Right-leaning critics of America’s wars are in despair today at the thought that President Trump has betrayed them. As soon as Israel launched its strikes against Iran last week, many anti-war conservatives and libertarians assumed America would inevitably be drawn in. By letting Benjamin Netanyahu start a war, they reasoned, Trump had as good as started it himself. And what began as Israeli airstrikes would soon involve American bunker-busters and, before long, full-blown regime change, with American troops required on the ground.
It’s a genuinely dismaying scenario, and by no means out of the realm of possibility. But consider several other terrifying scenarios that media hype, some of it coming from the right, once inflated into illusions of certainty. Remember “fire and fury”? Those were Trump’s words in 2017 that signaled the beginning of a nuclear war with North Korea—which never happened. Then there was the bloodshed unleashed throughout the Middle East by Trump’s decision in his first term to move America’s embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—bloodshed that was also only a fearful fantasy. Most of all, recall the war with Iran that broke out after Trump ordered the killing of Qasem Soleimani—a war that never took place.
The present crisis is far more serious than those incidents, but that’s all the more reason to keep calm. Bitter feelings, to say nothing of panic, are luxuries the anti-interventionist right cannot afford. Nor can it afford to disengage from politics, or from Trump, right when engagement matters most.