Anti-Trump catastrophism is the real menace to the West

Snark really is all that President Trump’s critics have left. They greet his every utterance, whether made in the flesh or on Truth Social, with instant sarcastic derision. Their cliquish cynicism was on full display during Trump’s address to the nation on the Iran War last night. No sooner had Trump said the US was nearing victory than his opposing army of nay-sayers was gleefully crowing: ‘Nah, it’s a disaster, we’re screwed.’

I can’t be the only person who now finds this voguish gloom more grating than Trump’s starry-eyed statements? Give me Trump’s possibly premature declarations of victory over these wet dreams of defeat any day of the week. The US is ‘near completion’ of its ‘core strategic objectives’ in Iran, Trump said. Too sanguine? I reckon. War, once started, has a nasty habit of being unpredictable. But the other side, with its almost joyful prophecies of catastrophe, leaves me far colder.

Trump’s address didn’t really contain much that was new. On that, some of his critics are right. It was less a grand presidential address than a ‘tired compilation of his Truth Social posts’, as a writer for the Telegraph put it. He said the US and Israel have ‘decimated’ the Islamic Republic’s navy drones and ballistic-missile capacity. Nuclear sites have been ‘obliterated’. He assured the American people he would hit the regime hard for ‘the next two to three weeks’, and then we’re out of there. We will be ‘out of Iran pretty quickly’, he told Reuters.

Perhaps keen to shake off the critique that his battering of the Islamic Republic is a breach of his promise to end the ‘forever wars’, he drew a distinction between this war and past wars. ‘It’s very important that we keep this conflict in perspective’, he said. He pointed out that the US was in Vietnam for ‘19 years, five months and 29 days’. And in Iraq for ‘eight years, eight months and 28 days’. So far the Iran War – he paused briefly before delivering the punchline – has lasted ‘32 days’.

Even Trump must know those 32 days could become 32 more, and even longer. Especially if he decides to send marines to seize Kharg Island (where 90 per cent of Iran’s oil is exported from), an option that’s apparently still on the table. And yet his ‘perspective’ felt refreshing. The media establishment’s noisy handwringing over the Iran War has been infused with a kind of ahistorical hysteria. Readers could be forgiven for thinking it is a uniquely barbarous event executed by a singularly mad president. Ignorance of history underpins such fevered commentary far more than morality does.

Only people who had never heard the words ‘Nixon’, ‘Cambodia’ or ‘Operation Freedom Deal’ could view the Iran War as an unprecedented tear in civilisation’s fabric. The New York Times’ Bret Stephens is right that ‘panic’ is a more important driver of such agitated coverage than principle. He points out that the price of oil has spiked many times before. In March 2012, it reached $123 a barrel (the equivalent of $175 in today’s money), and everyone just carried on going to see Hunger Games and campaigning for Obama to be re-elected president. Earlier generations who saw millions perish in war would ‘marvel’ at our ‘comparative good fortune’, Stephens says.

Of course, Stephens, like many of us, is not blind to the possibility of Iran turning truly disastrous. He rightly laments the Trump administration’s ‘failures in planning’, in particular its failure to ‘get more allies on our side before the campaign began’. And yet the cultural elites’ insistence that the war is a historic calamity feels more like groupthink than critical thinking. Even before the war started, the Nation was telling us it would be a ‘bigger catastrophe than Iraq’. You can balk at Trump’s premature triumphalism, but you should likewise bristle at the premature defeatism of these cultural pessimists larping as anti-war critics.

Such de rigueur fatalism was everywhere following Trump’s address. The BBC positively dripped with it. Its coverage cocked a knowing eyebrow at Trump’s ‘claims of victory’. The broadsheet media marvelled in horror at Trump’s ‘slurred’ address which only confirmed there is ‘no end in sight’ to this insane war. Leftish X was awash with claims – hopes? – that actually the Islamic Republic has shocked the world and held its own against the murderous oaf in the White House.

I have no special insight into this theatre of war, and find myself not trusting a word the mainstream media says about it. But can it really be the case that the US and Israel have not achieved any objectives and are floundering in the face of the Islamic Republic’s zealous fightback? Doesn’t that seem unlikely? Entire layers of the regime have been taken out. Weapons installations and nuclear facilities have been blasted. The idea that the US has suffered a massive ‘strategic defeat’ strikes me as a far more hasty call than Trump’s talk of swift victory.

Here’s what concerns me most about the ‘anti-war’ catastrophism of Trump’s critics – it seems to be motored less by a principled objection to wars of intervention than by a low, opportunistic urge to see Trump get a bloody nose. It’s anti-Americanism, not anti-imperialism. It’s the heir less to the noble anti-war movements of old than to that scourge of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has ailed so much of the Anglo-American elite this past decade. I don’t like war, but I’ll tell you what I like even less: that there are people in our societies who seem to view the victory of Iran’s Islamist death cult as a small price to pay for rapping the knuckles of Trump, ‘the West’ and the populist project.

We’ve seen Islamists on our streets openly cheering the Islamic Republic. Leftists crow, on the basis of thin information, that the mullahs are winning. Even in the esteemed journal Foreign Policy, the cry goes out that it would be bad if America won. A ‘US victory in Iran would be bad for Washington, and the world’, it says. Such a foreign-policy boon for Trump would be ‘even more frightening than US failure’, we’re told. Imagine how morally cossetted you would need to be, how luxuriantly out of touch with brutal global truths, to think that a win for a regime that sponsors armies of anti-Semites and massacres its own people would be preferable to a win for Trump.

The Iran catastrophism, the belief it will all blow up in the face of arrogant America, is not what I recognise as anti-imperialism. ‘I denounce European colonialism’, CLR James famously wrote, ‘but I respect the learning and profound discoveries of Western civilisation’. In stark contrast to such honourable intentions, the hysteria over this war feels more like an extension of today’s fashionable rejection of ‘Western civilisation’ – like a dark dream that the wicked West will be brought down a rung or two. How else to explain that some are dreaming – whether openly or quietly – of an American defeat at the hands of those implacable foes of our civilisation: Tehran’s tyrants. All good people want this war to end, but like that? Really?

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.