The Confused and Complicated World of the Right’s Iran Strike Critics

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, June 24, 2025

 

Assuming the cease-fire Donald Trump negotiated between the U.S., Israel, and Iran holds — some confusion over the timing of that arrangement notwithstanding — the twelve-day war over Iran’s nuclear program concluded early this morning. For the Islamic republic, it was a comprehensive debacle.

 

Three years ago, Iran had Israel encircled. Its terrorist armies in Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen retained immense firepower and routinely threatened U.S. and Israeli interests — often violently. The Islamic republic’s nuclear weapons program was intact. Indeed, the Biden administration was quietly negotiating an “interim” agreement to revive the 2015 nuclear deal. That agreement would have provided Tehran with yet more funds that it could divert to projecting terrorism abroad, repressing dissent at home, and, after an arbitrary period of stasis, smoothing its pathway to a bomb. Everything was coming up mullahs.

 

The October 7 massacre — a conscience-shocking slaughter that Iran either green-lit or had some advance notice of — was a strategic disaster. It set Israel on a course that resulted in the significant degradation of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Those proxies barely lifted a finger to support Iran during the war Israel waged against its nuclear facilities. Nor did Beijing or Moscow come to Tehran’s assistance.

 

For nearly two weeks, Iran watched as its military and paramilitary commanders and nuclear scientists were systematically assassinated, its nuclear facilities pummeled, its air defenses and ballistic missile launch capabilities wrecked, and as the symbols of regime stability collapsed one by one. Tehran’s climbdown on Tuesday afternoon took the form of a half-hearted ballistic missile volley on a U.S. base in Qatar that Iran warned everyone about ahead of time. It was a defeat for Iran that neither it nor its chastened allies can afford to sugarcoat.

 

For those who predicted a long and terrible war over Iran’s nuclear program — one that was likely to engulf the whole world — these are confusing times. The strategic coup that Donald Trump and his Israeli allies appear to have engineered does not fit within the worldview that critics of U.S. power projection have constructed for themselves. Indeed, in their effort to force the events they don’t understand to comport with their preferred frameworks, they sound more confused than ever.

 

Readers of the American Conservative expected Götterdämmerung. Its writers envisioned “WWIII,” into which America’s “clients” — read, Israel — were mesmerically “manipulating” America’s leaders over the objections of the noble masses. The war would be so “dangerous” and “unpredictable” that it would likely become “another Mideast Forever War” that would sap the GOP of domestic legitimacy and scuttle Trump’s political project at home. “Trump’s current strategy is detached from its ostensible political aims,” AmCon’s Jon Hoffman wrote yesterday morning. “It places the United States on the path to war, not peace.” He advised Trump to prepare U.S. forces to absorb a crippling blow from Iran “while dismissing further U.S. military action.” Only thus could the great war that was forecast be averted. Today, in the cold light of a terrible peace, the American Conservative’s authors are still pretty sure that this short and successful war will be a long-term strategic failure that won’t “sit well with the public,” all indications to the contrary notwithstanding.

 

Over at Tucker Carlson’s podcast, he and former Fox News host Clayton Morris retreated into nostalgia for a war they believe they comprehend in all its malevolence: the Iraq War. Both speculated that the run-up to the Iran strikes ran “the same playbook from 2002,” by which Americans were supposedly lied into war. From there, their conversation devolved into a fetid stew of conspiratorial paranoia.

 

The September 11 attacks were, “I maintain, a massive false-flag operation,” said Morris. “I absolutely believe it was a catalyst to get us into these forever wars.” The cable news networks are “all an extension of the intelligence community.” The Syrian gas attacks were “not real” and “have been debunked.” (By whom? We may never know.) In fact, the United States was guilty of “stoking a civil war in Syria,” Carlson maintained. “We did that really at the behest of another country, shamefully.” He does not make clear why we stoked that civil war but not the other civil conflicts that proliferated after the Arab Spring, nor why we declined to engage directly in it until the Islamic State threatened to overrun the Iraqi Security Forces.

 

Moreover, we’re told that the CIA, not the Iranian regime, is responsible for America’s conflict with the mullahs — because of the 1953 coup and because the agency kills Americans in Iran’s name. “This is the CIA plan,” said Morris. “We’ll get a dumb Muslim who is easily brainwashable, and we’ll have them carry out an attack as a catalyst for us to go into war.” Tucker agreed: “Or a dumb Palestinian Christian, like Sirhan Sirhan.” Those who disagree with any of this are acting in service to Israel or are “bought and paid for by the military-industrial complex.”

 

On and on this went, the point being to call into question the efficacy of Trump’s operation. In the hosts’ minds, the fact that Iran’s nuclear facilities were cleared out in advance of the strikes has already been established. And there was never any need to go to war over Iran’s nukes anyway: “They actually don’t have a nuclear warhead,” Carlson observed. (Indeed, that is the logic of preemption.) “Did you game out that the Iranian parliament just voted to close the Strait of Hormuz?” Morris asked. (Probably? What else accounts for the two carrier groups and dozens of air assets in the region that seem to have deterred Iran from lashing out irrationally?) “What would devastate the United States of America?” the onetime Fox host asked. “Is it an intercontinental ballistic missile? No, no. What would devastate the United States of America would be $5 gasoline.” Well, your mileage may vary on that one, but we’re fortunate that neither prospect seems likely in the near term — not that the hosts seemed all that satisfied with it.

 

Those on the pro-retrenchment right who predicted a global conflagration were still holding out perverse hope for that outcome even as it was clear to students of Iranian defense doctrine that it was suing for peace. They just didn’t know what they were looking at, which describes much of their analysis:

It’s not “genuinely laughable” today, nor should it have been yesterday. Rather, the whole campaign was a pretty sophisticated display of statecraft involving hard and soft power, military and diplomatic elements, carrots and sticks. It was a mission with narrow and achievable aims that seems to have been mostly secured. And if Iran attempts to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program, it will encounter the same consequences it endured over the last two weeks.

 

Only if you are so wedded to the notion that the application of Western military power to any foreign problem only begets more problems could you convince yourself to ignore this operation’s manifest successes. The “twelve-day war,” as Trump has taken to calling it, proved that the selective use of force can achieve desirable outcomes and advance U.S. interests. If you’ve made a career out of insisting that this is never the case, you wouldn’t like what you’re seeing either.