The first American casualty of the Israel-Iran conflict was Tucker Carlson.
“The first week of a war with Iran could easily kill thousands of Americans,” Carlson said on June 7. The Tehran Times, which calls itself the “voice of the Islamic Revolution,” praised Carlson’s acuity and agreed that American foreign policy is controlled by Fox News’s Mark Levin. On June 13, Israel attacked Iran in one of the most complex and successful military operations in history. By June 19, not one American had been killed in the first week of the conflict. Full marks to Carlson, the fearless teller of truths the Jews don’t want you to hear.
The second American casualty of the Israel-Iran conflict was the MAGA isolationist faction. Never before in American politics has so stupid a group risen to such prominence. Its members may know even less than the Know-Nothings did. But prominence is not influence. In the decade since he first lowered himself to politics, President Donald Trump has consistently said he opposes allowing the apocalyptic psychos who run Iran to build a nuclear weapon. Trump kept saying it on the campaign trail in 2024, too. He gave Iran 60 days to make a deal back in mid-April, then gave the Israelis the green light when the clock ran out. No one should be surprised that he acted on his word.
The isolationists are surprised because they have whipped themselves into digitally enhanced delusion. They thought Trump was their man because he denounced the follies and “forever wars” of the War on Terror, the insider-trading of Beltway politics, and the bad faith of the media. They liked what they heard, so they tuned out his patriotism, his admiration of military power, and his sharp recognition that the greatness of America must be reasserted in an altered world. For all their praise of Trump as contractual, some of his most ardent admirers preferred not to see that the contract changes as the nature of the negotiation changes.
One of the isolationists’ manifold dishonesties is their claim that we face a choice between “American boots on the ground” in Iran and doing nothing as a hostile nuclear power arises at the crossroads of the global economy. Its distorted vision projects the bifocal dysfunction of American democracy beyond America’s borders. Like the swings in the domestic vote since 2008, it is shaped by reaction and provincial resentment. It inverts the failed post-9/11 foreign policy that thought everyone anywhere could, given sufficient bombing, adopt Western liberal democracy into another ideal of American exceptionalism in which no one can be like us, so there’s no point in doing anything, anywhere, ever again. This, too, is a retreat into fantasy.
The unexceptional truth is that there is a wide range of policy options between willed incapacity and global conquest. The isolationists’ unwillingness to recognize this is another resentful reaction to failure. The experts of the Obama and Biden administrations tinkered with their toggles, adjusting here and compensating there, when it was obvious that picking the mullahs as the balance point of their Asia policy was stupid and dangerous. The task now is not to mirror one stupidity with another and invite new dangers into the vacuum where American influence used to be. It is to construct new policies that recognize the complexities of an altered world.
As always, the rising powers, not status quo powers such as the United States, pose the complexities. Behind Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis is Iran, and behind Iran are Russia and China. The MAGA isolationists have sunk themselves by failing to rise to the challenge of joined-up thinking. They showed that they are not serious people; “kooky,” as Trump said when dismissing Carlson. Thwarted, Carlson has retreated into fantasy and attributed Trump’s hostility to Iranian nuclear weapons to hypnosis by “neoconservatives” and the “Israel lobby” along with mad Jew-baiter Candace Owens, unfunny comic Dave Smith, and professional moron Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (D-GA) (R.-Grifter).
What kind of conservative was Carlson when his foreign policy horseshoed into alignment with those of Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), as well as the Al Jazeera Islamist Mehdi Hasan? What kind of truth teller was he when, in an interview with the toad-like Steve Bannon, he denied that Iran tried to assassinate Trump in 2024 — and then, when he interviewed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) a few days later, denied that he had said it?
What kind of journalist was Carlson when he said nothing when Qatar’s prime minister and prime Hamas apologist, Mohammed al Thani, told him that Qatar has “never heard” or “never seen” anything about Iran being “close to a nuclear weapon”? All Carlson or al Thani had to do was read the International Atomic Energy Agency’s February report that Iran nearly doubled its stock of 60% enriched uranium from 363 lbs last August to 605.8 lbs in February. The IAEA said about 92 lbs of 60% enriched uranium can be enriched to 90% purity, enough for a nuclear device, relatively quickly.
That interview, a Foreign Agents Registration Act filing shows, was arranged by the Washington, D.C., lobbying firm Lumen8 Advisors. As a May 17 Washington Examiner article by Robert Schmad describes, Carlson’s softball circus act was the centerpiece of an extensive Qatari influence campaign that intended to block Trump’s foreign policy. What a patriot Carlson is.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.