extensive military campaign would force the country to make concessions. The campaign has come, but the concessions have not. The harsh reality is that Iran’s regime has a tight grip on power, does not care about suffering by their people, and buried its nuclear material and much of its conventional military power underground where air power could not easily destroy it.

Another mistake the neocons made was to misjudge Trump. The president may have appeared to share their goals, given his frequently expressed contempt for the Obama administration’s handling of the issue. But the reason Trump hated Obama’s nuclear deal is that it was made by Obama, a figure he regards with a pathological mix of envy and racial disgust.

While the neoconservative impetus to prevent a nuclear Iran is rooted in a hatred and fear of its radical government, Trump has never held an ideological grudge against a foreign power. His geopolitical vision is personal. To the extent that a country’s authoritarian character factors into his assessment, it is generally a plus.

By suppressing mass protests and then outmaneuvering Trump at the negotiating table, the Iranian regime began to elevate itself into the same category as Russia, China, North Korea, and other “strong” dictatorships that he admires. “I never cared about regime change,” he said yesterday at the G7 summit. “We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people,” Trump said of the Iranian leadership. “They were nice to deal with. They were strong people, smart people.”

If Iran’s rulers are so rational and nice, one wonders why their potential acquisition of a nuclear weapon would so concern the United States. Indeed, Trump floated the notion that seizing Iran’s nuclear material no longer mattered very much. “You could make the case, why even bother?” he mused, adding, “It’s not very valuable stuff.”

Despite his boasts, Trump has never been a brilliant dealmaker. His specialty is finding ways to strip out short-term value while foisting long-term costs on others, while manipulating public opinion so that he can always find a new round of suckers. Nothing about this skill set suggested an ability or even a willingness to tackle a problem such as Iran’s nuclear ambitions, especially if doing so imposed extended costs. As soon as it became clear that he would not enjoy a quick and cheap victory, Trump’s calculation was always going to be that expensive gasoline is his problem, and a future nuclear-armed Iran is somebody else’s.

Trump’s desperation to get out of the war has been obvious for more than two months. The war supporters have had to process this reality by progressing through the Kübler-Ross stages of grief at various speeds. They all started in the denial stage. “It is astonishing to me that so many seem to have concluded that the US clearly caved to Iran’s unacceptable demands (a US non-aggression guarantee, acceptance of enrichment, full sanctions relief, unfrozen Iranian assets, and a total US withdrawal from the Middle East) while Iran obviously balked at ours (no ballistic missile program, no nuke program, no proxies, hand over enriched materials),” National Review’s Noah Rothman insisted in early April, dismissing as implausible the emerging contours of the deal.

[Read: The U.S. had no choice but diplomacy—yet again]

“I would say this to the President: I personally know that you will do the right thing,” the hawkish commentator Mark Levin said in early April, when the cease-fire began. He added: “I have complete faith in this man.” A month later, the Fox News personality Jesse Watters still clung to hope. “The commander in chief must believe the Iranians are serious about surrendering,” he said. “The president,” Watters went on, “must know what he’s doing.”

At the moment, the dominant sentiment among hawks is stage two: anger. Trump “has choked, he has chickened out, he has bled himself dry,” Podhoretz complained earlier this week. “The greatest superpower to ever exist brought to its knees by a few mines. Just a disaster for America,” Ungar-Sargon wrote on X today.

Some have progressed into the bargaining stage. “Smartest thing for Trump to do is lull Iran into complacency with this deal and then let Israel do another decapitation strike,” the podcaster Erick Erickson said yesterday. The conservative activist Will Chamberlain suggested, “President Trump should renege.” For those concerned about hawkish loved ones, the next stages are depression and then acceptance.

Achieving this final won’t come easily, though. When Trump announced the war, he warned, “The regime’s conventional ballistic missile program was growing rapidly and dramatically, and this posed a very clear colossal threat to America and our forces stationed overseas.” But speaking in Europe today, he said Iran hadto keep its ballistic missiles, since Saudi Arabia had its own, and mocked advisers who suggested otherwise (“I don’t think they’re smart”).

Meanwhile, the administration is attempting to make its supporters forget a decade of claims that Obama betrayed the country by handing “pallets of cash” to Iran as it permits the country to recover billions immediately, by suspending sanctions, and possibly far more in “reconstruction” funds that Iran views, not inaccurately, as reparations. The dread pallets seen in endless Fox News clips transferred $1.7 billion to Tehran, a minuscule figure compared with the $12 billion in unfrozen assets, not to mention the potential $300 billion reparations.

Obama “gave them $1.7 billion in cash, green cash,” Trump said this morning, in a video clip shared by his rapid-response team. It is as if Trump’s sole objection to the JCPOA was not the sums of money involved but the use of actual greenbacks. After all, $300 billion worth of cash would be impractically heavy to transfer by pallet.

Perhaps the hawks will realize that their preferred policy was wrong, that regime change by airpower was impossible, and that Trump was unfit to lead in the first place. Or perhaps they’ll appear on Fox News one day soon praising Trump’s wise and generous dealmaking with our Iranian friends, in contrast to the tacky gifts from the miserly Obama.

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