My young family and I were in Israel when the Israel Defense Forces and Mossad began their offensive operations against Iran on June 13, commencing what President Donald Trump has since called the “12-Day War.” Although the Mossad’s intelligence and the IDF’s rapid establishment of air superiority inside Iran proved to be nothing less than extraordinary, my wife and I lived on pins and needles for those first few days of the war. As the definitive essay on the topic, a 2019 Foreign Policy magazine missive – appropriately titled “The Trump Doctrine” – from former Trump administration national security official and current State Department Director of Policy Planning Michael Anton put it, Trump’s conception of “America First” means that he has “no inborn inclination to isolationism or interventionism, and he is not simply a dove or a hawk.” By contrast, Trump’s foreign policy instinct is “Jacksonian”: It is a strand of pragmatic conservative realism that is intuitively skeptical, a la George Washington’s famous farewell address warning, of involvement overseas but is also able, willing and eager to lash out and strike if necessary to defend core American national interests. After decades of debate about the Iranian nuclear program and months of pearl-clutching hysteria about the alleged imminence of World War III, the United States has devastated the illicit nuclear weapons program of a terrorist regime that chants “death to America” on a daily basis – without a single American casualty, without any extended American troop presence on the ground, and with a quick post-strike ceasefire to boot.
Author: Josh Hammer
Published at: 2025-06-28 21:36:00
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