On June 21, the U.S. launched a meticulously planned strike on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Ahead of the attack, skeptics warned that by bombing Iran, President Donald Trump would be starting another “forever war.” But a ceasefire followed less than 48 hours later. The United States reportedly used some 75 munitions on targets in Iran, before declaring the country’s nuclear weapons program devastated and the central aim of the campaign against Iran achieved.
Both before and after the strike, the public debate over President Trump’s decision has been largely conducted as though he had to choose between two competing foreign policy frameworks: a liberal internationalist (or “neoconservative”) policy, whose advocates press the administration to overthrow authoritarian regimes and rebuild them as liberal democracies; and an isolationist (or pacifist) policy, which assumes the U.S. has few genuine interests in Europe, the Middle East, or South Asia, and that the right thing to do is almost always to “stay out of it.”
The trouble is that neither President Trump nor key figures in his administration, such as Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, seem inclined to accept the simplistic neocons vs. isolationists binary that the media has been trying to impose on them. Republican voters are not sold on it either.
As the Iran strikes demonstrate, President Trump is guided by an entirely different strategic vision—a nationalist foreign policy that neither the liberal mainstream media nor the alternative media on the right seem very interested in discussing. Perhaps the Iran strike has finally gotten their attention, and a more serious conversation about U.S. foreign policy will now be possible.
