The Party of Strength

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, August 14, 2026

 

Yesterday the president ordered the Navy to ditch the electromagnetic catapult system it uses to propel fighter jets off the decks of aircraft carriers. America is returning to the good ol’ days of steam catapults, he declared.

 

Experts were baffled. “Replacing the electromagnetic catapults with steam will be a complex endeavor that will likely cost billions of dollars,” the Wall Street Journal noted. The old system used more mechanical parts and required more money and technicians to maintain; modern U.S. carriers will need to be retrofitted with new (meaning: old) infrastructure to support them.

 

Installation of an electromagnetic system is already nearly half-finished on a supercarrier that’s under construction in Virginia. That will now need to be reworked to accommodate the executive order at “significant cost, schedule, and integration risk,” the contractor told the paper.

 

What gives?

 

Dispatch contributor Jesse Singal had a theory. “This means either some random aide thinks the old system is cool, and told Trump about it at a moment when [the president] was particularly lucid, or Trump has some sort of financial stake in a steam-catapult company, but it’s 99.9 percent one or the other.”

 

I would have put the odds slightly lower, at around 90 percent. In a movement as besotted with nostalgia as Trumpism, there’s always a chance that the president prefers doing something the old way simply because that’s how it used to be done. American greatness was at its zenith in his youth, and in his youth carriers used steam. QED.

 

But certainly, if you had to bet, you’d bet on Singal being right. And he is right, it appears. Per the Wall Street Journal, “Trump is making good on a promise he made almost 10 years ago to go back to the steam system after hearing a sailor praise it while visiting a ship during his first term.” Some random person told him steam catapults were cool, and the alleged coolness of steam catapults became an idée fixe.

 

Plant a seed in Donald Trump’s head and you never know what poisonous fruit might grow.

 

As it happens, the steam-catapult idiocy isn’t the only fiasco in the news this week that involves the world’s greatest military.

 

Fiascos.

 

The most sordid has to do with conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, where morale has allegedly deteriorated after nine months at sea. “Family members and sailors say the roughly 5,000 service members aboard Lincoln have endured food and water shortages, disrupted mail service, and long workdays with little time off,” Stars and Stripes reported. Some crew members are said to have complained of suicidal thoughts. More than one has tried to go overboard.

 

A different kind of fiasco that came to light recently took place earlier this year in Germany. In April and May, U.S. infantry from Fort Hood held military exercises against a Ukrainian drone unit. Despite the Pentagon having had many months to learn from Russia’s battlefield misery and adapt its tactics accordingly, the Americans were defeated “easily.” The armored vehicles they used were spotted and “killed” so quickly, in fact, that U.S. units had to “re-spawn” simply to keep the exercise going, one official told the Wall Street Journal.

 

The third fiasco has to do with Iran. Everyone knows that America has burned through an outsized share of its missile stockpile during the war, but only lately has it become clear how outsized it is. Some experts estimated that half the supply of high-tech THAAD interceptors was gone; the truth, according to sources who spoke to CNN, is more like 80 percent. (Half of all Patriot missiles have been spent as well.) Amid the predictable finger-pointing and scapegoating at the top, the Pentagon has issued an urgent memo to defense contractors begging them to start cranking out weapons “significantly faster.”

 

Joint Chiefs chairman Dan Caine is reportedly so spooked that he’s urged Trump to find an off-ramp from the war before our “dangerously low” remaining supply of munitions runs out. The president is now resigned to “low-keying it” in Iran, opting for economic pressure over military escalation because escalating might be too perilous for … us.

 

There’s a fourth, less visible but momentously important, fiasco in motion. Even before the president returned to office, the United States passed the grim milestone of spending more on debt servicing than it does on defense. But under Trump, the problem has worsened considerably: In an age of high interest rates, America nonetheless borrowed more in the first 10 months of this fiscal year than it did in all of fiscal year 2025. Last month’s budget deficit was the steepest since March 2021, putting us on track for an annual deficit of no less than $2 trillion.

 

As more of our money goes toward servicing our debt, less of our money will necessarily go toward national defense. That would be bad enough if we weren’t spending big bucks on certain foolish and wasteful vanity projects, but we are. The president doesn’t seem to care a whit.

 

Amid all of that, the Trump administration now appears doomed to a strategic defeat in Iran. America’s Gulf allies are already coming to terms with Iranian ownership of the Strait of Hormuz, preferring to pay a “fee” to their Shiite enemies so that tankers can safely transit the strait than suffer through another pointless U.S. escalation. If the Pentagon can no longer defend Saudi oil fields from Iranian retaliation due to munitions shortages, the Saudis are better off letting themselves be extorted. That’s the state of confidence in America overseas now.

 

All in all, there’s a solid case to be made that this presidency will end with U.S. military power at its weakest point since the Carter years. And we’re still not even halfway through it: Trump being Trump, there’s a decent chance that he’ll treat the Pentagon’s overextension as an excuse to live out his dream of abandoning NATO before he leaves office. Having done major damage to American prestige by behaving too hawkishly in the first 19 months of his term, he’s fully capable of doing major damage by behaving too dovishly over the remaining 29.

 

All of this has to matter politically, no?

 

Traditional advantages.

 

Since Vietnam, Republicans have been the party of strength abroad. The Cold War, the Gulf War, the war on terror, now the war with Iran: The GOP is forever eager to throw roundhouses at foreign villains while the hippie Democratic base cries, “There has to be a better way!” If you’re a hawk who believes in hard-power projection, choosing between blue and red has been a no-brainer since 1980.

 

Will that still be true in 2028, though? How many more military-related fiascos will it take from the Trump administration before the traditional Republican advantage on national security among voters ends up as depleted as the Pentagon’s missile stockpile?

 

That’s a trick question, actually. According to some polls, that advantage is already gone.

 

As noted elsewhere by CNN reporter Aaron Blake, two recent surveys found the parties statistically tied on questions about “strength.” A Reuters poll saw Democrats ahead, 37–36, when it asked which side will do a better job handling “war, foreign conflicts, and terrorism.” That’s a 12-point swing away from Republicans since Trump was reelected in late 2024.

 

A Fox News poll had the GOP still ahead on national security but by a narrow margin of 50–48, within the margin of error. That too reflects a 12-point turnaround dating back to before the Iran war.

 

Not everyone who’s moving from right to left on questions related to national security is a disappointed hawk, needless to say. Some are swing voters who bought Trump’s hype in 2024 about “ending endless wars” and now feel bait-and-switched. Others are Tuckerite isolationists who dream of making the world safe for postliberalism. But there are surely people who favored the president in 2024 because they believed even a war-skeptical Republican would project military power more competently and responsibly than the liberal weenie alternative—and have learned otherwise the hard way.

 

Those hawkish voters now face having to watch the tough guy they supported forced to acquiesce in Iranian control of Hormuz because he’s maneuvered himself into having no other option. Their humiliation will be ineffable. How loyal will they remain to a party whose biggest foreign policy accomplishment over these four years is likely to be vastly increasing Iran’s regional prestige?

 

What’s the pitch to them post-Iran to keep loyally turning out for a party led by J.D. Vance?

 

Before you answer, bear in mind that the current war might not be the worst strategic defeat America suffers before Trump leaves office. The president’s ineptitude and the Pentagon’s munitions shortfall are bound to influence China’s calculations about Taiwan and Russia’s about Europe. Trump has never been likely to intervene to defend U.S. allies in either scenario, but between the current strain on the military and the heat he’s taken from “America First-ers” for being too bellicose, he’s really unlikely to intervene now.

 

In fact, having just watched China flex its muscle over oil markets, he might not even consider doing so. A man who’s afraid of being remembered as Herbert Hoover won’t risk challenging an enemy who can plausibly threaten him with a global recession simply by boosting its oil consumption.

 

If the president’s bluff is called and he declines to fight, what’s left for right-wing hawks then? What does American paralysis in years three and four of Trump 2.0 do to perceptions of “the party of strength”?

 

I can understand feeling skeptical that the GOP might lose its traditional advantage on national security, which has been a fact of political life for the better part of 50 years. It’s unthinkable! But as it turns out, it’s not the only issue right now on which the party is seeing a longtime advantage evaporate.

 

As Blake notes, perceptions of Republican economic stewardship have also collapsed under the weight of tariffs and gas-price hikes driven by the war. The same Fox News poll that I mentioned earlier has Democrats ahead 54–45 on which side would better handle the economy, giving the left its biggest lead since 2006. Reuters has the margin at a more modest 37–36, but not since May 2017 had Republicans trailed on the question (which was asked slightly differently at the time). Unthinkable! Yet here we are.

 

Come 2028, if the GOP is no longer the party of “strength” and no longer the party of prosperity, what will it be the party of, exactly?

 

The paths ahead.

 

My cynical answer is that it’ll become the National Front. Eighty percent of its agenda will be about expelling swarthy undesirables, 10 percent will be about learning to love Russia and China, and the rest will involve snorting various progressive and protectionist economic policies. Stop fighting illiberals abroad and start fighting liberals within. The J.D. Vance program, in other words. Right-wing hawks will wander off into the wilderness.

 

My more cynical answer is that it’ll become the National Front but will still command the votes of most traditional Republicans, including hawks, because hyperpartisanship always trumps hard experience. No matter how humiliating the rest of the president’s term becomes militarily or economically, right-wingers will anxiously reassure themselves that any Democrat would be worse. Better a belligerent dope who makes decisions about aircraft carrier technology based on word of mouth than a tax-and-spend technocrat beholden to hippies.

 

“The National Front plus a big group of willfully delusional conservatives” is a pretty good description of the Republican coalition right now, no? Why wouldn’t it continue?

 

Democrats will make it easy in some ways for the GOP. For instance, the left is vastly less likely to support war with Iran than the Trump-led GOP is and, with the notable exceptions of Ukraine and NATO, isn’t meaningfully more likely to favor other foreign interventions. If you’re a Mark Levin-style conservative hawk who thinks the big problem with the current conflict is that we haven’t dropped enough bombs, why would you think President Mark Kelly will be more likely to scratch your itch than President Vance would?

 

The left’s hard tilt against Israel is another huge red flag for hawks. Even if the broader right comes to see the Iran war as a mistake and proof of the president’s incompetence, most Republicans outside the “young chud” Tucker Carlson niche will view it as having been directionally correct on clash-of-civilizations grounds: Trump understood the Muslim threat. A Democratic Party that’s now pro-Palestinian writ large, pro-Hamas out on its fringe, and captivated by politicians named Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed is not an obvious home for those Republicans.

 

Then again, no one knows how big the Tucker Carlson niche might get by 2028. If the GOP turns into a party in which terms like “goyslop” become common parlance, in which the supposed “real” clash of civilizations is with Israel specifically and global Jewry more generally, one would hope Republican hawks would take that as their cue to pull up stakes and declare independence. Or even—gasp—consider supporting a Democrat like Kelly who seems not obviously crazy and not very interested in the various sinister tentacles of the Jewish octopus.

 

Another way of saying all that is that Trump’s various military fiascos, Iran most prominently, might be just the thing needed to accelerate horseshoe-ification. “The party of strength” in the future might be an uneasy coalition of left- and right-leaning liberals who lean toward projecting America military power against illiberal regimes—when the goals are feasible and the people giving orders are capable, neither of which is true in the present war.

 

Whereas the opposition party of the future might be a similarly uneasy coalition of left- and right-leaning illiberals who lean against American military imperialism, especially when practiced against illiberal regimes and especially especially against illiberal regimes that are waging war on Israel. That octopus isn’t going to slay itself, you know.

 

If you had to bet on political trends, though, you’d always bet on inertia, particularly in an age of turbo-charged tribalism. “Strength” has been part of the right’s tribal identity since the Reagan era; even Trump, who won two elections by questioning GOP-led wars, reinforced that identity with boorish alpha-male bravado and a lust for dominance. Asking Republicans to relinquish it, even after the Iran fiasco, is asking a lot.

 

And asking Democrats, whose base led the opposition to Vietnam, Iraq, and Iran, and whose anti-American socialist wing is ascendant, to claim it is asking just as much.

 

So we will likely forge on into 2028 with both parties in their familiar roles, with Republican candidates halfheartedly promising strength and Democratic candidates half-heartedly demanding restraint. No one on either side will feel very convinced by the posturing, but longtime partisans will relish the reassurance that their tribal identity is, more or less, still what it’s always been. The president isn’t the only American besotted by nostalgia.