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These remarks were delivered on a panel at the National Conservative Conference on September 3, 2025.

Good afternoon. 

Before more insults are inevitably hurled… I must commend and thank the supreme organizer, the supreme leader, if you will, of this conference, Yoram Hazony, by all appearances a sincerely religious man and devoted father of many, including his own children, a bright and wily political organizer, historian, and philosopher. Thank you for having me.

As I told the Daily Telegraph in anticipation of this conference—which some might give the backhanded compliment of “CPAC for nerds” or “CPAC for the smart set”—this thing is talked about for a reason. And if I could extend compliments to his native country, it’s true too of his homeland. They don’t sit on the sidelines. 

I must also thank our moderator Daniel McCarthy, my friend, mentor, career sherpa, and as of 2025, one-seventh of my boss. Very gracious of you to have him as the moderator, Yoram. He is the newest board member of the American Ideas Institute, most prominently known as the publisher of The American Conservative, which I edit.

For years now, but particularly since the reinauguration of Donald J. Trump... my own journalism, reporting, and posting on one former senior administration official’s social media website have been defined by strident intra-right criticism of the leadership of the Zionist project’s inappropriate and dangerous political efforts in this country, particularly, and escalatingly, and desperately, and ceaselessly on the conservative side. 

And I think that we all know that this is happening. 

But what do I actually want? Besides an inchoate belief “for the clicks,” as critics may allege, is the gist of my advocacy and analysis, as my late mentor (dead four years last month) and surrogate father, Mark Perry, a longtime advisor to the PLO’s Yasser Arafat, might have said after a scotch, simply “Screw Israel”? It is not. More diplomatically, why have I become a hater, and utterly convinced that the U.S.–Israel relationship, particularly when Republicans hold national power, has become a world-historical, perhaps the world-historical case, of the tail wagging the dog? 

As former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon—as mentioned by Max, a longtime source of mine, as well as that of the most fun journalists in this town—has taken to labeling the dynamic: Israel is a “vassal state” calling the shots in the world’s most powerful empire, and “regime change in Tel Aviv,” his words, not mine, is necessary. This change in tone, in my studies of Steve, to the extent that I understand him, has occurred in just the last six months. After all, this is a man who archaically refers to Istanbul in Turkey as Constantinople and Iran as Persia, not exactly the stuff of an Islamophile or crypto-Mullah. Something is in the air. 

But first, I will attempt to pre-emptively rebut some of the arguments of my cobelligerent Max Abrahms, who before today I had only met in Max’s guise as a determined if infinitely ludicrous and hilarious “reply guy” in my mentions, frequently insisting he would fail me in his class, teaching the immortal and exact and totally-not-subjective-in-the-slightest science of international relations. I would prefer to at least minimize the degree to which we are talking past each other. 

Max wants to advance the cut, as you just heard, that baby MAGA Isolationists, a uniform bloc and cabal of dumbasses, insisted that World War III would happen in June, and because we are all here at the NatCon 5 today and not in a heap of radioactive ash, that he is right and should never be questioned again. Putting aside that Max is setting up the Burning Man of strawmans, I submit that I don’t really want to talk about tactics at all; I seek to discuss strategy. 

Why are these our wars? Why are Israel’s endless problems America’s liabilities? Why do we, in the national conservative bloc, broadly speaking, laugh this argument out of the room when it’s advanced by Volodymr Zelensky, but are slavish hypocrites for Benjamin Netanyahu? Why should we accept America First—asterisk Israel? 

And the answer is: we shouldn’t. 

But first, actually, on the tactics. I don’t feel the need to concede that Israel triumphed in the Twelve Day War. The circumstantial evidence indicates that Israel was running out of missile interceptors; the indisputable evidence is that Israel needs U.S.-made and -operated (meaning American troops could be killed at any moment in another extraneous theater a la Abbey Gate in Afghanistan) THAAD missile systems, deployed by no less than the Biden Crime Family itself in the previous administration, to protect it; the most plausible evidence is that the Israeli propaganda machine has kicked into high gear since early summer to cover up the extent of damage imposed by the Iranians on the Israeli homeland, in what was still clearly a relatively restrained response by Tehran, hence, no World War III. After all, Tel Aviv? Those aren’t Bibi’s voters. He’s a real nationalist. 

The Iranians concede they were surprised by the war, failing to anticipate the objective daring of the Israeli prime minister and of another country’s resources and reputation, but appeared to have moved quickly, and quickly rallied by the end of that month. It’s not clear the June ceasefire was brokered per se for Iran’s benefit as much as for Israel’s, especially as President Trump showed limited appetite in the later days of the crisis. No America meant Israel on its own, which meant Israel would have to make decisions with its own capabilities, which are still pretty immense, but not with the full weight of what some might term “Uncle Sucker.” As it should be. 

As David Hearst of the Middle East Eye observed, Iran in its limited response inflicted more damage in a few days than Hamas’s homegrown rockets or Hezbollah’s previously-vaunted arsenal landed in nearly two years of conflict. With the recession of Netanyahu’s poll numbers swiftly back to pre-war levels by some polls, the reality is that Israel is likely to come back to Washington asking for even more very soon. If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to want a glass of milk. 

Since Israel’s inception, America has struggled and, I argue, failed, to have an appropriate, mutually self-reliant relationship with the Jewish state. It’s clear now in the full view of history. Harry Truman’s relationship—and I note he was a Democrat, for what it’s worth—with the state’s founders, many of them by most measures former terrorists (if Max wants to focus on that), was controversial in the 1948 election. Dwight D. Eisenhower threw a wrench into early plans for a “Greater Israel,” the new-old term of art of Netanyahu, during the Suez crisis. Kennedy courageously sought to limit and negate the nascent Israeli nuclear program at Dimona but didn’t live long enough to pursue that policy with long-lasting vigor. His successor Lyndon Johnson was a big government militarist par excellence, as the country learned the hard way in Vietnam. I could go on, but it’s very arguable that only Eisenhower, Kennedy, the first George Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump have challenged the fragile and dangerous consensus around a country, to paraphrase the president, that “doesn’t know what the F it’s doing.”

But the problem is: the country does “know what the F it’s doing.”

First, Israel has made crucial investment in appealing to President Trump’s vanity. As the president told the Daily Caller’s Reagan Reese over the weekend: “So, Israel is amazing, because, you know, I have good support from Israel. I have. Look, nobody has done more for Israel than I have, including the recent attacks with Iran.”

President Trump again went on to hail the historic strength of Israel’s “lobby,” the president’s words not mine, making clear, for Trump, why the U.S. is involved at all. It’s clear as day for him: Israel. Because Israel loves him. 

In exchange though, they are asking for the political capital of his administration, and, risking the generational impression that Middle East wars, no matter what the GOP says about the new right or changing this or changing that, is risking the general impression that all the GOP delivers is tax cuts and wars in the Middle East.

President Trump did not answer the reporter Reagan Reese’s question. Reese queried, the first question of her sitdown, I will note: “A different war, Israel, a March Pew Poll, found that 53 percent of surveyed U.S. adults had an unfavorable view of Israel, that’s down – or that is up from 42 percent in 2022. Among young Republicans under 50, 50 percent have an unfavorable view of Israel. That’s up from 35 percent in 2022. There’s a growing group within MAGA, America First coalition, Republicans, especially younger Republicans, who are skeptical of our support for Israel. Are you aware of this group? Are you worried about it?”

On the home front, this dynamic is dementing. 

One could be forgiven for believing the only people this administration is reliably deporting are supporters of the Palestinian cause. 

After riding back into power on the appeal of free speech, enshrined in the First Amendment of this country’s Constitution (if conserving that isn’t conservatism, I don’t know what is), this administration has used its influence to attempt to curb and intimidate speech on Middle East issues, particularly the State Department. After assembling a potentially generationally-realigning cohort of voters disgusted with woke pieties and the suffocation of dialogue with incessant accusations of racism, Republicans have all too eagerly embraced holding the whip themselves, accusing countless unbigoted critics of being anti-Semites, instead of engaging on the issue. 

Nevermind, so long as we’re casting the racism stone (which I thought was a leftist move), that as flagged by his biographer Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Winston Churchill, that strident Zionist and imperialist and, I may note, non-American, said in the 1930s, before the horrors of the next decade: “I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people [the Arabs in Palestine] by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

This discussion almost always descends into the mud. But the mud is where this issue emanates from and why Zionism in 2025 is at best a morally dubious project (as the New York Times’ Ronen Bergman wrote in his seminal Rise and Kill First, Israel has assassinated more people than any “Western” country since World War II), and one Washington should avoid an “entangling alliance” with, as this city’s namesake said in his farewell address of foreign countries and foreign conflicts we ineluctably and poorly understand.

As for Israel itself and its recent conduct, which I as a U.S. nationalist feel I have a small vote in, since I remain an unwilling shareholder in that country and its activities, given U.S. military support and diplomatic largesse for Jerusalem, as my late mentor said, referring to the experience of the Shoah: “They know better.”

Editor’s note: This transcript has been lightly edited for readability and conciseness.