Despite strenuous efforts by many orbiting the MAGA movement—from traditional conservatives, to anti-war libertarians, to restraint-oriented MAGA figures—President Trump struck Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025. Opponents of the strikes highlighted the blatantly obvious risks: encouraging Iran to race to a nuclear weapon, terrorism aimed at America, or uncontrolled escalation into globe-spanning conflict. Iran, as is typical, responded with perfunctory missile strikes after providing advance warning to President Trump. Such is the extent of Iran’s response, at least thus far.
Taking a victory lap, Rebecca Heinrichs—a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute—unsurprisingly proclaimed that these warnings were hysterical and wrong. Ultimately, Heinrichs seeks to ridicule the anti-war wing of MAGA into accepting that they “had suffered a true political defeat, and that perhaps they would do what they longed for the U.S. to do in the world: retreat.” They should be “humble[d]” because “their doomsday scenarios never materialized.”
The great irony, of course, is that the war hawks are incapable of humility. If Iran—rather than giving the US advance warning of its response and time to avert casualties—had instead inaugurated a campaign of unwarned missile attacks on US bases and troops throughout the Middle East, turned on sleeper cells to launch terrorist attacks against US citizens and military installations, or began racing to a nuclear weapon, the hawks would not retreat in defeat. This would merely affirm that Iran is an irredeemable regime that only responds to force, so that we must escalate further. Depending on the time of day, Iran—or Russia, or China, or anyone else—is either a ticking time bomb or a paper tiger. War hawks are always prepared to declare they were right, no matter the outcome.
Putting this aside, Heinrichs uses this episode to spin her own variation of the threadbare yarn accusing opponents of war of reverting to interwar “isolationism” and antisemitism. Labeling this the “1939 Project,” she claims the MAGA right is embracing a revisionist, “fringe,” and patently absurd narrative of American history that looks askance at “America’s history as a global superpower.” Just as the 1619 project seeks to place America’s true founding in the 1619 arrival of African slaves rather than the 1776 Declaration of Independence, Heinrichs argues, the 1939 Project seeks to frame the key event in modern foreign policy of the West as the mistaken launch of World War II in 1939 rather than “1945, the year the United States, with its allies, liberated Europe from Nazi tyranny, dropped the atomic bomb to end Japanese militarism, ended the war, stopped the genocide of the Jewish people, and saved the free world.” This victory, she claims, the MAGA movement “resents profoundly.”
There is much to say about the shamelessness of those pretending to moral authority sanctioning the dropping of atomic bombs on innocent people. This is no aberration, either. In Heinrichs’s book, Duty to Deter: American Nuclear Deterrence and the Just War, she argues just war theory permits—indeed, demands—a government to credibly threaten to use nuclear weapons against an adversary. To be clear, she does not mean we should only outwardly express our willingness to use nuclear weapons, while being unwilling in fact to do so. No, such a threat would not be credible, which is a contradiction in what she calls “nuclear pacifism.” Therefore, we must be willing to actually use nuclear weapons.
A foreword to the book claims that Heinrichs “rigorously and unflinchingly examined the morality of nuclear deterrence.” In fact, Heinrichs’s book contains a litany of logical and historical holes, unexamined assumptions, and ignored considerations. First, Heinrichs selectively applies just war concepts like proportionality and discrimination to reject early US nuclear policy targeting adversaries’ populations centers, assuming that this then justifies nuking regime-threatening targets without seriously examining whether any nuclear strike is justified. She merely asserts that nuclear pacifism invites aggression, while claiming there is no guarantee that nuclear strikes will lead to all-out nuclear war. Each may well be true, but neither answer the question.
Second, when explaining what justice requires the state to do, Heinrichs cherry-picks and distorts biblical passages. For example, Heinrichs argues nuclear pacifism “violate[s] the [Just War Doctrine” because it “abrogates the Divine mandate of government authority, which is to protect the innocent and punish the evil behavior that harms them.” Her footnote offers Romans 13:3-5 and 1 Peter 2:13-14 in support. Romans (which is substantially similar to Peter), however, states “For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong.” What could be a greater contradiction to this statement—that innocents need not fear rulers—than nuclear annihilation of innocents in another country to punish a foreign wrongdoer? In a more religious age, one wonders how many atheists this sort of “Christian” morality might have made.
Third, her deterrence arguments are rank with hypocrisy. If justice requires the American state to credibly threaten to use nuclear weapons against its adversaries, the logic applies equally to other states like China, Russia, or Iran. Does Heinrichs advocate exporting this book to our adversaries, so that they too may be comfortable with annihilating a hundred million Americans? I could go on, but to Heinrichs’ warning about the dangers of the MAGA right, the response must be: Physician, heal thyself.
Heinrichs complains that “1939 Project” MAGA anti-interventionists are misusing history to suit contemporary political ends. The irony is palpable; to war hawks like Heinrichs, every year is 1939. Cold War containment policy effectively treated every communist regime as a Hitler. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have found no shortage of prospective Hitlers. Saddam was Hitler (twice over), Milosevic was Hitler, Gaddafi was Hitler, Khamenei is Hitler (so was Khomeini), Xi Jinping is Hitler, Putin is Hitler, ready to move on Eastern Europe once Ukraine is vanquished.
As a corollary, every politician has the choice between being Winston Churchill—savior of the Western world—or Neville Chamberlain at Munich—the cowardly dupe who was either too trusting or too cowardly to take the actions necessary to prevent Hitler’s march through Europe. Give an inch, and you risk branding with the dreaded smear term: appeasement. The real “1939 Project,” then, has been the war hawks’ attempts to put the public in perpetual fear of perpetual Hitlers.
But if every leader is nouveau Hitler, negotiation becomes impossible. We all know the lessons from primary school: First, these Hitlers’ demands are always aggressive and unreasonable, so concessions constitute complicity in their evil. To take seriously any grievances from Hitlers is the worst failing of any leader, whether we call this victim-blaming, believing our enemies’ “talking points,” or some other propagandistic framing. Unconditional surrender is the name of the game when your adversary is a Hitler.
Second, we know that Hitlers can never be appeased. Hitlers may agree to certain concessions, but will always seize more than they bargained. Indeed, they always have designs to bend the world to their will, by hook or by crook—and the deterrence provided by the good guy’s military might is the only thing standing athwart that history. As such, we must resist these leaders immediately, categorically, and incessantly.
But if every enemy is Hitler, every disagreement and conflict appears existential. Then, even the most banal disputes with our enemies threaten to mushroom into an actual existential conflict. Unconditional surrender in negotiations is always paired with escalation. In this view, failing to escalate shows weakness and effectively grants the concession the enemy is seeking, while encouraging further incursions. Credibly escalating, in turn, necessitates a heavy arms buildup, lest your adversary be willing to call your bluff.
Threaten, never compromise, arms race, escalate. Wash, rinse, repeat. War profiteers salivate, while diplomacy, compromise, and peace evaporate. Diplomacy was not always a Machiavellian game of lying, cheating, and stealing to achieve the state’s ends, though we should not be surprised given the hold of messianic thinking in the foreign policy elite—famously with Woodrow Wilson, but continuing today through policymakers and messengers such as Heinrichs.
Facing great uncertainty about their sway entering the second Trump administration, war hawks will feel emboldened by President Trump’s decision to strike Iran—a fever dream about which neoconservatives have blustered for decades. They will escalate their propaganda, seeking to swell their influence by convincing President Trump that his anti-interventionist supporters have poor foreign policy judgment and should be discounted, like the boy who cried wolf, or reflect anti-interventionists’ broader conflict with President Trump’s agenda that must be marginalized. This outcome is far from divinely ordained, but given President Trump’s failure to deliver on an end to the Israel-Palestine and Ukraine-Russia wars, signs are ominous that Trump may take an increasingly hawkish, hard line in these conflicts.