President Donald Trump decisively shattered the neoconservatives’ decadeslong stranglehold over the Republican Party during his first term as president. If the sixth National Conservatism Conference is any indication, he has already succeeded in his second term at purging the GOP of the America Last isolationists who thought they could hijack the Make America Great Again movement.
Trump’s radical remaking of the GOP was nowhere more apparent than in a debate over the United States’s relationship with Israel and Iran. On the one hand, you had Max Abrahms, one of the single most cited professors of terrorism studies, defending Trump’s extraordinary elimination of Iran’s nuclear weapons capability. The mild-mannered Abrahms gave an academic evisceration of both the neoconservative failures of the aughts that enabled Trump’s rise to political power and the paleoconservative isolationists who have united to project that Operation Midnight Hammer would trigger World War III and cause millions of American casualties.
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On the other hand, you had the aptly named Curt Mills, the condescending and cursing executive director of the American Conservative.
“I don’t really want to talk about tactics at all,” said Mills after Abrahms spent half an hour making the forensic case for how Trump’s Iran strike made 340 million Americans safer. “I seek to discuss strategy. Why are these our wars? Why are Israel’s endless problems America’s liabilities?”
These questions, of course, have already been answered by Abrahms at NatCon and by Trump for nearly 20 years: the world’s No. 1 sponsor of terrorism proclaims “death to America” in the same breath that it and its proxies say “death to Israel.”
In exchange for $20 million over three years — that’s about 3% of what the federal government spent in the last month alone — and 30 minutes of bunker busting, America has gotten Israel to obliterate the entire leadership of Hezbollah, oust the pro-Putin Syrian government, decimate Hamas and the Houthis, and defang the Iranian dictatorship. Regarding who got the most benefit for the least time, talent, and treasure expended, the U.S. is not the vassal; Israel is ours.
This is precisely why paleoconservatives cannot talk about strategy. Instead, Mills denied that Israel won the 12 Day War, proclaimed that “Zionism in 2025 is at best a morally dubious project,” and the Israeli government engaged in “genocidal” rhetoric, and seemed to imply that resettling Gazans to the West would be the only way to avoid said genocide or “another 9/11.”
Ad hominem attacks are all the isolationists pretending to be conservatives have, because in their rabid hatred of Israel, they’ve deluded themselves into ignoring the strategic self-interest of our alliance with the country, inadvertently promoting the interests of the Qataris, Iranians, Muslim Brotherhood, and beyond to the point that they’ve embraced America Last.
The fact is that it’s not just the GOP that has fallen in line with Trump’s realpolitik; it’s the MAGA base itself. In an NBC News poll after Operation Midnight Hammer, whereas only half of Republicans who identified as adherents of the GOP said they strongly supported Trump’s strikes, 70% of self-identified MAGA faithful said the same. Five in 6 MAGA Republicans supported the strikes overall compared to just shy of 3 in 4 Republican Party followers.
And why? Because the bulk of Trump’s fans understand the reality that self-described Israel “haters” like Mills have blinded themselves from seeing: that taking out Iran’s nuclear weapons capability makes Americans safer, something 80% of Republicans told Quinnipiac they believe.
The future of the conservative movement may still be in massive ideological flux by virtue of Trump’s penchant for pragmatism over blind dogmatism, but it is because his empirical record shows that he can maintain and manifest peace through strategic and limited shows of unabashed strength that his foreign policy realpolitik has captured the entire GOP. As Dave Weigel over at Semafor notes, coupled with Trump’s total crackdown on the Southern border, he’s made the GOP’s alliance with Israel an effective non-issue among actual conservatives.
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“But beyond [Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY)], that’s not taking hold among elected Republicans, largely because it’s incompatible with the overall NatCon vision,” writes Weigel of the notion that supporting Israel is controversial. “The idea that supporting Israel could pull the US into a wider conflict was seen as an outdated, old idea from ‘Conservatism, Inc.’ Terrorism could be prevented by keeping terrorists out of the country — not, as the neoconservatives thought, by bringing Jeffersonian democracy to Kabul and Baghdad.”
Mills may have gotten in more personal barbs and viral diatribes against the White House during the NatCon battle, but Trump and Abrahms have won the ideological war. The America Last isolationists have no real intellectual home in the MAGA movement, and their inability to consolidate a lasting argument at NatCon proves it.