A MAGA Intellectual Takes on ‘Inverted Neocons’ 

The U.S. has not yet directly intervened in an offensive capacity against Iran. But President Donald Trump seems to many, including myself, on the verge of doing so.

Trump has gotten a lot of pushback from antiwar conservatives and libertarians for letting a major Mideast war begin on his watch. Some even accuse him of betraying the America First movement and joining forces with neoconservatives to fight a war on Israel’s behalf.

One MAGA luminary who rejects that view is Daniel McCarthy, the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and a contributing editor and board member at The American Conservative. In a recent article in Compact, McCarthy made the case that some figures on the antiwar right have become mirror images of the neocons: While the latter push for Trump to join Israel’s war with Iran, the former argue he should have prevented it. Both groups, McCarthy maintains, want Trump to “control events in the region” rather than let the regional enemies fight it out. McCarthy would prefer that Trump focus on America’s own problems at home.

For various reasons, I disagree with McCarthy’s perspective on this matter. But since I’ve long regarded McCarthy as one of the sharpest and most thoughtful proponents of America-First conservativism, I wondered if I was missing something important about the unfolding conflict. Wanting to hear more, I interviewed McCarthy on Monday afternoon. Below is a condensed and lightly edited transcript of our conversation.  

Your view of the Israel–Iran war differs from that of some other conservative advocates of foreign-policy restraint, and you’ve criticized people whom you call “inverted neocons.” Who are these inverted neocons and what do they get wrong about the Israel-Iran war in your view?

Well, we have some friends, especially among the libertarians, who are ideological in their approach to foreign policy, and also idealistic and emotional in their approach, rather than being realistic and assessing forces and recognizing that making the perfect the enemy of the good or trying to have everything that you want all at once is going to be counterproductive. 

I’m critical of people who, seeing Israel’s attack on Iran, have immediately responded by saying, well, this is all Donald Trump’s fault, the Trump administration is fully invested in this, this attack could not possibly have happened without Trump giving his assent to it, and therefore, this war is our war.

I would say, in some ways, they ideologically almost want to have their predictions fulfilled. They’re saying basically, if Trump has some responsibility because he didn’t stop Israel from doing this attack, then he must also be willing to go along with airstrikes, adding U.S. fighters and bombers to Israel’s air force. And it won’t stop there either. It’ll go through to boots on the ground and occupation. 

And I just think all of that is ideologically excessive. That’s taking on a nightmare scenario, and it’s actually abandoning the responsibility we have to look at each step of this mess that we have, and to say, you know what, America has a choice every step of the way and can back down or choose not to be involved at any point.

I have a couple of quotes here from your recent article in Compact. The first sentence of the article is this: “The basic fact of the Israel–Iran war is that Israel is much stronger than its opponent.” Another quote: “Our interest lies in staying out of a conflict that Israel is perfectly capable of winning on its own.” And the title of the article is “This Is Israel’s War,” but I don’t know if you chose that title.

I would argue that the U.S. is already deeply involved in the conflict. Israel is attacking Iran using U.S.-supplied munitions. America repositioned forces in the region to thwart Iran’s retaliatory strikes. Without our significant and ongoing military support, I don’t think Israel would be in a position to win this war. And that means that letting them fight it out entails our deep involvement. What am I getting wrong?

What I think you’re getting wrong is what follows from what you’ve just laid out. Does that mean that we should get more involved because the war is made possible by what we’ve already done? Does it mean that we should not make efforts at, first of all, staying out, and second, calling at least for peace? Should we abandon all hope of having an end to the war, of calling for an end to the war, of staying out of adding more force to it because of what we’ve already done? And I would say no.

Up to this point, Israel has received a great deal of U.S. aid; I’m sure it’s going to continue to receive a great deal more. If the antiwar position or the non-interventionist position is we can’t do anything until we cut Israel loose and remove any kind of support from Israel, then we basically have a politically impossible position for our side, because the amount of support the American people have for Israel as a whole is much greater than the amount of support the American people have for our joining Israel’s air force in bombing Iran or certainly having American boots go on the ground to undertake regime change and an occupation of Iran.

So, I would say that non-interventionists should fight the battles we can win, and we should be skeptical of despairing over battles that frankly have already been lost.

I’m wondering what you think about this war’s escalatory dynamics. There’s already a big push to get Trump to bomb Fordow [nuclear enrichment facility], because Israel is unable to take them out, meaning it needs our bunker busters and B-2 bombers.

And there’s the risk that U.S. forces and assets will be targeted or maybe incidentally hit by Iranian strikes, which would likely trigger our escalated involvement.

And there’s also the simple matter that Israel is a small country, and if ballistic missiles are raining down on it, we might want to enter the war directly to prevent Israel from resorting to nuclear weapons. 

How worried are you about these escalatory dynamics? And what do you say to those people who confidently predict—and I would include myself in their number—that this is going in the direction of Iraq War 2.0?

I am worried about the escalatory potential on all of those steps. But in terms of confident predictions, I would say, look back at your own records. What I recall here, and one of the things that informs my relative—and, again, I want to emphasize relative degree of optimism here—is that I’ve seen a lot of my friends be very, very wrong about their predictions before.

There were an awful lot of folks in our world who said, after Donald Trump assassinated [Iranian military officer Qasem] Soleimani at the end of his first administration, that this was going to lead basically to World War III, that this was going to lead to all sorts of unrest in the Middle East, that Iran was going to retaliate against us—none of which actually happened, or at least, not to the degree that it had been predicted.

And even before that, we had friends who were saying the same thing about moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in Israel. I don’t necessarily like using a phrase like “inverted neocon,” but what’s striking to me is that certain premises that many of our friends have are very similar to the premises of the neocons in terms of the inextricability of U.S. involvement, and in terms of threat inflation.

So, the neocons say that because Iran is such a powerful state, we have to preemptively attack them, Israel has to preemptively attack them, because they are  just such a powerful threat they can’t possibly be allowed to be around.

And then our side tends to say, Iran is so powerful that we can’t possibly allow Israel to attack them because then Iran, this great lion, will be awakened and will devour Israel, will devour us. It’ll retaliate in the ways that you’ve said.

And I just don’t think that either of those outlooks is based on analysis. I think they’re both based on moral, ideological preferences….

One thing that I think differentiates my view from that of many of our friends is I think that both Israel and Iran are acting quite logically here. And I think a lot of our friends say Israel is acting malevolently and Iran doesn’t really have any desire to have a nuclear weapon. But actually the war itself is sort of verifying the logic of both of the belligerents, right?

You’ve got these ballistic missiles coming over from Iran, and they’re blowing up apartment buildings throughout Israel. And the Israelis are saying, well, wait a minute, if one of those ballistic missiles had a nuclear warhead, we would be screwed. Israel is such a small country and a compact country that, even if it has a second strike capability, which we think it does, the amount of damage that Israel as a compact country could receive from a handful of Iranian nuclear weapons in the event of an apocalyptic showdown greatly exceeds the amount of damage that Israeli second-strike capabilities, whatever they might be, could conceivably inflict on a vastly larger Iranian land mass with a population of 85 million people.

So, I think that all those calculations make the Israelis very, very keen to defang Iran and to remove any possibility of an Iranian nuclear program.

As for the Iranians, put to the side the question of whether Iran is undeterrable, whether they want to have nuclear weapons for aggressive reasons…. It is absolutely a clear-cut logic that Iran wants to have a nuclear weapon, or should want to have a nuclear weapon, for defensive reasons. If I were the Iranians, I would absolutely want to have a nuclear weapon. Why? Precisely to prevent what’s happening right now….

That is a really bleak, realist outlook that says both of these belligerents are going to keep at it because they both have rational grounds for what they’re doing.

That said, that’s not the only calculation involved here. Obviously, the amount of pain that they’re both inflicting on one another is also a calculation that has to be factored in….

And there’s also the question of the danger for both of these states that something is going to change with respect to outside powers. The Iranians are certainly worried that America will get in. As for the Israelis, the reason they are free to have a war with Iran is because they’re not in grave danger of having a war with their Arab neighbors. But that could change if the Arabs become more sympathetic to Iran and less sympathetic to Israel, that would open the possibility for Israel of facing a multi-front war, which would be an extremely dangerous position for them. 

So, that actually gives both Iran and Israel, I think, an incentive, both in terms of the pain they’re experiencing right now from the mutual blows and also from the possibility that the international situation is going to change, to start talking to one another and to try to resolve this very difficult logical problem. It’s not as if they both want to continue this tit-for-tat indefinitely or that they can do so.

I would agree with a lot of what you just said, but I would add a couple of things, and the first thing I’d add is that this was logical from Israel’s perspective only because of America’s deep support for Israel and because Israel knows that we’re going to cover it with our superpower shield. We have warships in the Mediterranean Sea, we have forces in Iraq who shoot down Iran’s drones, and so on. 

And if Israel wants to take out Iran’s nuclear program because they don’t want it to be a nuclear weapons state, they’re unable to do that without direct U.S. intervention. And they’re unable to topple the regime without direct U.S. intervention. It seems like America’s interests are very much implicated in this. So why shouldn’t Trump have tried to prevent this war? And I think you’ve said you disagree with people who say that Trump should have tried to prevent this war.

No, I didn’t say that.

On X you wrote, “If you say the U.S. shouldn’t tell other countries what to do, but you insist the U.S. should have stopped Israel from attacking Iran, you’re not exactly a non-interventionist.”

Right, if you take for granted that the U.S. actually runs the world and therefore that we have a responsibility for preventing Israel from acting, and if we don’t, it’s as good as acting ourselves, that is accepting an imperial hegemonic framework.

That’s not accepting an “every nation for itself” framework, right? So, first of all, I think Trump did tell the Israelis, I’d prefer you not do this. It’s hard to know based on all the reports, many of which are trying to spin actions in one direction or another, but it seems like Trump didn’t want the Israelis to do the attack, that he asked them not to. They ignored his request not to do it. Trump also said, I definitely don’t want you to target the regime leader, Khamenei. And the Israelis, for the time being, at least, seem to be going along with that. 

So, we’re certainly free to express both what we think is in Israel’s best interest, what’s in our own interests, what’s in the interest of global peace and humanity, but we’re not in a position to actually control what happens.

But we were in a position to say to Israel, we’re not going to intercept these missiles. If you attack Iran, there’s going to be retaliation, and we’re not going to reposition our forces, getting them ready to defend you. We’re going to do the opposite and withdraw them. That would have been using leverage to prevent Israel’s war.

I don’t see that as an exertion of hegemonic influence. I see it as saying, “You have to pay the consequences of your own behavior.”

You’re assuming that Trump told the Israelis, we’re going to do this for you—

We also sent them Hellfire missiles.

Yeah, but that’s different from having our own ships intercepting the missiles. There’s an open question here. My assumption, which could be mistaken, is that Trump told the Israelis, I don’t want you to do this, and that they did it anyway, and that once they started doing it, Trump has had our ships shooting down Iranian missiles and whatnot….

I understand this claim that if we either revoked all support from Israel right now, or certainly if we had never supported Israel to begin with (in which case, I don’t even know if Israel would exist) that either of those positions would be a way where this conflict would not be happening right now or could end very quickly.

But I also think that’s unrealistic in terms of what Americans not only have done in the past but are willing to do right now. Everyone’s aware of how the American system works, including the Israelis. 

One of the things that pisses me off, by the way, is seeing a lot of libertarian jerks and others who are basically just biding their time, waiting for an opportunity to denounce Trump and to go back to saying, oh, my God, he’s just another George W. Bush!

It’s unfortunate, but I know these people well enough that I know that this is the psychology. And it’s not that they shouldn’t criticize Trump, but they shouldn’t immediately go 100 percent in the direction of thinking, oh my God, it’s 2003 all over again. Because that seems like a reflex. That seems like an ideological tic, as opposed to something that’s actually dealing with a more complicated situation.

If Trump says to the Israelis right now, I’m going to completely withdraw all support from you, I think the Israelis would just turn around and say, hey, how did that work out in 2019 when you tried to do that with the Ukrainians? And do you think Americans are less supportive of Israel in the midst of a war than they were of Ukraine? 

I worry a lot more about Congress and its neocon character than I do about Trump. I think Trump is genuinely hard to predict. I think Trump is complicated. I think Trump has an instinct to stay out of the war or at least not to get more deeply into it. I think Congress—and this again is something where I would warn my libertarian friends to be very careful what you wish for. There are an awful lot of libertarians who say, oh, the problem with a lot of our wars is that they’re just presidential wars. They’re unconstitutional. Wars are meant to be done by declaration of Congress. 

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My God! Can you imagine what’s going to happen if Lindsey Graham puts forward an appeal to have Congress declare war against Iran, to join Israel? I don’t think there’s a zero percent chance that would pass. I think there is a lot of Republican support for something like that. There might be a hell of a lot of Democratic support. 

And that would really screw us over, because then what are we going to say? What are our libertarian friends, who have been standing on process for so long, going to say if Trump doesn’t want to get into war, doesn’t want to get in more deeply, and Congress says, no, we’ve actually literally declared a war. We want America to go and do a full regime change on Iran. 

So again, I just really think that our friends need to think more carefully about the implications of their own principles or ideological constructs.