Tea at Trianon: How Trump Surprised Hawks and Doves

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, June 26, 2025

How Trump Surprised Hawks and Doves

From Daniel McCarthy at Compact:

Trump bombed Iranian nuclear facilities on Saturday evening, and by Monday evening was announcing a ceasefire between Iran and Israel. He ended the war almost as soon as he got America into it, a feat that confounds hawks and doves alike. The former wish the war had been longer, the outcome more certain, and the conclusion the end of the ayatollahs’ regime. The latter wish Trump had never allowed the war to happen—assuming he had the power to stop it—or that he’d kept America out of it. Now the raging debate online is over who won the policy battle. Is a two-day war (for us) consisting of one bombing sortie actually a war? It defies the grandiose claims of both interventionists and non-interventionists, who were more alike than not in assuming that regime change was in the offing and the stakes were much the same as those on the table in the 2003 debate over the Iraq War.
“We can’t just bomb Fordow and go home,” was the sentiment of more than one antiwar friend. Any ideology, hawkish or dovish, subsists on extreme scenarios. The idea that some policy either good or bad could be less than apocalyptic, or utopian, is hard to accept. But Trump is not an ideologue, which means he neither feels ideological constraints (which would have kept him out of the war altogether) nor suffers ideological delusions (which would have told him more force achieves more good).
Once again Trump proves to be ambidextrous, in defiance of conventional political logic. He’s the president who brought about the end of Roe v. Wade and the Republican leader who has moved the party away from pro-life orthodoxy. He loves a grand, seemingly impossible bargain. But can he really reconfigure international relations the way he’s redrawn the boundaries of domestic politics? A realignment in party ideologies and voting blocs is one thing; realigning the Israeli-Iran relations is entirely another. The ceasefire is fragile at best. No matter how successful the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran may have been in destroying existing nuclear facilities, Iran can always rebuild what it has built before. Will that mean more Israeli attacks, coupled with further American intervention? If Trump is not careful, the scenario that may emerge over the coming weeks will not look like 2003, but rather like the situation that persisted for more than a decade and led up to the Iraq War.
In 1991, George H.W. Bush also won a swift victory, ejecting Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait. But then what? The “Marsh Arabs” whom Bush encouraged to rebel against Saddam were massacred. Bush and his successor, Bill Clinton, enforced no-fly zones over parts of Iraq, a form of low-intensity war with no obvious end, other than the one George W. Bush decided upon in 2003. The second Bush’s regime-change war was a dozen years in the making. All the while, America’s foreign-policy establishment was becoming accustomed to thinking of this as a proper and normal exercise of “leadership” and global responsibility. The mental habits acquired by America’s elite in the 1990s—in foreign policy, in cultural politics, and in economics—account for most of the political crises of the early 21st century, as well as for the rise of right-wing populism and Donald Trump in response to them. (Read more.)