The blame game has already started. Dire internal polling reportedly already has Republicans pointing fingers over who is responsible for the anticipated bloodbath in November. Many of President Donald Trump’s MAGA supporters are blaming Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) for failing to pass the SAVE America Act (intended to tackle the issue of election integrity), a failure that has demoralized the Republican base. Prominent neoconservative voices are warning that the GOP may lose the Senate majority because of doubts sown by prominent influencers about the value of the U.S.-Israel alliance.
The reality is simpler. This election will be a referendum on whether Trump fulfilled his promise to put “America First” above the interests of other nations with their foreign lobbies and influence operations. The early indications are that many who voted for Trump two years ago to put a stop to forever wars abroad at the behest of the military-industrial complex are gravely disappointed that he entered into a regime-change war of choice with Iran and has continued the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, while ignoring the devastating impact these conflicts have had on Americans here at home.
Voters are clear about what has changed in their lives since February. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the disruption of the Bab al-Mandab Strait have traveled swiftly from the Persian Gulf to the American kitchen table. Fuel prices are up. Inflation has reared its ugly head, forcing the Federal Reserve to defy the president and raise interest rates. For the voter in rural Ohio who was promised relief from the affordability crisis, the Iran war is not an abstraction, it is a monthly bill.
The Trump administration never made a serious case for the war to the American public, much less a case grounded in America First principles. “Operation Epic Fury” was sold as a swift decapitation, premised on assurances from Israeli officials and hawkish media that the Islamic Republic would collapse at the slightest push. Months later, the rationale shifted from denuclearization to regime change to — in Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s telling — preventing a war between Iran and Israel. Meanwhile, while few Americans grasp how badly U.S. bases in the region have been battered, they feel the consequences in their wallets. A war launched to serve the interests of Washington’s foreign policy caste cannot expect the support of voters once its costs arrive at home.
Those costs are strategic as well as economic. The conflict has depleted America’s stocks of interceptors and stand-off munitions to the point that Washington can no longer supply European partners looking to arm Ukraine. Yet the administration continues to underwrite a proxy war against Russia it can neither win nor afford, even as commanders warn they lack the means to meet contingencies in the Pacific. It all betrays a bankruptcy of strategy, as commitments have outrun finite resources in theaters where America’s concrete interests are secondary at best.
Trump’s political movement was supposed to be a correction to the hubris and ideological crusading of the so-called unipolar era. Instead, MAGA foreign policy has devolved into yet another iteration of globalism, the old neoconservative dream of primacy everywhere and all at once, this time dressed in nationalist rhetoric. Many of those now claiming the America First mantle are yesterday’s neoconservatives under a new MAGA banner. Americans who came of age amid the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan recognize the usual suspects saying the same things under different labels. They are not buying it.
Republicans should take note of a striking development: Some Democrats on the campaign trail are now arguing that Trump has not been America First, an implicit concession that America First is a worthy standard. If the GOP surrenders that ground, it might discover that a challenger running on the themes of Trump’s 2016 campaign can defeat the party of Trump’s 2026 war.
History tends to reward hubris with humiliation, but humiliation can also be clarifying. The new Iran war has exposed the limits of American power in a post-unipolar world and the obsolescence of the Carter Doctrine. As the world’s leading producer of oil and gas, the United States has no business serving as the guarantor of Middle Eastern energy transit, still less as guarantor of any foreign government’s regional ambitions.
THE ‘AMERICA FIRST’ LEFT IS HERE — AND REPUBLICANS ARE MISSING THE TRAP
A course correction would not be complicated. End the war in Iran and pursue a negotiated settlement. Stop writing blank checks to foreign capitals that are cashed in American blood and treasure. Let capable regional powers assume primary responsibility for their own neighborhoods. And redirect America’s finite resources toward the homeland and the hemisphere, the rebuilding of the domestic industrial base, and a sustainable balance of power in Asia.
America First was never a slogan tied exclusively to one personality. It is a tradition of sovereign realism as old as Washington’s “Farewell Address” and John Quincy Adams’s warning against “going abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” If Republicans lose in November, the fault will not lie with Thune or with podcast influencers. It will lie with the decision to trade that tradition for yet another war in the Middle East, and with an administration that did not take seriously the voters’ demand that America First must be the guiding light of our foreign policy.
Dr. Arta Moeini is an international political theorist and managing director at the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy in Washington, D.C. You can follow him on X @ArtaMoeini.