All the Sad Hawks

An irony of the Iran war is that Donald Trump, whose patience for written texts and policy details is famously negligible, came to grasp the reality of the situation more quickly and clearly than his neoconservative supporters who spent years obsessing over the issue. Trump, recognizing that America has suffered a historic defeat, has abandoned his demands for unconditional surrender, and is trying to buy his way out with a memorandum of understanding that reportedly promises Tehran billions of dollars to restore the status quo ante. By contrast, the neocons, the coterie of interventionists who long ago developed a reputation as the brains of the conservative movement, have been rather slow on the uptake.“I suspect the MOU may be less awful than the administration’s disastrous sales pitch,” Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies posted on X yesterday. (Later he conceded the deal was not better at all but, in fact, “even worse than I assumed.”) The pundit Batya Ungar-Sargon hypothesized that Trump might be “in a fugue state.” Marc Thiessen, a Washington Post columnist who has tried to steer Trump toward hawkery through relentless obsequiousness, termed the MOU the “Vance peace deal,” as if the anti-interventionist veep had staged a coup. An especially plaintive moment took place during Commentary’s podcast when Eli Lake, the hawkish foreign-policy analyst, cried “What’s going on? What's going on?”What’s going on is that the neocons misapprehended both the geopolitical situation and the president they trusted to resolve it.The defining trait of neoconservative thought is a near-boundless faith in the efficacy of U.S. military power. This faith caused the neocons to recoil in from the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. A tougher president, they believed, would have used the threat of American might to make Iran accept much stricter terms.[Jonathan Lemire: Trump in defeat]At the time, the neocons insisted that their plan would no