Above photo: Trump speaks in Winston-Salem, NC, Sept. 8, 2020. Screenshot from NBC news video.
Michael Arria speaks with expert Sina Toossi about the influence neoconservatives will hold in the new Trump administration.
And what this could mean for policy toward Iran and the broader Middle East.
Incoming U.S. President Donald Trump adopted an aggressive Iran policy in his first term. He withdrew from the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), adopted harsh sanctions on the country, and assassinated Iranian military commander Qassem Suleimani.
Should we expect more of the same this time around? Does he actually want a deal with the country? Who might end up pushing him on the issue behind the scenes? Is there any reason to take his non-interventionist seriously or does neocon ideology still prevail within the Republican party? Is the Iranian government actually vulnerable right now? What role does Israel play in all of this?
Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke with Center for International Policy Senior Fellow Sina Toossi about these questions and more. Toossi is formerly a research associate at the National Iranian American Council, and his work has appeared in Newsweek, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, The Huffington Post, and other publications.
During the Bush years, there was a lot of discussion about the neoconservatives. Their politics, their objectives, their intellectual history. How should we understand that movement now? Does it still wield a lot of influence in Washington? Did it splinter? Do we see it in the incoming Trump team?
In short, I would say it has splintered, but it does depend on how we define neoconservative.
There were the architects of the Iraq War who had this grandiose vision to transform the Middle East using U.S. military strength. They believed in U.S. supremacy and a kind of global domination. I would argue that continues to be the dominant school of thought in the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
This past election, it was more pronounced on the Democratic side. During Trump’s first election, we saw this splintering of the traditional neoconservatives, with many joining the “Never Trump” camp, people like Bill Kristol, for example. He has been embraced with open arms by the Democratic Party and MSNBC.
During the presidential campaign we saw the Kamala Harris campaign of hail the endorsement of Liz Cheney and they were even happy to get an endorsement from Dick Cheney. They brought Leon Panetta to the DNC. This is in contrast to 2008, where Obama was partially elected because of his opposition to the Iraq War, although he went on to establish a hawkish foreign policy.
With Trump, we can never put him in one basket. He’s not always clear and definable in terms of his vision. He’s already appointed many hawks, and even people who come from the traditional neoconservative camp, like Marco Rubio. Marco Rubio has been an arch neo-con from the beginning and he was picked to be Secretary of State.
In Trump’s first term we had figures like Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State and John Bolton as National Security Advisor. Again, it depends on how we define these terms, but ultimately, you saw people who had very unilateralist, uncompromising view of U.S. global domination. They think America has to be you know the sole superpower in the world for the 21st century.
At the beginning of the turn of the century, they had Project for the New American Century, a policy outfit where they put out all these letters calling for a century marked by American global domination. That strand of thinking is still very prominent in both parties.
They’re smart. They are trying to maximize what they can get from all sides. Trump was definitely not ideal for them at the beginning. They were definitely unnerved about him and thought he would be more chaotic. Their vision of domination isn’t exactly what Trump has mind, in terms of like alliances with Europe or NATO. He was never their preferred guy in 2016, but they adapted.
Another division in the neoconservative camp is with a lot of the pro-Israel lobby folks. The late Sheldon Adelson was originally favoring Marco Rubio in that 2016 campaign, but he flipped to Trump and a lot of that hawkish pro-Israel network went with him.
With Trump himself you see switch between a brazen unilateralism and the idea of non-intervention. Saying, on one hand, the Iraq War was a terrible mistake, but also saying the U.S. made a mistake by not taking the country’s oil. It seems like we are going to have these same contradictory impulses during this term, but i’m more convinced that Trump is aware of these things and maybe it’s intentional maybe to a certain degree that he’s going to have Tulsi Gabbard and JD Vance and these people who come from the non-intervention wing of the party.
Even in the Republican Party, these divisions were always there, but it seems like a non-interventionist camp of Republicans has really strengthened in the past five years. Ironically, Trump ran on that to an extent. He kept really emphasizing that he doesn’t want to start a new war. Obviously he’s very unpredictable, but I think that’s part of it. It’s reminiscent of the the Nixon madman doctrine and, to some extent, Trump is a madman.
I think he plays it well. He is kind of crazy, but I think some of it is intentional, and he wants to be seen as unpredictable. So now he’s talking about taking Canada and the Panama Canal, or whatever.
If you look at John Bolton’s memoir, Trump was kind of the good cop. When faced with the Iranians or the Chinese or anyone he presented his team like, “I have John Bolton and Pompeo. These guys are crazy. They just want you know we want and want to bomb everybody.” Whereas Trump ultimately just wants a deal. He threatens fire and fury, but he actually wants a deal.
I see all these contradictions continuing in the second term, which actually makes me a little bit more optimistic in terms of the specific interests of wanting peace, no war with Iran, and perhaps getting a new nuclear deal or some kind of deal with Iran. Trump is free from electoral constraints and traditionally, in the modern era, second term presidents have been more willing to things considered political risky. Obama did the Iran nuclear deal in his second term. Bush leaned a little bit more toward diplomacy.
We’ve even see Trump show a seemingly increased willingness to criticize Netanyahu. On Truth Social he just shared a clip from a Tucker Carlson interview with Jeffrey Sachs, where Sachs said Netanyahu is trying to drag the U.S. into a war with Iran.
It’s going to be interesting. He has a lot of people around him who are hawkish, especially on China, but he also has people around him who are more non-interventionist. People say Trump believes whatever the last person he talks to says and he also listens to people who flatter him. I think some of this is really going to be driven by his own personal decisions, but the neoconservatives are there in the background. They’re probably more marginalized, but they still have people in the Trump camp. We’ll have to see how it plays out.
I wanted to pick up on something you said about an anti-interventionist bloc developing on the right. We do see a lot of skepticism of “forever wars” from right-wing voices, and we see a lot of criticisms of Ukraine military aid, etc. A lot of it seems to be connected to “America First” type stuff, as these people are generally xenophobic, hawkish on China, and concerned about the border, but I’m wondering how sizable you think this group is, whether their policy goals line up with their rhetoric, and how much influence they have on the current GOP?
I would argue it’s a real phenomenon. The Republican Party has historically had these periods where they haven’t been pushing nation-building overseas. George W. Bush, in 2000, was a big hallmark of his campaign, criticizing the Democrats for being committed to nation-building.
Of course he ended up adopting an aggressive foreign policy, but H.W. Bush and even Reagan and Nixon, on some issues, there was a more realist kind of thought. This idea of bringing China into America’s camp to counterbalance Russia. George H.W. Bush did condition some aid to Israel. You had Paleoconservatism. These were conservatives who really believed in the Republican philosophies of small governments and opposed big budget deficits. The idea of intervening everywhere and spending trillions of dollars really went against their principles.
Obama got the Iran Deal done in 2015, which led to a full-on assault from the foreign policy establishment. You had the neocons fully on the side of the Republicans, attacking Obama’s Middle East policy. You had Netanyahu addressing Congress, but when Trump ran in 2016 you saw him play both sides. His criticisms of the Iraq War were really strongly put, during the primary he said that it had been fought on a “pack of lies.” Tucker Carlson started becoming more prominent on the right and he allegedly helped convince Trump not to strike Iran in 2019, after Iran had shot down a U.S. drone.
So that camp gained some ground and of all the VPs Trump could have picked, I think Vance was probably the least interventionist choice.
Again, we’ll see what camp within Trump’s circle ultimately wins out on a lot of these debates. Are they going to make a deal with Iran? Are they going to escalate tensions with Iran? What’s the confrontation with China going to look like? Russia? We will soon know where the balance of power truly lies in Trump’s world and in his inner circle.
You mentioned Obama working to establish the Iran Nuclear Deal. Trump obviously destroyed it, but it didn’t seem like the Biden administration really put in much of an effort to reestablish it. What do you attribute that to?
In 2020 Biden ran on returning to the Iran nuclear deal. In fact, the 2020 DNC platform was actually pretty good on foreign policy. I actually helped write the section on returning to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [JCPOA] for the platform. The progressive foreign policy camp was pretty well mobilized by the 2020 election. I would argue it had more influence over the Democratic party than it did in this last election.
When Biden came to power, you had all the progressive groups who had been working with Democrats and trying to bring back JCPOA, but you also had the foreign establishment people who had a lot of power in the administration. Biden made Jake Sullivan National Security Advisor, which basically signaled that they weren’t going to reenter a deal immediately and wanted to get more concessions.
That created a delay and by the time negotiations started Iran had a more hardline government. Things deadlocked and just got worse and worse. Ultimately Biden failed. He failed to deliver on his campaign promise
The Democratic establishment really pivoted to a more traditional, hawkish foreign and that’s how Kamala decided to run. Trump veered toward more anti-intervention rhetoric and I think that’s one of the reasons that he won.
I wanted to talk about the current Iranian government. In mainstream U.S. media we consistently hear that it’s crazy and committed to destroying its enemies, but we also keep hearing about how it’s allegedly vulnerable. How do you see Iran right and how does the government view Trump coming into office?
Yes, there’s these kind of agenda-driven narratives that are being promoted right now and I think they are very dangerous.
One is that Iran is extremely vulnerable. There’s this idea that the United States and Israel can now take out its nuclear program with very little cost and destroy any threat it poses. There’s this push to fulfill the longstanding neoconservative vision of dominating the Middle East. They always said they wanted to go into Iran after Iraq. It’s been their goal for decades.
There’s a couple things here. First, the Iranian government is a repressive government. No one denies that. There are hawkish forces in Iran who have also helped to perpetuate this conflict and they don’t want normalized relations with the United States.
However, Iran is not a monolith. The government that negotiated a deal with Obama was a reformist governments. It was basically dominated by Western-educated technocrats. people like Mohammad Javad Zarif, the foreign minister. They really viewed this deal as being a stepping stone to broader diplomatic agreements with the U.S. and they thought it would help restore diplomatic ties. Neocons like to say, “Oh, there are no moderates in Tehran. They’re all hardliners.” That’s obviously BS.
When Trump left the Iran Deal it totally destroyed the political capital of that moderate camp and powered the hardline camps in Tehran. So you had this period of major counter-escalation by Iran. You had oil tankers being targeted, missiles hitting Saudi Arabia. The Aramco attack in 2019 that took out half of Saudi oil production. Then Qasem Soleimani was assassinated and you saw Trump giving carte blanche to Israel. Biden continued those polices, so you saw Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah counter-escalating.
The domestic landscape in Iran has also changed as the government has grown more repressive. You’ve had backlash, social and protest and movements, including the The Women, Life, Freedom movement in 2022
The Iranian president [Ebrahim Raisi] died last year in a helicopter crash and a reformist president [Masoud Pezeshkian] was elected, so now you are seeing more of that reformist rhetoric coming out of the government. Again, he doesn’t have all the power, but he has significant power. So, this is a real opportunity to try and get a deal done.
Trump has said he wants a deal but then you have a foreign policy establishment who looking at the ceasefire in Lebanon and the fact the Assad government collapsed. They think the so-called “Axis of Resistance” is vulnerable and that we shouldn’t negotiate. We should go for the kill in Iran basically. Bomb them, try to do a regime change.
I think this is a big misinterpretation of the actual situation. Iran hit Israel twice in the past year with missile attacks. There’s the Fog of War and a lot of debate about how effective they actually were. Israel knows but they aren’t sharing that intelligence with anyone. We do know that those missile attacks, in April and in October, did circumvent the multilayered, very sophisticated air defense that Israel has. They hit targets despite Iron Dome. Even if we say they didn’t hit exactly what they were trying to hit, they hit the country.
I think Iran has tried to avoid a total war situation, but they’ve shown their missiles can cause real damage. If Iran is attacked I think the country can cause significant damage to Israel. Potentially its infrastructure, potentially to U.S. military bases in the region. We saw them hit oil facilities in Saudi Arabia in a very devastating way.
This idea that Hezbollah is completely destroyed is also a misinterpretation. The ceasefire is actually criticized by people in Israel who say they should have taken Hezbollah out. Despite the major hits Hezbollah took, Nasrallah being killed, and the widespread displacement and bombing, they were continuing their missile and rocket and drone attacks consistently throughout that two month period. Israelis couldn’t get that deep into Lebanon, certainly not as deep as they did in 2006.
Hezbollah still retained enough military capability despite being bombed. In the days before the ceasefire, it was still hating Israel in significant ways. It launched an intense rocket barrage a day or two before the ceasefire, including Tel Aviv. It’s caused widespread insecurity in Israel, displaced tens of thousands of people, many of whom are still actually afraid to go back. And that’s another issue. It’s created a real cost for the Israeli economy, for the Israeli state.
So this idea that Israel just walked over these people and is in this moment of invincibility. This is not accurate. If Israel could not destroy Hezbollah decisively, there’s no way it’s going to be able to do that with Iran’s capabilities. So it’s not like the hawks are presenting.
Interestingly, the Israelis seem to understand this. I was reading in the Israeli press regarding the Nagel Committee report, which kind of shapes national security strategy. They released their recommendations, and they confirmed that Israel cannot destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities by itself. It needs the United States.
The hawks in the United States and the Israeli Lobby, they have an incentive to portray Iran as uniquely vulnerable at this stage and uniquely weak. They want to push this narrative so that Congress will support striking the Iranians. Again, it seems like Trump may actually understand that. So we’ll see what happens. I think now is an opportune time for diplomacy. The Iranians want a deal. This would be a great time to deliver one.