The Pre-War World Is Gone

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, March 19, 2026

 

So far, the data do not suggest that Republicans lack the stomach for challenging the status quo in the Middle East.

 

If America’s objective over the skies of Iran is to neutralize Iran’s power-projection capabilities, the war has opened up the prospect of a secondary objective at home: a “purge,” as Michael Brendan Dougherty put it, of right-wing iconoclasts and dissidents from Donald Trump’s coalition.

 

The establishmentarian types who never sought such company in the first place are busily expelling from Trump’s “core base” anyone discomfited by the war, he maintains. And all amid a perverse pageant in which the likes of Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, the fellows at the American Enterprise Institute, and other critics of the president’s actions over the years nevertheless support him in this national endeavor. Presumably, they should have observed a mulish consistency and opposed a war they’ve long supported because Trump is its prosecutor.

 

Indeed, rather than celebrate former counterterrorism czar Joe Kent’s resignation, Michael alleges, the establishmentarians “became even angrier” over it. One is indeed liable to encounter a mix of emotions when confronted with the fact that the nation’s onetime lead counterterrorism official is apparently beholden to a variety of fantastical antisemitic conspiracy theories. His self-expulsion from public life notwithstanding, though, Michael sees Kent’s departure from government as indicative of how the “isolationists and restrainers and prioritizers” are forever subject to a campaign of character assassination and perpetual discreditation.

 

Leave aside the relative pro-Trump credentials of the conservative internationalists at whom MBD sneers, or the desirability of removing from the security community’s ranks those who cannot distinguish America’s allies from its enemies; it’s not clear from the polling that the “core base” of Trump’s movement is being expurgated by, well, anyone. Rather, critics of the war seem to be eagerly marginalizing themselves:

 

 

You’d be hard-pressed to find a poll in which self-described “MAGA” voters are not four-square behind this war — a subset within the larger GOP and GOP-leaning voting base, the majority of whom are also supportive of the war. As the New York Post reported today of just one recent poll, Republican voters prefer Trump’s judgment on foreign affairs (85 percent) to the dissident podcasters who have been relentlessly critical of the war with Iran (6 percent).

 

Why is that so hard to believe? Not only has Donald Trump proven repeatedly that “MAGA” is whatever he says it is, the longtime Republicans who have not fallen under Trump’s spell but still support the war do so because they are products of almost a half-century of history in which Iran has been an avowed and blood-soaked enemy of the United States.

 

The “restrainers” are right to be self-conscious. They spent the last year advocating pathological hostility toward America’s NATO allies, insisting that Europe should focus on Europe and contending that the alliance should not conduct out-of-theater operations. They did that while promoting doctrinal revisions to American grand strategy that would lead the United States to retreat into its own hemisphere, leaving the world to its devices. That sure seems shortsighted today. And it was Donald Trump — not some nebulous cabal of interventionists — who proved how foolish it was.

 

Yet, as Michael notes, drilling down into the polling of all Republicans (I thought we were talking about the “core base?”) reveals a rising level of trepidation among GOP voters over the course the war is taking. Here, Michael has a point.

 

The public is understandably apprehensive over even a small ground operation to take, for example, the islands in the Persian Gulf that Iran uses as transshipment hubs for oil to unlock the Strait of Hormuz. It doesn’t help that some Republicans, as he notes, are spinning voters by claiming that putting U.S. troops on Iranian soil does not constitute “boots on the ground.” That’s akin to insisting that this war isn’t a “war” at all.

 

Voters’ concerns are heightened, not alleviated, by the linguistic games Republicans are playing amid their poorly concealed fears that the war and its accompanying financial disruptions will doom the GOP at the polls in November. Like the “isolationists and restrainers and prioritizers,” though, they are clinging to the pre-war world that has already passed away.

 

There is no going back to the world as it was before February 28. Under fire from the Iranian field commanders independently targeting the region’s civilian infrastructure, the Gulf states are lobbying Washington not to halt the war but to see it through to a determinative conclusion. The Iranian regime has made it clear that it, not Israel or America, is the acute threat to the region. The regime itself has been hollowed out. For however long it survives in the postwar world, if it survives at all, it will need to be contained so that the regime will implode rather than explode. The application of U.S. hard power will compel American lawmakers to ensure the speedy replenishment of its stocks of exquisite stand-off munitions — nothing spurs production like consumption.

 

These are all long-term commitments. Michael believes that they are destined to be unpopular, perhaps even more unpopular than the already unpopular war against the Islamic Republic. But the risk these conditions pose to the Republican Party’s immediate political fortunes pales before the prospects for the future they might unleash.

 

It’s only because we’ve gotten very good at it that Americans don’t know how much time, energy, and resources the United States devotes around the clock to preventing Iranian regime elements and their proxies from killing as many of us as they can. Since the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Islamic Republic has been the locus of instability in the Middle East — the primary obstacle preventing America from executing that “pivot to Asia.” The pre-war world was already a costly world, but those costs were baked into a suboptimal status quo that few had the resolve to challenge.

 

This war is hastening the realization of the vision for the region heralded by the Abraham Accords. Success in that project is not assured, but America’s participation in it is. So far, the data do not suggest that Republicans lack the stomach for that endeavor.

 

There’s a simple reason for that. Among Republicans, the polling has long demonstrated that there is no internal contradiction that Donald Trump’s advocacy cannot paper over. His coalition was never something anyone else could control. As such, it was also destined to become unstable after 2024 — the last time Trump’s name would ever grace the top of a ballot.

 

Political coalitions in America are impermanent things. And Republicans have reason to worry that most American voters, burdened by high prices and unclear on the war’s objectives, would punish the GOP at the ballot box. But the polling also suggests that Republican voters are not succumbing to fatalism along with the rest of the electorate.

 

If the Trump coalition cracks up over the war, it will not be because the MAGA right abandoned the president or the squishy establishmentarians got weak in the knees. At least, that’s not happening yet. What is happening is that those with a loose attachment to the GOP, unenthusiastic voters, or even independents who are persuaded by Democratic messaging are running for the exits.

 

Those are the voters who contribute at the margins to a victorious national electoral coalition, but they are not Trump’s “core base.” Those who believe that they represent the purest version of the “MAGA” right might reflect on that when they presume to speak for the voters that only Trump himself commands.