The flip-flopping Strongman in the White House

At the beginning the Israeli Iranian challenge to America looked like the first stress test to the MAGA movement. Then Trump’s pondering yet another military intervention in the Middle East showed the weakness of the Democratic Party which did not challenge him making his decision on war and peace without consulting US-Congress. Then, after the attacks on Iran’s nuclear installations and his victory celebrations, some feared highly dangerous consequences of America getting involved in just another war. As the conservative critic Robert Kagan wrote: It will strengthen autocratic tendencies at home and anti-liberal forces around the world. Yet so far, the “12 day war” has just been another chapter in the annals of the flip-flopping strongman in the White House satisfying his narcissistic impulses. 

For days US- and German media had followed the online war of words between the self-appointed leaders of the MAGA base, like chief ideologue Steve Bannon, Ex-Fox Host Tucker Carlson, Talk-Influencer Charlie Kirk and Congresswomen Marjorie Taylor Green on one side, and more traditional Republicans like Senators Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham on the other. With the headline “How the Iran war splits the MAGA-movement” “Süddeutsche Zeitung” reported on the hostile-sounding exchanges in the blogosphere and asked how dangerous this might be for Donald Trump. 

As it turns out, no danger to Trump at all. The danger rather lies in the misreading of the politics in the age of Donald Trump. Because the current Republican coalition of screaming influencers and docile legislators is a totally different political animal from the Democratic coalition of a traditional political party with different factions and a frustrated but helpless civil society. Members of the first coalition are all sycophants in a semi-autocratic system, and members of the opposition can’t currently agree on anything in the political wilderness in which they live. The first group is delivering a hideous but entertaining show, the second keeps performing serious acts of a well-known tragedy without ever reaching catharsis. 

The Middle East was the original point of departure for the MAGA movement. It was Donald Trump who recognized already during his first election campaign how out of step with the public the Democratic Party’s foreign policy after the disaster of the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan. He sensed how exhausted the American public was after those failed interventions which most people thought came at a cost to their economic wellbeing at home. “All that money wasted that could have been spent on me”, was a phrase you can still hear today. Steve Bannon’s claim today that 80% of MAGA people would be against US-involvement on the side of Israel might be exaggerated. But all polls confirm that both Democrats and Republicans are opposed to entering the conflict by a large margin. 

“This might be a missed opportunity for the Democrats to become the anti-war party, wrote the British “New Statesman”, “a position Trump has dominated since he won in 2016”. There is indeed a confluence of views on the current conflict between Israel and Iran between MAGA proponents and voices on the Democratic left like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But the current leadership of the Democratic Party keeps repeating the mistakes of Hillary Clinton and their forerunners when they did not find the political courage to speak out against President Bush’s invasion of Iraq. There is the War Powers Act of 1973 strengthening the position of Congress after President Richard Nixon had usurped too much power during the Vietnam War. But when it comes to opposing war the leaders of the Democratic Party in Congress are again missing in action. This comes after a week when US-Democrats should be flying high after having mobilised a few million protesters against the raids and immigration policies of the Trump Administration. The former, but now repentant, neoconservative columnist Peter Beinart writing in the “New York Times” calls this “a serious foreign policy blunder” by the Democratic leadership in Congress. 

But why can the threat of another unpopular war make Democratic Party timid while posing no harm to the Trump Administration? Because the MAGA spectacle will quickly adapt its resentment and bile to the new situation and the Republicans in Congress have nowhere else to go but into an oscillating Trumpism. Because for Donald Trump changing yesterday’s isolationist tune into a victorious song of war does not require much effort. It is just another form of TACO, the short form for “Trump always chickens out”, a phrase the Financial Times had applied to his twists and turns on tariff policies, for the way the President fails to stick to any of his promises. In this case of foreign policy Trump was “chickening out”, from his martially declared promise of “no more wars”. 

Trump’s “New Neoconservatism has evolved”, as Bruno Macaes points out in the “New Statesman”. “It has lost the thin veneer of idealism it once had and turned into a thoroughly nihilistic ideology, openly advocating brute force”. That will suffice for Trump’s base, which likes cruel spectacles of any kind as long as they harm others; and, with the war started, it will rekindle the popular “good versus bad”-thinking in a politically exhausted public. 

It is ironic that it fell to another old neoconservative and promoter of regime change like Robert Kagan to dramatically warn his countrymen and women of the dangers of going to war in Iran this time. With the United States “well down the road to dictatorship at home”, his argument in “The Atlantic” ran, “I can think of nothing more perilous to American democracy right now than going to war”.  

Going through the possible domestic consequences of a war in or on Iran Kagan envisages all the excuses Trump could use to strengthen his dictatorial control at home. It is indeed a frightening scenario he depicts about how Trump might be dealing with dissent in wartime or after possible acts of terrorism before he comes to his conclusion: “Any success Trump claims in Iran, whatever its other consequences, will be a victory for the anti-liberal alliance and will further the interests of anti-liberalism across the globe”. 

It might be. But for now, Donald Trump is pursuing a “head spinning Iran policy” as the “Financial Times” notes. On his truth social account, it is regime change today and diplomacy tomorrow, a bewildering spectacle alternating between military threats against Iran and diplomatic deals with its regime, between cruelty and magnanimity. This is not the outcome of a split personality, but the systematic flip flopping of a would-be strongman who wants to claim credit for any outcome, be it a “The 12 Day War” or a short-lasting peace. It is feeding Donald Trump’s insatiable narcissism as the ultimate foreign policy goal.