For months, leading up to Israel’s attacks on Iran last week, an intense and bitter battle has been underway on the American right — a battle for influence over President Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

The core assumptions that have guided Washington’s approach to the world for 80 years are suddenly up for debate. The global balance of power, the outcome of life-and-death conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, and more momentous future questions of war and peace all hang in the balance.

GOP foreign policy has long been steered by hawks, who see the US as locked in a struggle for global dominance against hostile and dangerous foreign powers. They’re willing to threaten — and, in some cases, use — military force to achieve American ends. During his first presidential campaign, Trump broke with the hawks on some key issues, but his first-term governance was largely hawkish in practice.

In the past few years, though, an “America First” faction came together to try and push Trump’s second term in a different direction. Deeply skeptical of “neocons,” foreign entanglements, and “forever wars,” they’ve competed with the hawks over administration jobs, tried to swing the MAGA base to their side, and worked to win Trump over in private.

Leading their fight was an unlikely foreign policy power trio: Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., and Vice President JD Vance. The three are like-minded in their loathing for the establishment and are also personal friends. It is not uncommon, in Washington, to hear talk of a “JD-Tucker-Don Jr.” axis of American foreign policy. Their increased influence meant Washington’s hawkish consensus was facing perhaps its most serious challenge in decades.

At times since January, it has seemed the America Firsters were winning. In April, when Israeli officials presented Trump with a plan to strike Iran, he rejected it in favor of pursuing negotiations over their nuclear program instead. Pro-Israel hawks were deeply worried about the concessions Trump’s team might make.

But as talks stretched on without success and Israel became more determined to strike, Trump decided not to stand in their way. The Israeli operation began Thursday night, killing many top Iranian military leaders and targeting nuclear sites. The hawks were overjoyed. Trump officials initially characterized the attack as a unilateral Israeli decision. But soon, the president began taking some credit for it, though he insisted a deal with Iran was still possible.

Carlson had spent months urging Trump not to get involved. “The greatest win would be avoiding what would be the true disaster of a war with Iran, which would not stay in Iran, of course,” he told me in an interview at the beginning of this month. He’d warned that US participation in a strike would be “suicidal” and that “we’d lose the war that follows.”

The US is not at war with Iran yet. But the chances we’ll be drawn into one are rising. So though Democrats generally despise the America Firsters’ domestic politics, dismiss them as bigots and xenophobes, and are appalled by their calls to abandon Ukraine — it’s worth noting that they’re the leading GOP figures opposing war with Iran.

The America Firsters have also called for rethinking the US’s approach to the world more broadly. That not only includes questioning our involvement in NATO, but also questioning the logic that could lead the US into a major war with China over Taiwan. Generally, they doubt that trying to run the world helps Americans.

The hawks dismiss them as dangerously naive, arguing that pulling back US involvement abroad would actually make war more likely — our enemies will run rampant, they say, if we don’t check their influence.

The America Firsters argue just the opposite: that it’s our meddling attempts to run the world as if we’re still the sole superpower that court disaster. “We’re not going back to a unipolar world,” Carlson told me. “It’s not going to happen. But I guess we could have a nuclear war over it — and we may.”

In many ways, this is just the latest flare-up of a long-running tension inside the American right — one that’s existed since the US emerged as a major global power at the start of the 20th century.

Back then, hawkish interventionists pushed for the US to join both world wars and protect the peace afterward. But the isolationists didn’t want to get bogged down in intractable foreign conflicts or send their sons to die in foreign lands. They supported, they said, America First. World War II gave the interventionist hawks the upper hand, and in the Cold War, the hawks held sway again, arguing the US had to intervene abroad to prevent communism from overrunning the world.

The ’90s brought a brief revival of isolationism championed by figures like Pat Buchanan, who questioned why, with communism defeated, the US needed such extensive overseas involvement. But 9/11 cemented the hawks’ dominance again, confirming to many that the US had to fight foreign enemies over there, or they’d fight us over here. Buchanan criticized President George W. Bush’s Iraq War as the work of a “cabal” that included “neocons,” but few on the right cared.

Carlson, then the co-host of CNN’s Crossfire, had supported the war. But on a December 2003 trip to Iraq, in which he spent time outside the Green Zone, he soured on it: “I saw the opposite of what I expected to see, chaos and confusion and disorder and violence,” he told me. The following year, he was quoted in the New York Times voicing regret: “I supported the war and I now feel foolish.” The pushback from the right, he says now, was furious: “I was absolutely hated for that by people I knew well and worked with and was friends with.”

Indeed, the adamant pro-war consensus among GOP elites and rank-and-file Republicans persisted even as conditions in Iraq worsened. And hawkishness continued to reign supreme on the right: Republicans criticized President Barack Obama for showing weakness toward Iran and Russia or for withdrawing from Iraq too soon. The only foreign policy critique they could imagine was a hawkish one, and the only solution was more hawkishness.

Saying the Iraq War was a mistake or failure was unthinkable. Until, that is, Trump said it.

During his first presidential bid, in 2015, he trashed the war as a debacle and a “tremendous disservice to humanity” — suddenly giving the isolationists in the party, long an irrelevant fringe, a new life. In this, he was voicing what an increasing number of Republican voters had come to believe — that the war had failed.

Trump’s heresies went further. He wanted to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan and Syria. He had friendly things to say about Russian President Vladimir Putin — which was so unusual for a mainstream politician that many wondered whether he was being blackmailed or bribed. He disdained NATO, widely viewed as the protector of peace in Europe, as an expensive waste. Yet he also had some more typical hawkish instincts, calling for more confrontation of China and Iran and promising to “bomb the shit out of” ISIS.

Yet while Trump embraced the “America First” label in practice, much of his first-term policy was steered by the hawkish establishment — sometimes to Trump’s enthusiasm, sometimes to his frustration.

His “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran escalated a tit-for-tat shadow war; eventually, Trump had top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani assassinated and a full war seemed quite possible. He waged a trade war with China and deepened ties to Taiwan with arms sales and military activity. His efforts to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and Syria kept getting slow-walked by top advisers. And his friendly words for Putin had little substantive impact; tough sanctions on Russia remained in place, and the US kept arming Ukraine and stayed in NATO.

How Carlson, Trump Jr., and Vance helped turn the right against Ukraine – and rose to greater influence

The most important challenge to the hawks during Trump’s first term played out at 8 pm Eastern, every weeknight.

This was when Tucker Carlson held the airwaves, using some of the most valuable airtime in conservative media — really, all media — to try to shape and articulate a distinct ideology that would appeal to the MAGA base. To this end, he indulged Americans’ bigoted and xenophobic impulses, promoted conspiracy theories, and became loathed by liberals. But he also directed much of his ire at the GOP’s establishment — and reserved particular scorn for the foreign policy hawks.

Carlson often used his airtime to poke holes in hawkish arguments and warn against war. After Soleimani’s killing in 2020, he said that the “neocon objective” was war with Iran and regime change but asked, “Is Iran really the greatest threat we face? And who’s actually benefiting from this?”

He was, essentially, waging a war of ideas for the future of the Republican Party — and trying to give the MAGA faithful a different, non-hawkish way to think about these issues.

The hawks’ lonely critics on the right were grateful. “Tucker’s the mothership,” Curt Mills, executive director of the American Conservative — a magazine Buchanan co-founded — told me. Carlson was a skilled entertainer and clever debater who could go highbrow and lowbrow.

He could also be very persuasive — in public and in private. A prolific texter, he cultivated ties to key MAGA-world figures — including, crucially, Donald Trump Jr. In 2020, Politico reported Carlson had “established a friendship” with the president’s eldest son.

Don Jr., at that point, had not been known for his foreign policy views, and he had limited influence on policy or personnel for most of his father’s first term. But unlike his sister Ivanka and brother-in-law Jared Kushner, Don Jr. was drawn to the MAGA base — and to a worldview that was a lot like Carlson’s. By 2020, Don Jr. had become an outspoken critic of “forever wars” and the “neocons” who he said were undercutting and sabotaging his father.

After January 6 and Trump’s ignominious departure from office, Jared and Ivanka stepped back and Don Jr. stepped forward, becoming an increasingly important adviser in his father’s comeback plans. He believed a second Trump administration had to be filled with MAGA loyalists rather than establishment-tied saboteurs. Trumpworld’s distrust of neocons continued to deepen, particularly once the Cheney family turned hard against Trump after January 6.

Around the same time, JD Vance began running for Senate in Ohio. Carlson already knew him and began openly championing his primary candidacy on his Fox show. Then, after Vance had the good judgment to hire one of Don Jr.’s top advisers for his campaign, he got connected with the president’s son — who was very impressed by him. They, too, became friends.

The first test of their ability to influence the right on foreign policy came as Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022. Amid warnings of a full-scale invasion, Carlson ran segments questioning how Americans have been “told” to hate Putin and Russia. Vance said he didn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other,” and that “the foreign policy establishment gets rich when American children die for dumb ideas.” Don Jr. asserted that “there is no American interest that justifies our intervention in Ukraine.”

Yet to many, the Russian invasion seemed to prove the hawks right. Putin, it turned out, did have malign intentions, and now here he was ending decades of peace in Europe. Supporting Ukraine to try to stop him, most believed, was both the moral and the strategically correct move.

The trio stuck to their guns, though, arguing that moralistic war fever was setting in — and that the hawks, in their zeal to clash with a nuclear power, could get a lot more people, maybe all of us, killed.

Trailing in polls in a crowded primary, Vance took heat from his more traditionally hawkish rivals in attack ads, but this eventually spurred Don Jr. to speak out publicly to defend him. After private lobbying from Carlson and Don Jr., an endorsement from Trump himself soon followed and carried Vance to a narrow victory.

As the Ukraine war stretched into 2023, its support on the right grew shakier. Carlson hammered home his skeptical arguments nightly. He claimed that aid money to Ukraine was wasted when we have so many problems at home, that escalation of the war was dangerous, and even that the US was partly responsible for provoking the war by expanding NATO. In his narrative, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was, if not the villain, a villain — and certainly no hero. Democrats and traditionally minded Republicans watched in horror, believing this was a Bizarro World inversion of reality.

But the GOP base — particularly its most engaged and pro-MAGA elements — was gradually won over. In part, this was due to negative polarization against a cause championed by President Joe Biden (whose son Hunter’s past highly compensated work in the country further suggested that something was rotten here). Others, like Elon Musk, characterized Ukraine support as the latest in a series of foolish and annoying progressive fads. In the mainstream, criticizing Ukraine aid made you anathema; on the online right, it made you cool.

In March 2023, with the Republican presidential primary kicking off, Carlson sent a questionnaire asking every prospective candidate about their Ukraine views; Ron DeSantis, courting the base, flip-flopped to back Carlson’s position. Soon afterward, Carlson was suddenly fired from Fox amid internal controversies and launched a new show on Musk’s X. But the party kept moving toward him: Conservatives in the GOP-held House held up Ukraine aid for months. By summer 2024, 47 percent of Republicans said the US was doing “too much” to help Ukraine, and just 30 percent said the US was doing the right amount or not enough.

For the first time, the America Firsters had successfully mobilized and won an intra-party argument on a foreign policy issue. Carlson and his allies changed the default GOP position away from hawkishness and toward skepticism of supporting Ukraine — and, along the way, launched Vance’s political career.

In 2024, Don Jr. and Carlson again successfully lobbied Trump to endorse Vance — as his VP nominee. (Carlson reportedly told Trump that if he picked a “neocon” instead, the “deep state” might have him assassinated.)

Once in office, Vance delivered — smacking down Zelenskyy in a public Oval Office meeting, and rebutting hawkish critics in lengthy, biting X posts.

Yet Trump still seems hesitant to truly cut Ukraine loose. Rather than simply washing his hands of the situation, he wants to help end the war, and he’s grown increasingly frustrated that Putin doesn’t seem to share that desire. He’s recently attacked the Russian president (“he’s gone absolutely CRAZY”) and threatened new sanctions on Russia. He has no love for Ukraine, but he still seems to fear being blamed for a Ukrainian defeat.

The new divide on the right over Israel and Iran

With Vice President Vance, the America Firsters had one of their own in a top administration post. But in the days after the presidential election, it briefly seemed as if he’d be the only one.

Rumors suggested that Trump would name the conventionally hawkish Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz, and Elise Stefanik to top foreign policy positions, while Mike Pompeo — his hawkish first-term secretary of state — seemed in line for secretary of defense.

Quickly, Carlson and Don Jr. staged an intervention, warning the president-elect that he was repeating his past mistakes. When one X poster urged Don Jr. to keep “all neocons and war hawks out” of the administration, Don Jr. replied, “I’m on it.” Soon, Trump announced that Pompeo would not be chosen (he’d eventually go so far as to yank Pompeo’s government security detail). And he made unconventional picks that shocked Washington: Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and Pete Hegseth for defense secretary.

The drama over lower-level appointments soon grew even more intense. And a major sticking point, it quickly emerged, was policy toward Israel and Iran.

GOP hawks had long championed Israel and vowed to stand with it against its enemies, such as Iran. But many on the isolationist or populist right have long been less keen on this idea — suspicious of foreign entanglements, worried about advancing Israel’s interest rather than America’s, and dubious about more Middle Eastern wars. (For some, these concerns were paired with arguable or explicit antisemitism).

After Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks, Carlson, for instance, urged caution and restraint, worried about the US being drawn into war with Iran, questioned why Americans were so worked up about this rather than our problems at home, and argued the Israeli government mistreated Christians. “How is this helping America, exactly? I don’t see a huge upside for the United States in paying for this,” he told me, referring to Israel’s Gaza war.

But many others, including some in the America First camp, pushed back: “There is no analogy between the situation in Ukraine and Israel,” Stephen Miller wrote in 2023, saying Israel was “fighting a jihadist death squad” and that its war was “a necessary action to ensure the survival of the sole Jewish state.”

Don Jr. felt similarly: “You don’t negotiate with this,” he wrote. “There’s only one way to handle this.” And in a May 2024 speech, weeks before his selection as the VP nominee, Vance contrasted Ukraine’s war and Israel’s, saying he was fully supportive of the latter.

But by the end of last year, Israel was making plans to strike Iran’s nuclear program — and seeking US assistance in doing so. Many traditional GOP hawks were on board, arguing that since Iran’s proxies Hamas and Hezbollah had been badly weakened, now was the perfect time to attack. More broadly, they believed Iran could never be allowed to go nuclear — it was simply too dangerous to Israel and the world. What was truly necessary, they thought, was regime change. The America Firsters, however, were not sold. They did not want war with Iran and saw another neocon plot taking shape.

The Trump administration staffed up while this debate was unfolding, and hawkish Israel supporters responded to some of its hires with alarm. Critical articles appeared in publications like the New York Post, Jewish Insider, and Tablet, arguing certain midlevel appointees were worryingly soft on Iran. Elbridge Colby, who’d said containing a nuclear Iran was “eminently plausible” and was nominated for the Defense Department’s top policymaking job, became a particular flashpoint. Hawks in the Senate threatened to spike his nomination, but Vance vocally backed him and he made it through.

Most alarming of all to hawks was Steve Witkoff, the real estate investor and foreign policy neophyte who surprisingly became Trump’s negotiator in chief, and who they feared was giving away the store to Hamas and Iran. “Our main worry is Witkoff, really,” a plugged-in hawk told me last month. “You can boil it down to that.”

Meanwhile, many hawks who sought administration jobs hit a wall. Here, Don Jr.’s influence was crucial — a friend and business partner of his, Sergio Gor, was named director of the Presidential Personnel Office, and took on the job of screening out neocons.

A source with knowledge of administration dynamics told me that Gor “made a decision that he wasn’t going to hire from the traditional places” — the hawkish institutions that had long fed into GOP foreign policy jobs.

The exception was Mike Waltz’s National Security Council. Waltz, the source told me, initially had more freedom to do his own hiring, and he made the NSC staff a beachhead for hawks.

But Waltz quickly became a beleaguered figure. As Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed for attacking Iran, Waltz appeared to be closely coordinating with him in a way that raised the America Firsters’ suspicions. Back in March, the Israeli attack proposal faced skepticism inside the administration from Vance and other top officials.

While this debate was ongoing, Trump’s advisers also debated whether to strike the Houthis, the Iran-backed Yemeni militia that was endangering shipping in the region. Waltz and Hegseth were on board, but Vance was one of the few urging caution. “I think we are making a mistake,” he wrote in a group chat with other advisers, worrying about the economic impact and a lack of public buy-in. “I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself,” he continued, but he urged delaying the strikes at least a month.

The hawks won that argument but soon faced several setbacks. Waltz had inadvertently invited the editor of the Atlantic to that group chat, which put an unwelcome spotlight on him. Soon afterward, the far-right activist Laura Loomer convinced Trump to fire six NSC staffers she disparaged as “neocons.” It didn’t take long for Waltz himself, and dozens more NSC staffers, to be shown the door. (The NSC was handed to Rubio, who was initially deemed a hawk, but now seemed to have accommodated himself to Trump’s priorities rather than trying to impose his own agenda.) On top of all that, the Houthi strikes were incredibly expensive and ultimately deemed ineffective; Trump has since called them off.

In April, Trump rejected the planned Israeli strike on Iran and began pursuing negotiations with the Iranians led by Witkoff — to the hawks’ deep dismay. And during a trip to the Middle East last month, Trump seemed to side with the America Firsters in a speech that criticized “neocons” and “interventionists.” In the speech, Trump insisted he wanted a deal with Iran — though he added that, if Iran rejected his overtures, he’d return to maximum pressure.

But as Trump tried to deal, he was also facing pressure. The hawks soon united around the demand that any deal could not allow any Iranian nuclear enrichment — something Iran was insisting on. Every Senate Republican except Rand Paul, plus most of the House GOP, signed a letter urging Trump not to allow any Iranian nuclear enrichment, and soon he and Witkoff were saying that was their position, too. Compromises intended to let both sides claim victory were privately floated, but none stuck.

In early June, hawkish talk radio host Mark Levin visited Trump at the White House, insisted that Iran was days away from completing a nuclear weapon, and urged Trump to “allow the Israeli government to strike Iranian nuclear sites,” Politico reported. Carlson revealed Levin’s visit in a lengthy post on X, writing, “These are scary people. Pray that Donald Trump ignores them.”

He did not ignore them. It is not yet known what exactly Trump privately told Netanyahu, but it is highly unlikely that Israel’s extensive attack on Iran took place without his tacit blessing. At the very least, Trump stopped affirmatively standing in the way of an Israeli strike.

The question now is whether the nightmare scenario Carlson and others warned of — in which the US gets drawn into the war and it goes disastrously — ensues. Since the strikes began, Carlson has argued that allowing them wasn’t “America First” policy. Asked about that by the Atlantic’s Michael Scherer on Saturday, Trump answered: “I’m the one that decides that.”

Does Trump want a new Cold War with China — or a big, beautiful deal?

Bombs are already falling in Ukraine and Iran. But all that could, in the end, be a sideshow compared to the question of what happens between the US and its premier global rival: China. A potential war in Asia — perhaps started by China as an effort to reclaim the island of Taiwan — is the biggest fear keeping many US policymakers up at night.

Elbridge Colby, the Defense Department’s top policy official, is in an alliance of convenience with the America Firsters: he supports reducing US involvement in Ukraine and in the Middle East. But unlike them, he does so because he wants to better focus resources on what he believes is a far more important goal. The “cardinal objective of US grand strategy,” Colby wrote in a 2021 book, should be to deny China “hegemony” over Asia.

In Colby’s conception, hegemony is overwhelming predominance and authority without direct control — the US has it in North and Central America. China, he argues, is trying to achieve hegemony in Asia, by pushing the US out.

Colby acknowledges hegemony over Asia would give nuclear-armed China little added ability to threaten the US homeland. The “more plausible” danger, he says, is that China could “set up a commercial trading bloc” that could exclude and disfavor the US from trade in Asia, which he calls the world’s most important economic region.

Preventing this, Colby writes, requires “firm and focused action”; namely, the US must form and lead an “anti-hegemonic coalition” of other states in the region. But there’s a huge risk: If China forcibly seized a US “ally or quasi-ally,” like Taiwan, US authority in the region would unravel. Therefore, the US should work to ensure that doesn’t happen. And though hopefully the result will be peace through deterrence, we must accept “the distinct possibility of war with China.”

This is a realist version of the traditional hawkish argument, accepted by the national security establishments of both parties, that the US must prevent China from getting too much power in Asia. (Other, more moralizing versions tout the superiority of US values or a US-led world order.) And to most in the foreign policy sphere, this is common sense. Great powers compete and seek advantage, often at the risk of war, because if you don’t risk war, you lose. The idea that we could just, well, not do this — that we could stand aside and let China dominate Asia — seems preposterous.

The America Firsters have no love for China and tend to be all for a trade war. But some are more skeptical about this military competition logic — fearing, again, entangling alliances that risk getting Americans killed far from home. In Vance’s May 2024 foreign policy speech, he criticized “neoconservatives” who he deemed eager for war, saying: “Put me firmly in the category of, I don’t want to go to war with China, and I want to make more of our own stuff. Okay?”

“We’re in a rivalry with China, no one would debate that,” Carlson told me. “But are we hoping to revert to or maintain a unipolar world, where the United States makes all decisions unchallenged — where we get to make decisions about the borders in Asia? Where do we get the authority to make those decisions? And do we have the strength to make those decisions?”

“I guess we could have a war over Taiwan. I’m pretty certain we’d lose! But what would be the point of the war?” he went on. “Because we need to get all the semiconductors? Because China doesn’t like to sell us stuff?”

The hawks argue, in contrast, that military counter-balancing is the best way to avoid war. “You don’t want to get to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan given what that would mean for Japan, the Philippines, etc.,” Matthew Continetti, of the American Enterprise Institute, told me. “You need to deter it.” That, he said, can be done by “making Taiwan as prickly and as frightening to Chinese military planners as possible.”

The second Trump administration is filled with China hawks, and in keeping with his longtime China-bashing rhetoric and love of economic warfare, he’s pursued a confrontational course. He ramped up his trade war with China, and talk of “decoupling” the two economies has intensified. He’s acting aggressively to keep technologies, such as advanced semiconductors, away from China. And in keeping with the hawks’ weapons, he’s arming Taiwan.

Yet Trump does seem to share the America First skepticism about war to defend Taiwan or another Asian country. Unlike Biden — who repeatedly said the US would defend Taiwan — Trump has been more vague on what he’d do. He’s complained that Taiwan “took our chip business” and stressed how far away and small it is compared to China. His skepticism extends to US troop commitments in other Asian countries, such as Japan and South Korea, too. “This administration’s China policy is objectively more dovish than Biden’s,” the source with knowledge of administration internal dynamics argued, adding that Trump “views the economic side fundamentally as different than the military side.”

It may not be so easy to separate the two. In April, in response to Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, China restricted exports of “rare earth” materials that are crucial to US military technology as well as some civilian manufacturing. This move, the Washington Post reported, caused “deep consternation at high levels of the administration.” It apparently spurred Trump to seek a truce in May. But Trump officials soon rolled out new “tough on China” policies, and the truce fell apart.

So what is Trump’s endgame? Many speculate that he intends all his tough talk and actions to be a prelude to a big, beautiful deal with China — something far less disruptive than a lengthy, painful “decoupling” would be, and something quite different than what the hawks envision.

Would such a deal just be about trade, or might it also encompass the US’s involvement in Asia? The New York Times’ Edward Wong recently argued that Trump could be inclined toward an idea of “spheres of influence” — basically, the US gets the Americas, and China gets Asia. This would horrify the hawks — much of Colby’s positioning in recent years can be seen as an effort to convince Trump and MAGA not to do this. But there’s little sign that this is the administration’s actual policy so far.

In early June, Trump tried to revive the trade war truce in a call with China’s Xi Jinping. The Chinese president reportedly warned Trump that hawks in his administration were jeopardizing their relationship with provocative policies. After further negotiations with top officials, Trump claimed Wednesday morning that the truce was back on. He posted on Truth Social: “RELATIONSHIP IS EXCELLENT.”

Why Trump says he wants deals – but gets tempted toward hawkishness

Trump shares many instincts with the America Firsters: He dislikes long wars. He wants to avoid pesky foreign entanglements. He’s skeptical of our allies. But one complication is that, unlike the isolationists of old, he does not actually want to withdraw the US from the global stage. Instead, he wants to make deals.

The complication is that, in such deals, Trump desperately wants to be perceived as a “winner” and not a “loser” or “sucker.” And if he feels like there’s a risk of that latter outcome, he starts to favor aggression to shake things up. Often this involves empty threats, but sometimes — as we saw in Iran last week — it entails actual military force. Sometimes, Trump grows concerned that too many people believe he typically bluffs or backs down and tries to restore his reputation for dangerous unpredictability.

It remains to be seen whether Trump can actually clinch big, consequential deals with foreign adversaries. Talks with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in his first term resulted in nothing. The recent talks with Iran have now been derailed by Israel’s attack. If talks with Russia and China also fail, Trump will likely find himself tempted back toward typical hawkish policies again. (He’s already threatening sanctions on Putin.)

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd infamously called Trump “Donald the dove” during the 2016 campaign. But Trump has never been anything like a peacenik. He dislikes wars that go poorly — but if he’s persuaded a military action will go well and make him look strong and successful, he’s happy to support it.

The America Firsters have made a play toward challenging the hawks’ dominance on the right, and Trump is often sympathetic to their critique. But his support of Israel’s Iran attack is a major setback for their project.

As global tensions rise and bombs fall, can Trump manage to return to the path of diplomacy? Or is it already too late?