In the wake of the Democratic blowout in Tuesday’s midterms — South Carolina, Kansas, and Texas have gone blue — beware the preachers of holy complexity bent on obfuscating the obvious: President Trump and the GOP broke their pledge of peace, launched an ill-conceived war with Iran, and thus exacerbated an affordability crisis they’d been elected to solve. 

To be sure, other failures marked the first two years of the Trump administration: the chaotic tariff regime, the grotesque corruption, the performative cruelty of ICE, Trump’s own descent from mere reality-TV vanity to ballroom-obsessed, Neronian caprice. But the Iran war — given both its inflationary effects and galling betrayal of one of Trump’s core pledges — looms largest.

The preachers of holy complexity have good reason to avoid this bare truth. Because it indicts their entire project: a hawkish foreign policy that sees US and Israeli interests as identical or nearly so. Its advocates have for years underwritten Israeli maximalism at great cost to American global prestige and domestic well-being. After the ballot-box shellacking wrought by the Iran war, that project faces a bleak future in mainstream American politics. 

Voter polling — what actual voters tell pollsters upon leaving the precinct — is rarely this unambiguous. Nine of 10 voters identified the cost of living as a major concern as they headed to the polls. Only a quarter of voters described the condition of the US economy as “excellent” or “good”, while three-fourths described it as “not so good” or “poor”. And a staggering 87% of voters said they were very or somewhat concerned about the price of gas and diesel.

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Most telling: about 60% of voters told the Associated Press that the Iran war was a mistake. Yes, fewer identified the Iran war as a “crucial” factor than did the cost of living. Then again, the war itself is a cost-of-living issue. 

It’s also true that, as political economist Justin Vassallo noted in these pages, the current inflation is partly structural, having to do with the general trend toward de-globalization. But since energy prices ramify through the economy, the Islamic Republic’s (predictable) closure of the Strait of Hormuz in response to the US-Israeli invasion has unquestionably aggravated the affordability crisis.

As one senior Trump official told me recently, the administration shouldn’t have been “adding the short-term energy shock” of the Iran war to the structural inflationary trends. 

Or take it from outgoing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who recently said: “Some of these Republicans are saying, “Oh, well, the gas, don’t worry. It’s no big deal.” . . . No, no. Listen, we’ve just got to be honest. Gas is higher. It hurts people, working-class people, and it’s higher because of the Iran conflict. That’s just the fact. If you can’t admit that to voters, then you’re gaslighting them, and they’re not going to listen to you on other things.” Even Fox News pundits — yes, them — openly lamented the war’s baleful effects on GOP campaigns Tuesday night.

This matters because, ever since Jerusalem demanded that Washington join its 12-Day War, the hawks and neoconservatives insisted that a military intervention in Iran would be popular, or at least not unpopular. “There is no US downside to striking the Iranian regime,” counseled the former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen in January, a month before the full invasion. A few weeks into the war, he cheered: “The Trump Doctrine is here. It ends forever wars” (the Iran quagmire has now entered its ninth month).

The hawks also went out of their way to pooh-pooh the economic downsides of the war. John Podhoretz of Commentary (where, full disclosure, I once served as senior writer) reassured a radio host that “I don’t think the American people care very much, they’re very uninvested in this. Unless gas prices go up to $250 a barrel, and suddenly it costs $9 a gallon at the pump, what cost is being inflicted on any individual American by this conflict? There is no cost. There is no cost!”

News Nation host Batya Ungar-Sargon said: “The markets seem to have … a kind of anti-Trump Derangement Syndrome, in which Trump can do no wrong. It seems that no matter what he does, the markets love it. … Even while the US blockade was on, the markets seemed totally oblivious.” 

Never mind that the blockade is still on, and that Gulf oil is transiting with great difficulty and at high expense. Ungar-Sargon identifies as a populist of sorts, and thus knows well that what happens to equity prices often has very little to do with the economic conditions of ordinary people. Indeed, in March 2025, she wrote in praise of Trump’s plan to shift the US economy away from finance and toward manufacturing. The headline: “Trump vs. Wall Street”. (But when there’s an unpopular war to defend, one reaches for the nearest non sequitur.)

And when, over the summer, there was a chance at a negotiated settlement in time to extricate the GOP from the Persian Gulf mess, the hawks assailed the talks — relentlessly. “Mr. President, Give Up on a Nuclear Deal With Iran”, urged The Free Press. Which also published the following not-at-all-uniformly-hawkish opinions: “America Will Regret Withdrawing From Iraq”, “Houthi Defeat Is Closer Than We Think”, “The Dangerous Pause in Iran”, “Danger Lurks in JD Vance’s Negotiations With Iran”. You get the idea.

“Trump’s Iran strategy is working,” argued Thiessen. “His vice president isn’t.” (Why the opprobrium targeting JD Vance? Because the Vice President had taken the lead on negotiations with the Islamic Republic.) Ben Domenech slammed Vance as “Hillbilly Obama” for trying to clinch the deal. The hawkish elements of the religious Right dutifully stepped up to claim a just-war case for preemption and against diplomacy; papal teaching suggested otherwise.

These voices, to be clear, weren’t marginal or irrelevant to Trump’s decisionmaking. Far from it. Although many of them began as Never Trumpers, and even prayed that the Trumpian chalice might pass from them in 2024, these pundits and outlets rebranded themselves as MAGA true believers (or respectably Trumpian, in the case of The Free Press). More than that, they took it upon themselves to police the Right’s boundaries, framing the movement’s antiwar dissidents as unrepresentative at best and traitors at worst.

Trump listened. As several administration sources have told me — including both hawks and restrainers — the President in his second term ignored the usual executive-branch processes. The “deep state” had throttled him during his first term, in his view, and he now preferred to hear from loyalists only. He watched a lot of Fox News, and heard directly from pro-Israel mega-donors such as Miriam Adelson. 

One consequence was the lack of foresight and lousy planning that marred the operation, not least Team Trump’s disregard of the Hormuz threat. The echo chamber of yes men and women also, paradoxically, led 2024’s “peace” candidate to realize a long-cherished goal of the more hawkish elements of the deep state he once denounced.

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In the event, the results are disastrous. Trump is hemmed in at home, and while he will retain greater scope for action abroad, his ability to keep waging the Iran war will depend upon congressional Democrats’ power of the purse. The deeper tragedy is the collapse of the remarkable coalition he put together that, by 2024, encompassed the multiracial working class, including half of Hispanic men and a fifth of African-American men. The Iran war, as I warned in these pages in September, was driving a re-realignment favoring Democrats.

But the outcome is worse still for the hawks themselves, especially those who had come to treat American and Israeli interests as one and the same, and to take the aspirations and tone of Israel’s hard Right as an unimpeachable guide for US policy. It had gone too far. At one point last year, US State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce described the United States as “the greatest country on Earth” before pausing to correct herself: …next to Israel.” (Cleanliness, recall, is next to godliness, not the other way around.)

Where will they go now? The Middle East hawks still enjoy tremendous institutional power. But their worldview can no longer be considered to be in the American mainstream. Republican elected officials no less than Democratic ones can read polls, and foreign policy must enjoy some degree of domestic buy-in. Even before the GOP’s Iran-war rout, the polling was clear: Israel — at least, in its current, maximalist iteration — is massively unpopular among Democrats, Independents, and younger Republicans. 

Probably, as a number of Trump World sources told me on Tuesday, the hawks will remain part of the broad conservative coalition. But it’s hard to imagine them in the cockpit of Republican governance going forward. Negotiating their long-overdue demotion, however, will prove far from simple.

I kid, I kid. Not about the Houthi takeover, which is all too real, but the “dividend” payments and the geographic renaming. Those are the kinds of things a ragtag group of Yemeni militants might be expected to do. But these days, they are more readily identified with President Trump’s administration in the United States — an astonishing and dismaying turn for the nation as it marks the 25th anniversary of 9/11.

For all their horror and wickedness, the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks took place amid deep American confidence, as well as a kind of epistemic simplicity. A decade earlier, one version of Enlightenment modernity, market liberalism, had bested its chief and last serious rival, communism. All that was left to do was expanding the system into the farthest reaches of the Earth and maintaining its smooth operations. 

Sure, a few backward holdouts remained — Serbian ultra-nationalists here, Islamist kooks and African warlords there — but none could really threaten the system. And even if they managed serious damage, as they did on that fateful day, American power could always clean their clocks and remake their societies; the universalist logic of the system demanded nothing less.

Yet 25 years later, that blessed simplicity is lost. And worse, a quarter-century of remaking other societies has left the United States looking like one of the holdout rogues: paranoid, warlike for its own sake, socially balkanized, psychologically fragile, given to leader worship, and incapable of articulating a universal idea. 

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To understand the dismal change, we have to first examine the decision structure that led to it.

It’s a banal truism that what took place after 9/11 was the product of neoconservative hubris. Yet lodging that ancient charge isn’t enough. If George W. Bush and the neocon cohort around him succumbed to hubris, well, so did a lot of others. So did the Clintons and Joe Biden. So did The Economist and The New York Times. So did Fareed Zakaria and Christopher Hitchens and the Leftist writer Paul Berman. So did I, beginning in the late aughts, as an ex-Leftist-turned-hawk.

Yet there were many more reasonable courses of action than the one they — we — settled on. Washington and its allies could have carpet-bombed the Taliban’s strongholds and used special operators to chase down the perpetrators of 9/11 (which was, indeed, how Osama bin Laden was eventually brought to justice). In retrospect, there was no obvious reason why the Afghan effort should have also included teaching their women about Marcel Duchamp and Dada before the Taliban retook the whole country.

Iraq, meanwhile, wasn’t even developing weapons of mass destruction, and old-school balance-of-power calculation should have underscored Saddam Hussein’s value as a check on the Iranians. The Libya and Syria interventions were even more unwise, carving out ungoverned spaces across vast swaths of the region that radiated terror and sent more than a million migrants to Europe’s shores. Libya now features open slave markets; Syria has settled into rule by a newly besuited Al Qaeda warlord.

So how did things get so out of hand? Why go so far? The decision tree, it now seems to me, was predetermined by both material and ideological factors. On the material side, there was the sheer asymmetry between the relative power of the United States and everyone else’s in the 1990s and aughts. Back then, Russia was humiliated and the Chinese economy barely factored as a rival. This led all but a very few US strategists to conclude, maybe we can — why not try?

This unusual correlation of forces gave the Western mind a bad sugar high. Already, a few years before 9/11, the political theorist Benjamin Barber predicted that the early 21st century would be contested by capitalist globalism, which he called “McWorld,” and traditional and identitarian reaction, which he designated by the shorthand “Jihad.” 

Barber himself, to be clear, deplored both of these poles as reductive and deleterious to authentic human happiness. But many others were happy to plant the flag of McWorld in the heartlands of Jihad, an ambition made concrete in the famous Burger King inside Baghdad’s Green Zone. Then, too, the idea of a monolithic Islamist enemy — rather than a reality of an Islamic world fragmented along numerous national and sectarian lines — lent global liberalism the sort of singular ideological adversary it had been missing since the demise of the Soviet Union.

This was always an illusion, of course. Islamism was no real competitor to McWorld. It was savage and exhausting; within a decade or two, the Arab Street decided it prefers its own gleaming McWorld than a restored transnational ummah under a caliph. 

Even so, the illusion of a total adversary, akin to those that menaced freedom in the 1930s, galvanized the intellectuals. The likes of Berman wore “Enlightenment fundamentalism” as a badge of honor. The New Atheism of Hitchens, Sam Harris, et al., celebrated the post-9/11 wars for casting the cold light of reason upon the dark and terrible gods that still kept billions in thrall. If Islamism — or Islam itself — could give way, the thinking went, then so might the cornpone Christianity of the average Bush voter (never mind that it was just such red-state believers who’d be called to carry out regime change).

Which brings us to the consequences. Nations have only limited resources and attention in a world still characterized by scarcity. All along, as they set about remaking the Middle East and North Africa, the United States and many of its European allies neglected the domestic foundations of their power. Manufacturing withered, because McWorld ideology taught that growth is growth; and it doesn’t matter whether GDP is generated by tangible, tradable goods or by software and services (whether high-end or low). 

All along, Wall Street was permitted to swallow large chunks of the real economy, disgorging pink slips and precarity for the working and middle classes. A corrosive ultra-liberalism filled the resulting void with porn, legalized weed, and online gambling. 

All along, employers’ hunger for low wages — and urban professionals’ desire for cheap nannies, gardeners, and dry cleaners — were allowed to dictate immigration policy, welfare nets and cultural cohesion be damned. Impressive new social technologies were allowed to rip through communities and individual minds, without regard for attention spans and mental health.

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Meanwhile, the predictably lousy outcome of the regime-change wars themselves sapped national confidence and bred distrust for institutional authority. If “they” lied about Iraq’s WMD, what else did “they” lie about? Military families, especially, witnessed firsthand the wide gap between the rhetoric of the hawks and the grim realities of these conflicts. Democracy itself was cast into doubt; no matter which party you voted for, D or R, you got more regime-change wars.

One grave consequence of all this was a general degradation of American human capital. Writers, such as UnHerd columnist Richard Hanania, who identify the human-capital decline as the crisis of our time aren’t wrong. But they too often overlook the social and material conditions needed to foster high-grade human capital. The post-9/11 wars undermined those necessary conditions in the United States (and, to some extent, in Europe).

Is it any wonder, then, that American politics is characterized by open demagogic bribery, such as Trump’s recent vow to reward every adult with a $5,000 “dividend” drawn from tariff revenue? (The latter, to be clear, wouldn’t begin to cover the full cost.) Or that American political discourse is warped by a kind of dual conspiracism, in which the masses suspect a hidden foreign (often Jewish) hand in the course of events, while elites themselves ascribe the feelings of the masses to foreign (often Russian) interference? 

Is it any wonder that the icon of the late Trump era is the so-called MAGA-tard — a single-toothed gnomic creature who tells himself that $6 diesel is worth the price of liberating Iran? Or that the administration has demanded “academic receivership” to ensure that university history and regional-studies curricula accord with Trumpian ideology? Or that Trump’s “faith adviser,” Paula White-Cain, has issued a fatwa that “to say no to President Trump would be saying no to God”? 

All this — political handouts, pervasive conspiracy theories, leader worship, surveillance of intellectual life, and so on — were characteristic of the Middle East where I was born. Right down to the frenzy for ideological renaming of landmarks and places. The post-9/11 wars thus didn’t fail to achieve anything, as is commonly believed. They remade America in the image of the Middle East.

The adults recounted the episode repeatedly as I grew up. I never found it quite that funny, but they did: would that they could be as blissfully oblivious to such a world-historical drama. Many of those watching that night were secular progressives and democrats who had supported the 1979 revolution, only to watch haplessly as Khomeini built a theocracy atop the corpses of their comrades.

Would his croaking trigger a fracturing of that young regime? This was the question — hope, really — roiling them all that night, while millions of the imam’s devotees mourned him in the streets. The answer was no. Instead, the regime consolidated under Khomeini’s successor, Ali Khamenei, whose factional cunning and ruthlessness made up for what he lacked in learning as faqih, or Shiite jurisprudent.

The octogenarian Khamenei has been running the Islamic Republic for more than 35 years now — almost my entire life. He has managed this, in large part, by keeping the regime on the anti-American and anti-Israel course that was set for it by Khomeini, driving millions, my family included, into the Persian diaspora along the way. And now, amid Israel’s assault, his strategy — combining brinksmanship with incompetence and underdevelopment — has brought the regime, and maybe the country, to the brink of ruin.

Yet the question that should be roiling Western leaders today, President Trump above all, is whether they are prepared to court an even wider disaster, as Jerusalem presses for maximal military advantage? Or to put it another way: can the West avoid the same hubris that brought Khamenei’s regime to its knees?

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The Iranians told an intricate moral and strategic story to explain their course. They offered a litany of grievances — some real, some not — against the US-led bloc in the Middle East going back decades. And they combined an expansive estimate of Iran’s true civilizational scope with a theological opposition to Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land and old-fashioned conspiracism: the suspicion that behind every internal failure lurks a hidden Jewish hand.

As an energy-rich but isolated middle power, the Islamic Republic adopted a strategy of proxy warfare, funding a chain of mostly (but not only) Shiite proxies from the Levant to Mesopotamia down to the Arabian Peninsula. These provided a defensive buffer, pestered the US bloc, and allowed Tehran to effectively claim territory when Sunni power faltered, just like in Iraq after George Bush’s invasion. As the Arab states more or less abandoned the Palestinian cause, Iran stepped up as its champion, garnering a respect among global Muslim audiences that was denied to it by much of the Iranian populace, especially the secular and the educated.

Through it all, blood-curdling “death-to” chants — Marg Bar Amreeka, Marg Bar Israel — rang out at regime rallies. The chants were soon married to an incipient nuclear program, ostensibly for domestic energy needs. The program almost certainly had a military dimension, but I’m no longer convinced the aim was to “wipe Israel off the map”, as many officials warned. More likely, it was intended as an insurance policy against regime change.

But here’s the thing: if you keep chanting death to a nation of people that survived an attempted genocide within living memory — and build up a nuclear program along the way — you’re taking quite a gamble. You’re raising the stakes to all in, and acting like you’re sitting on pocket aces, when really you’re holding an off-suit Jack-10 at best.

For a good while, Khamenei turned his moderately good hand into decent pots. He bluffed, yes, but he also skillfully exploited the other side’s felicitous errors. America’s post-9/11 wars and the Arab Spring uprisings created power vacuums into which Tehran projected power and presence.

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The postwar government that emerged in Iraq after Saddam Hussein fell was an Iranian client protected by US airpower. Syria’s civil war threatened to take out a key proxy, the Assad regime, but the defensive operation led by Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani succeeded well enough. Saudi Arabia waged a brutal, long war against Yemen’s Tehran-backed Houthis but failed to dislodge them.

Then came the October 7 attack. As I noted at the time, citing a Persian proverb, “This ‘I hope you die’ isn’t one of those usual ‘I hope you die’s’.” Meaning: the massacre cast such serious doubt on the Jewish state’s defense capability — it so gravely called into question its entire reason for existence — that the response was bound to be a game-changer. In the immediate aftermath, there were conflicting reports and intelligence assessments about whether Hamas had freelanced the attack, or whether it was planned in coordination with (or at least, notice to) the group’s Iranian patrons.

That was the moment for Khamenei to cash out his chips. Instead, he made a deadly bluff. Instead of backing off, the rational thing to do, Iran activated its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, and launched a missile barrage at northern Israel — before the Jewish state had fired a single retaliatory shot at Hamas at Gaza. I remember tuning into Persian-language pro-regime X spaces where the exuberance, and the delusional belief that the end of the Zionist entity was nigh, were palpable.

Since then, what’s been revealed is the astonishing weakness of the Shiite crescent that was supposed to shield the Islamic Republic in such a scenario. Save for the Houthis, one after another fell: Hezbollah, de-testicled and decapitated; Hamas’s leadership, assassinated at the heart of Tehran; Bashar Assad, exiled to Moscow, replaced by an al-Qaeda warrior-turned-besuited member of the Davosie.

Now this: an attack that reportedly involved, among many other daring measures, the Mossad transferring drones into the country to disable air defenses ahead of the bombing raids. As an Iranian-American who cares about the old country’s safety and territorial integrity, I wish I could grab Khamenei by the collar — erm, keffiyeh — to ask: when your defenses are this decrepit, when your intelligence apparatus is this porous to Mossad infiltration, why pick fights with the world’s paramount power and its Holocaust-damaged regional client?

The maddening aspect, from the point of view of Iranian security, is that Khamenei at various points slowed down Tehran’s race to the nuke, but without seeking a broader regional compromise. He could have raced determinedly to the bomb, or he could have meaningfully thrown his weight behind across-the-board talks. But he picked the worst combination: material weakness combined with saber-rattling and provocation. Marg Bar Israel — well, kinda, sorta.

Yet the temptation to hubris isn’t limited to Tehran. It’s possible that the US-Israeli plan (if there is a plan) aims to degrade Khamenei’s capabilities until he reaches the precipice of regime collapse and cries uncle. Maybe it’ll work. Or maybe the Iranian obsession with saving “face”, which isn’t limited to this particular regime, will drag the United States into yet another open-ended, all-out war in the Middle East.

The potential nightmare scenarios are as numerous as they are appalling: regime collapse that leads not to the restoration of the Pahlavi dynasty and the ascent to the Peacock Throne of its chubby dauphin, Reza, but warlordism and ethno-sectarian warfare that drives millions of refugees into Europe. Or a Chinese intervention in favor of a crucial energy partner and anchor of the new Eurasian bloc led by Beijing. A blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on the Persian Gulf monarchies.

For Washington, even being distracted from the pivot to the Pacific region is bad enough. It would give the impression of an American ruling class that is incapable of executing any of its own much-touted strategic plans. For Trump and his Trumpians, meanwhile, the danger lies in discrediting one of the central planks of their appeal to Main Street: namely, a focus on domestic reconsolidation and a determination to keep America out of a region that simply isn’t that important to an energy-rich superpower.

Khamenei’s hubris has already wrought devastation on my native land. I shudder to think that the American response might end up wasting another decade or two in my adopted home.

His slogan, “America First”, was interpreted by many as a call to focus on domestic issues rather than overseas conflicts and regime change. And it was seemingly backed up by his running mate, J.D. Vance, who suggested that the Democrats failed because they “built a foreign policy of hectoring, moralising and lecturing countries that don’t want anything to do with it” — as opposed to the Chinese, who “have a foreign policy of building roads and bridges and feeding poor people”. 

Two weeks after Trump’s historic victory, however, hopes that the next president might pursue a more isolationist — or at least less interventionist — foreign policy are already fading into the distance. 

Since the election, a fierce battle has been raging within the MAGA movement between restrainers and sabre-rattlers. When political commentator and comedian Dave Smith wrote on X “that we need maximum pressure to keep all neocons and war hawks out of the Trump administration”, he was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr, who said: “I’m on it”. The anti-neocon faction rejoiced when news emerged that Nikki Hailey and Mike Pompeo, known for their ultra-hawkish positions, would not be joining the administration. But as Trump started unveiling his cabinet selections, the excitement quickly turned to despair — and anger. 

Many of the names chosen by Trump to fill key foreign policy and national security roles are, in fact, well-known neocons and war hawks who advocate a muscular foreign policy against countries such as Iran and China (much like Hailey and Pompeo themselves). Such appointments don’t suggest a pivot away from Biden’s reckless interventionism and imperial overreach, but rather a return to policies that Trump once criticised. 

Take Marco Rubio, Trump’s choice for Secretary of State. Rubio, a prominent senator from Florida, is a longtime hawk who has spent most of his political career promoting neoconservative foreign policy positions, particularly on Iran and the Middle East, and advocating US military action abroad. In the eyes of many MAGA supporters, he is the quintessential representative of the establishment wing of the Republican Party that Trump has long railed against. Back in 2016, when Rubio ran for the presidential nomination, Trump belittled him as “Little Marco”, and Rubio responded by calling the magnate “frightening”, “disturbing” and a “con artist”. 

Rubio was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq, of the bombing of Libya and of the Obama administration’s failed attempt at regime change in Syria. He has also supported US interventionism in Latin America, particularly against Left-wing governments. A staunch ally of Israel, closely aligned with the views of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, Rubio has consistently taken a hardline stance against Iran. He opposed the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, arguing for stricter sanctions, and even advocating military strikes. On the current conflict, he has defended Israel’s every move in the war in Gaza and Lebanon. He is also an anti-China hardliner: he was instrumental in pushing for legislation that would counteract China’s influence in US technology sectors and has been vocal about China’s human rights abuses. 

In the past, Rubio has also called for strong measures against Putin’s regime, though in recent years he has aligned with Trump on opposing military support for Ukraine. But aside from the latter, where we can expect Rubio to back Trump’s efforts to end the war, his track record suggests that Rubio will maintain a focus on aggressively pursuing US interests abroad, and countering all the official enemies and geopolitical rivals of the United States, including via military means. 

Trump’s Secretary of Defence pick Pete Hegseth — a national guard veteran and Fox News anchor — is more of a wild card. In the past, the former soldier was an ardent supporter of US military engagement in the Middle East: in 2008, as head of the pro-war lobbying group Veterans for Freedom, he appeared with George W. Bush at the White House to support Bush’s plan to escalate and extend the Iraq war. Today, his view seems to have shifted. In a recent interview, he described himself as a “recovering neocon”, characterising the post-9/11 forever wars as a mistake that had “made things worse”. However, he remains an ardent supporter of Israel’s war on Gaza, describing the story of Israel as that of “God’s chosen people”, a view which aligns with his evangelical Christian background, where support for Israel is often seen as part of a theological stance. He has also stated that “Zionism and Americanism are the frontlines of Western civilisation and freedom”. 

Trump’s other key foreign policy picks all lean in the same direction. Mike Waltz, Trump’s next national security advisor, is another militant neocon who criticised Biden for not escalating aggressively enough in Ukraine and supported allowing Ukraine to use US weapons to strike deep into Russian territory (though, like Rubio, he recently voted against additional military aid to Ukraine). He has also advocated bombing Iran; opposed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan; called for “a new Monroe Doctrine” to deter Chinese influence throughout the Western hemisphere; and promoted escalating military support for Taiwan. 

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Like Rubio and Hegseth, Waltz, too, is an unwavering supporter of Israel. He has criticised the Biden administration for undermining Israel’s position in the current conflict, particularly in the context of the Gaza and Lebanon wars. And has suggested that Israel be allowed to “finish the job” when dealing with threats like Hamas and Hezbollah, indicating a preference for a more assertive response from Israel. The theory is, as he set out in a piece for the Economist earlier this year, to “move quickly to end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine in order to transfer US focus and military assets back to the Indo-Pacific region and counter China”. 

Similarly, Brian Hook, who will lead Trump’s transition at State Department, is known for his hardline stance on Iran: as the US Special Representative for Iran during the previous Trump administration, Hook was a key architect of the “maximum pressure” strategy against the regime, which involved reimposing and expanding sanctions after he helped Trump withdraw from the nuclear deal. Elise Stefanik, Trump’s new ambassador to the UN, is an equally staunch Israel supporter and Iran hawk. “There is no excuse for an American president to block aid to Israel”, Stefanik told the Israeli Knesset earlier this year in a speech where she criticised Biden for delaying a single shipment of 2,000-pound bombs. 

While Stefanik initially supported aid to Ukraine, she voted against the latest aid package in April. She has also suggested that the US should take a more aggressive stance against China. Before being elected to Congress, in 2014, she worked for several leading neocon think tanks, including the National Endowment for Democracy, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Foreign Policy Initiative. 

As is clear, fervent support for Israel is a common thread among all of Trump’s foreign policy nominees. Mike Huckabee, Trump’s choice as the next US ambassador to Israel is an evangelical Christian who describes himself as an “unapologetic, unreformed Zionist”, and frames his support for Israel through biblical and religious perspectives. He has been a vocal supporter of Israeli illegal settlements in the West Bank, which he refers to as Judea and Samaria. “There’s no such thing as a settlement,” he has said. “They’re communities. They’re neighbourhoods. They’re cities.” In 2015, he even drew criticism from the Anti-Defamation League, an organisation committed to fighting antisemitism, after accusing Barack Obama of “marching the Jews to the oven” by signing a nuclear deal with Iran. 

The overwhelmingly pro-Israel stance expressed by the new appointments, rather than staunching the violence in the Middle East, risks encouraging Netanyahu to further escalate the war, including against Iran, potentially drawing the US into an all-out regional conflict. 

The only conflict where peace and de-escalation seem to be on the agenda is Ukraine. Trump seems keen to bring the war in Ukraine to an end, and even if that is likely to prove harder than he thinks — also because of the pushback he’s likely to face from pro-war forces in his own party, as well as in Europe — it at least offers some hope. The nomination to national intelligence director of Tulsi Gabbard, who has been a vocal critic of US involvement in what she called “counterproductive, wasteful foreign wars”, could also be read as a sign of this intent. 

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But overall, it’s hard to make the case that Trump’s foreign policy line-up isn’t a victory for the pro-war uniparty. Perhaps this was only to be expected: the stance of Trump’s foreign policy picks — which can be summarised as being pro-Israel, anti-Iran and anti-China — is, after all, closely aligned with Trump’s own views, as well as with the policies he pursued during his first administration. So a 180-degree isolationist turn was never on the table. 

Even though the priorities may shift — as the focus moves to Iran and China rather Russia — the next Trump administration isn’t likely to stray very far from the strategic orientation that has guided the US under the Biden administration, grounded in aggressively stemming the decline of American global dominance by resorting to diplomatic, economic and even military pressure. While we can expect Trump to prioritise diplomatic and economic tools over outright war, and to adopt a more transactional and less ideologically-driven approach to international affairs, this is ultimately no guarantee of peace. 

His previous administration testifies to this: while it is true that Trump started no new wars, as his supporters often claim, one may argue that he helped pave the way to many of the conflicts currently unfolding around the world. By withdrawing from the nuclear deal with Iran, ordering the killing of Soleimani and spearheading the Abraham Accords — aimed at sidelining Iran, while erasing the question of Palestinian statehood — many believe that Trump helped create the conditions that erupted on October 7. Similarly, Trump’s trade war with China set the stage for a broader geopolitical confrontation that has since assumed an increasingly marked military dimension. Indeed, even insofar as the Russia-Ukraine conflict is concerned, it was the Trump administration that began selling lethal weapons to Ukraine, and then unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, further fuelling Russia’s security concerns about the aggressive nature of Nato’s involvement in Ukraine. 

This highlights the intrinsically contradictory and ambiguous nature of “America First”. For many in the MAGA movement, it evokes a return to a pre-World War II ethos, when the US prioritised domestic concerns over entanglements abroad. It suggests a focus on economic self-sufficiency and a military posture confined to defending the homeland rather than engaging in costly overseas conflicts. But for many in the incoming Trump administration — and Trump himself — it arguably means something quite different. It means a strategy aimed at recalibrating America’s engagements in order to maximise US interests, including by asserting military dominance while at the same time avoiding direct military involvement. 

However, that is a very thin line to tread, especially in today’s age of heightened geopolitical rivarly, in which the economic and military dimensions are deeply intertwined. In such a context, anything less than a clean break with the US’s hegemonic approach is likely to lead the world down the same dangerous path laid out by the Biden administration. 

About 80 local voters crowded into the room for the latest leg of the “America the Great Tour”, which hopes to elevate national security issues during the Republican presidential race. The forum was held in concert with an official event hosted by the New Hampshire GOP, kicking off the final months before voting gets under way.

Speaking on the panel, Doug Burgum, the billionaire governor of North Dakota and a long-shot Republican presidential candidate, explained that the escalating war in Israel is in fact “a proxy war against America”. “If you’re running for President of the United States of America, you better understand whose side you’re on,” he continued, in a veiled swipe at those cautioning against a broader conflict. The crowd roared.

Sitting next to him was Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who had warmed up the crowd by emphasising America’s need to improve its military readiness. She warned that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the withdrawal from Afghanistan were failures of leadership. Such decisions, she said, showed that the Biden administration “seems to fold like a cheap card table every time the pressure is put on”.

The host of the event, Morgan Ortagus, a polished former State Department official, was no less forthright. As she opened the event, she reminded the audience of her plans to hold the forum that day in Israel, until Hamas launched its terror attack. Even this, she claimed, was a reminder of the importance of the panel’s mission: “When Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran chant death to Israel, they also chant death to America. Make no mistake: this was an attack on not only the state of Israel but also on the United States of America”.

Sponsored by Polaris National Security and the Bastion Institute — two stars in a constellation of organisations designed to revive the hawkish tradition within the GOP — Friday’s event was part of a conscious plan to push back against Donald Trump’s “America First” repositioning of the party. During his run for office, Trump openly ​​mocked the Iraq War as “a big mistake” and criticised the use of US money on its allies in Europe and the East Pacific as unfair to American taxpayers. In recent months, he has promised a quick end to the Ukraine war, suggesting he can hammer out a peace treaty with Vladimir Putin “and have the deal done in one day”.

Such rhetoric has clearly struck a chord with Republican voters, 60% of whom now say they favour decreasing US military support for Ukraine. In Washington, meanwhile, Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida, one of the most insurgent pro-Trump voices in the party, recently succeeded in toppling the Speaker of the House in part by rallying opposition to new funding for the war in Ukraine. On the party’s fringes, Vivek Ramaswamy, the upstart presidential candidate, has made opposition to “forever wars” a main plank of his campaign.

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Faced with such opposition to their neoconservative worldview, how have the GOP’s most prominent interventionists responded? Some, such as Bill Kristol, have decided to leave the party. But many are fighting back.

In 2021, Elliott Abrams, who led the 1998 “Project for the New American Century” (PNAC) letter demanding the removal of Saddam Hussein as a primary policy goal, founded a new group called the ​​Vandenberg Coalition, named after the Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg, who helped build the foundations for Nato in the post-war era. “The Republican Party,” wrote Abrams on its launch, “needs to adopt a forward-looking foreign policy for today’s unprecedented security environment.” The coalition involves Randy Scheunemann, the former head of the “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq”, Doug Feith, a former Defense Department planner for the Iraq War, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

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Yet perhaps the most interesting expert in the Vandenberg Coalition roster is Ortagus, a failed former congressional candidate who previously worked with several think tanks focused on national security and, for a period, as a spokesperson at the State Department. Ortagus is a regular conservative media pundit and, it seems, a growing force in the Republican Party.

A self-described “evangelist for national security issues”, Ortagus sits at the nexus of several of the new hawk advocacy groups: she is, for instance, the founder of Polaris National Security and is on the board of the Bastion Institute. As part of these roles, she has spent the past year travelling across early presidential primary states — Iowa and New Hampshire — organising events such as the panel in Nashua to showcase the party’s commitment to a confrontational foreign policy. Though the forums are technically run through a non-profit research institute, they have the air of a campaign-style rally, with jumbo American flags and raised platforms carrying rows of camera equipment.

What is it hoped they will broadcast? “The focus is to go around the country and talk about national security policy, and talk to the average American about why that matters,” Ortagus told me at the Nashua forum. And who backs the group? Where is it getting its money? “Oh, that’s not disclosed,” she said with a smile.

So far, most of the events have focused on promoting the message of leading hawks in the party, Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, with a particular prominence given to America’s adversaries, including China and Russia. Ortagus, at the panels, has sought to reframe immigration as a national security priority, with warnings that foreign terrorists are slipping over the southern border.

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Over the past fortnight, however, this emphasis has shifted. Since Hamas’s attack, the focus has almost entirely been on supporting Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, along with the need to extend the war to Iran, which is one of the primary financial sponsors of Hamas. This is despite the fact that, earlier this week, Biden made clear that there is “no clear evidence” that Iran had any involvement in Hamas’s assault on October 7 — a claim the Iranian government is also at pains to point out.

And yet, despite this lack of evidence, the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party continues to mobilise for a new war. Senator Lindsey Graham, a leading hawk, said he did not need evidence of Iran’s involvement in the Hamas attack to launch a pre-emptive strike. “What I would do is bomb Iran’s oil infrastructure,” he told CNN last week. Elsewhere, Elliott Abrams of the Vandenberg Coalition has said that the US should “contemplate some kind of military reaction” against Iran. “There are plenty of Iranian targets,” he added.

Other members of the new hawk advocacy groups have been similarly vocal. Earlier this week, Ortagus presented the Hamas-Israel war as an American-Iranian conflict, pointing out on Fox News that Americans were killed during the attack and some were taken as hostages. “Take Israel out of this,” she said. “What is the American response to this? How are we avenging our people that are killed? It is time to stand up to the Islamic Republic of Iran. They are not ten feet tall and we can take them on.”

Will such inflammatory rhetoric inspire action? It can’t be ruled out. When, in the late Nineties, the PNAC demanded that Clinton wage war on Iraq to remove its president, many dismissed it as far-fetched. But only a few years later, 9/11 rapidly reshaped the political calculus, as the neoconservative movement swept in to galvanise a traumatised nation into new conflicts abroad. The lack of strong intelligence around weapons of mass destruction mattered little in a time of retribution and fear.

Today, the shock and horror of Hamas’s assault has been rightfully called Israel’s 9/11. President Biden has wasted no time in pledging US support for Israel’s forces and travelled to Tel Aviv yesterday to make his commitment clear. But, just as in 2001, the neoconservatives are waiting in the wings, pushing to transform this crisis into a regional war — and dragging America into another Middle Eastern intervention.

This week, Nikki Haley launched her own bid for historical sub-footnote status (she is polling around 3%) when she declared her intention to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. The former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations is the first official challenger to her former boss Donald Trump. Commentators and bookmakers are largely agreed on her campaign’s (wholly non-existent) chances. The real challenge to the former president’s hold on the GOP will most likely come from Florida governor Ron DeSantis. But his appeal to the base is that he is a younger and more disciplined version of Trump, who can essentially continue what Trump started in 2016. With her appeals to the conservatism of the George W. Bush era, Haley can be expected to play the same role as Breckinridge: the swansong of a dying breed and the harbinger of her party’s irrevocable transformation. But even so, for the future of Republican politics and strategy, there is more to Haley’s bid than the sense of inevitable defeat that infuses it.

Clues about the true significance of the Haley campaign may first be found in retracing the relationship between the 45th president and his one-time ambassador. Nimrata Nikki Randhawa was born and grew up in Bamberg, South Carolina, the daughter of Sikh immigrants who came to the US by way of Canada from India. After graduating from Clemson University, she rose through the ranks in local politics and married national guardsman Michael Haley, converting to Christianity and later getting elected as a Republican to the state legislature in 2004. Haley became a national figure upon winning the governorship of South Carolina in 2010 as part of a Tea Party wave. Combining traditional conservative positions on taxes and social issues with an energetic populist style, Haley and the Tea Party represented a revival of GOP fortunes in the Obama years. She is also remembered for her call to take down the Confederate flag in 2015 after the Charleston massacre, and was touted as a serious presidential contender in 2016 though she opted to stay out of a crowded field.

Of course, that was the year both mainstream conservatism and liberalism were shattered by the insurgent force of Trumpian populism. Going well beyond the Tea Party, the real-estate mogul openly repudiated Bush-era conservative shibboleths, such as the Iraq War and free trade, while vociferously rejecting the establishment’s relatively moderate stances on immigration. As one of the party’s leading figures, Haley faced a choice between calling out Trump on principle or falling in line. Like many establishment conservatives at that juncture, she chose wisely: she did both.

At times, Haley appeared to criticise Trump, such as during her 2016 state of the union response when, in a veiled reference to her party’s frontrunner, she warned against the temptation “to follow the siren call of the angriest voices”. When her preferred candidate, Marco Rubio, was eliminated, she indicated she would vote for Trump but made clear that she was “not a fan”. In the end, Haley managed to say just enough to maintain her image as one of the respectable Republicans, but not nearly enough to anger or alienate the nominee. After Trump’s victory, Haley accepted the offer to serve as America’s envoy to the UN: it was an appointment that seemed to confirm the newfound unity between the president and the party establishment.

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At the United Nations, Ambassador Haley brought this political balancing act onto the international stage, gaining a reputation as the “good cop” of the Trump administration. This often meant adopting a of tone of rhetorical moderation to counteract Trump’s less statesmanlike instincts, while still pledging fidelity to the president. Nonetheless, Haley’s positions seemed to illustrate the distance between Trump and Bush-era foreign policy. For instance, while Trump was in favour of forging closer ties to Putin’s Russia and, at least initially, questioned the viability of Nato, Haley made a point of reaffirming the Atlantic alliance throughout her ambassadorship and took stands against Moscow and other authoritarian regimes.

When Haley stepped down in 2018, Trump praised her and she returned the favour in her memoir, in which she lauded her former boss as a strong president who was “great to work with”. A breach in relations due to January 6, after which Haley denounced Trump, was soon repaired when Haley later went back to supporting him. In 2021, she made clear she would duly make way for the former president if he opted for another run . “I would not run if President Trump ran, and I would talk to him about it… That’s something that we’ll have a conversation about.”

Even now, however, with Haley reneging on her pledge, Trump doesn’t seem all that bothered, writing on Truth Social, “Nikki has to follow her heart, not her honor. She should definitely run!” Unlike with DeSantis, Trump appears to be content with going soft on Haley, despite many lines of attack being open to the former president, such as tarring her as a disloyal “Republican In Name Only”, which can be enough to excommunicate someone from the party. Instead, the task of attacking her has fallen to Tucker Carlson and Trump’s other backers, who have referred to her as the “Carly Fiorina of 2024”, his one female rival from 2016.

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The lack of any real antagonism between Haley and Trump has led some to suggest that the former’s campaign is just a prelude to a possible vice-presidential selection (though he would likely be better off picking someone ideologically closer to him to avoid a repeat of the awkward relationship with Mike Pence), or part of some divide-and-conquer strategy to diffuse opposition to Trump and weaken the chances of Ron DeSantis. In this case, Nikki Haley’s run is not as pointless as it seems. Whether she is fully conscious of it or not, her campaign could very well be a welcome exercise in “regulated opposition” within the Republican Party.

That still begs the question: why is there so little tension between the two divergent wings of the party represented by Trump and Haley? After all, to hear Haley speak is to be transported to the halcyon days of post-Cold War Republican orthodoxy, when global market capitalism (neoliberalism) and military interventionism (neoconservatism) were unquestionable. This is a world away from the “America First” nationalism of Trump and the newer crop of populists, with its echoes of prewar isolationism and protectionism. Yet the Republican Party seems to have room enough for both of these tendencies without any big protracted battles over policy.

And while there now appears to be a brewing war of words between Trump and the Right’s traditional powerbrokers (like the pro-business Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity, who are threatening to withhold their support in favour of more orthodox candidates such as Haley), the understanding seems to be that this is a mere pantomime act. The parties will go through the motions of dissent and protest before inevitably rallying to Trump (as they had done after 2016). Indeed, the Club for Growth has already made it clear that they would support Trump in the general election if he became the nominee.

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The explanation for the lack of genuine ideological conflict is simple: surface-level squabbles belie a practical convergence on policy. As president, with the partial exception of tariffs, Trump readily outsourced his agenda to Washington insiders with either neoliberal or neoconservative inclinations like John Bolton, producing a record that is in many ways a continuation of the old regime, on everything from tax cuts to immigration to foreign entanglements. In return for acquiescence to party regulars on policy, Trump was given free rein to ratchet up the culture war and to rebrand the GOP into the MAGA party, while effectively retaining much of the four-decades-old conservative programme.

Unlike Henry Breckinridge, who really did disagree with FDR (and who bolted from the party), the contrast between the likes of Nikki Haley and Donald Trump is mostly one of posture and aesthetics. In distancing herself from the former president rhetorically while nonetheless working to ensure that national policy follows party orthodoxy, Haley embodies the non-dilemma of the Republican establishment. Their struggle is not in deciding between principle and power, but in preserving the appearance of principle while reaping the spoils of power.

But before “neoconservative” became a byword for the utopian, interventionist, nation-building foreign policy that was fatally discredited by the Iraq war, it described an entirely reasonable generation of American intellectuals who became disenchanted with the liberal domestic policies and the cultural changes of the Sixties. And their thinking, unlikely though it may seem, bears uncanny similarities with post-liberalism today. In fact, whether the post-liberals realise it or not, this group of writers, editors and thinkers from both the Left and the Right — Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James Burnham, Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer, among others — are the closest thing they have to intellectual predecessors.

Consider a few parallels. First, neoconservatism and post-liberalism both emerged as critiques of their era’s dominant liberal ideology in politics, culture and economics. Indeed, many neoconservatives started political life on the Left. In his 1979 essay “Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed — Perhaps the Only — ‘Neoconservative’”, Kristol, a former Trotskyist, wrote that the neoconservatives were “provoked by disillusionment with contemporary liberalism”.

Similarly, the sociologist Nathan Glazer’s neoconservatism took form after observing the intolerance of campus radicals. A left-liberal at Berkeley, he became concerned in the mid-Sixties about threats to free speech and free expression on campus. By the end of the decade, he had fallen out not just with the activist Left but mainstream liberals too. Writing in The Atlantic at the time, he delivered a prophetic warning:

“The students who sat in, threw out the deans, and fought with the police have, after all, been taught by American academics such as C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, and many, many others. All these explained how the world operated, and we failed to answer effectively. Or we had forgotten the answers. We have to start remembering and start answering.”

Glazer’s rightwards journey was typical. Peter Steinfels, a critic of the neoconservatives whose book on the movement provoked Kristol into writing his “Confessions” essay, explained that the neocons actually “set out to defend liberalism from the radicals’ attack”. But as they did, they were faced with a question: “Why had a liberal society produced a wave of political criticism which they perceived (in many cases quite accurately) as so illiberal and destructive? Having begun as defenders of liberalism, they too ended, to some degree as critics of it.”

Not all of today’s post-liberals started life on the Left, but their critique of liberalism often follows a similar path. It looks at the ways in which liberalism has failed, and asks how it birthed an illiberal strain on both the Left and the Right. Its exponents, as a result, often end up with a more profound critique of liberalism that they went looking for.

Pabst, for what it’s worth, argues that “genuine post-liberalism draws on the best liberal traditions but corrects liberal errors and excesses”. The same could be said of traditional neoconservatism. Daniel Bell described himself as “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture”. Kristol claimed that neoconservatives were “not libertarian in the sense, say, that Milton Friedman and Friedrich A. Von Hayek are” and had no problem with “a state that takes a degree of responsibility for helping to shape the preferences that the people exercise in a free market.” Kristol did, however, go on to embrace Ronald Reagan’s free-market economic agenda, much to the dismay of Moynihan, a New York Democrat who confirmed his break with the liberal Left and confirmed his neoconservative credentials when he accepted a job in the Nixon administration; he later wrote how he watched his neoconservative friends siding with Reagan “with a combination of incredulity, horror and complicity”.

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But even the most market-friendly neoconservatives had their concerns with capitalism, viewing it merely as a means to an end. Kristol described the neoconservatives’ relationship with business as “loose and uneasy, though not necessarily unfriendly” and argued that economic growth was important “not out of any enthusiasm for the material goods of this world, but because they see economic growth as indispensable for social and political stability”.

There is a similar range of economic views among today’s post-liberals: some are on the Left, some are on the Right. Pabst’s Left-leaning flavour of post-liberalism emphasises “economic justice”, “social solidarity” and “ecological balance”. Right-leaning post-liberals argue that excessive economic freedom has shifted resources and power away from communities and families. What both sides share, then, is a suspicion of top-down central planning of the socialist Left and the reflexive libertarianism of many on the free-market Right.

Neoconservatism and post-liberalism are also both moods or instincts, rather than fully-formed programmes for government. Kristol called the former a “persuasion” rather than a movement. The latter is similarly disorganised, representing a loose collection of beliefs and a shared impulse as opposed to a group that meets up, agrees a manifesto or seeks office.

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Both also have a complicated relationship with populism, on the one hand seeing the rise of populist movements as a symptom of liberalism’s failures, and on the other embracing some of populism’s critiques of the status quo. Responding to the criticism that there was “a populist temper to the neoconservative impulse”, Kristol acknowledged that “any ideology that gives politics a priority over economics is bound to have a populist hue”. It was the job of neoconservatism, he wrote, “to explain to the American people why they are right, and to the intellectuals why they are wrong”.

Though many post-liberals will balk at the populist label, I suspect they have assigned themselves a similar role. If they are serious about a political project that takes on what the American historian and author of The New Class War Michael Lind calls a technocratic neoliberal elite, it’s hard to see how post-liberalism won’t have the same “populist temper” as neoconservatism.

Another important parallel is their shared respect for the institutions that sit between the state and the individual. As UnHerd‘s Peter Franklin wrote in 2019, he was drawn to post-liberalism’s “respect for human dignity” that “distinguishes [it] from populism”, is “incompatible with collectivist ideas that instrumentalise the individual in service to some group identity; and also at odds with atomistic individualism”.

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Such a claim would no doubt leave Kristol and co. nodding vigorously. Writing 50 years earlier, Kristol described family and religion as “indispensable pillars of a decent society” and confessed that neoconservatives “have a special fondness for all of those intermediate institutions of a liberal society which reconcile the need for community for the desire for liberty”.

These neoconservative/post-liberal parallels are more than just a niche, extremely wonky parlour game. They are an antidote to an amnesia that infects a lot of post-liberal writing. Franklin, for example, calls post-liberalism “a genuinely new kind of politics” that “is tantalisingly close to breaking through”. But the many echoes of neoconservatism refute these claims of novelty and suggest that the post-liberals are the inheritors of a richer intellectual than many of them seem to realise.

Given that “neoconservative” is little more than an insult these days, I suspect most post-liberals will resist this comparison. But that would be a mistake. Half a century ago, some of the West’s sharpest minds assembled an incisive critique of post-war liberalism. Today, post-liberals are trying to do the same thing to post-Cold War neoliberalism. They would be foolish not to learn from those in whose footsteps they are following.