More than half of those Americans who supported Donald Trump for president in 2024 don’t think the U.S. military should get involved in the conflict between Iran and Israel.
A new The Economist/YouGov poll conducted on June 13-16 found that 53% of Trump voters said the U.S. should not join the war, versus just 19% who said the U.S. military should. Sixty percent of all Americans surveyed agreed that the U.S. should not get involved.
The poll also found that 63 percent of Trump voters said the U.S. should “engage in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program” while just 18% said the U.S. should not (in total, 56% said the U.S. should talk to Iran).
That result mirrors other recent polling on negotiations with Iran which found that Republicans support talks and comes amid an increasingly bitter battle between those pushing for war with Iran and Trump’s most loyal supporters — including MAGA stars like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson — who are furious that the president didn’t stop Israel from launching its attack on Iran last week and is apparently considering U.S. military involvement.
Ben Armbruster is the Managing Editor of Responsible Statecraft. He has more than a decade of experience working at the intersection of politics, foreign policy, and media. Ben previously held senior editorial and management positions at Media Matters, ThinkProgress, ReThink Media, and Win Without War.
The Bunker appears originally at the Project on Government Oversight and is republished here with permission.
It’s becoming a one-man show
As though he were Zeus unleashing lightning bolts, President Donald Trump announced on September 19 the unilateral destruction of a third boat in the Caribbean suspected of carrying illegal drugs destined for the U.S. It followed similar strikes announced September 2 and September 15. Trump declared the attacks had killed 17 “narcoterrorists.”
What’s peculiar about these attacks is that they’re being revealed by the president himself, on his Truth Social account. Even more strikingly, each includes video purporting to be of the U.S. attack, something that in the past had been part of the Pentagon’s remit. In fact, news of the attacks appears to be MIA from the Pentagon’s purported news website. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth simply retweeted Trump’s post on the most recent attack nine minutes later.
These are plainly extra-judicial killings carried out “on my Orders,” as Trump said in all three posts (perhaps he thinks capitalizing “Orders” makes them legal). The Missileer-in-Chief provided no evidence that those killed were running drugs, nor any information about the units and weapons involved in the U.S. strikes. It’s all part of the Trump administration’s continuing slide into unilateral “trust me” authoritarianism. It’s making even Pentagon lawyers nervous.
But U.S. military intelligence, as with anything that breathes lethality, is hardly infallible. Like the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the imminent U.S. victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan, the fraudulent Gulf of Tonkin attack that got us into Vietnam, and the dimming light at the end of the tunnel that keeps us there, it is good to be skeptical of any intelligence generated by the U.S. government. That’s not cynicism; it’s common sense. Deadly mistakes happen too often in war. Just ask the seven Afghan kids killed by that errant 2021 U.S. missile attack. Apparently, a military costing $1 trillion a year can no longer afford to halt suspected drug smugglers at sea and board their vessels to see if they’re carrying contraband.
The Bunker, of course, holds no brief for drug smugglers. But he does support the rules of war. “The administration claimed authority to kill on suspicion alone,” retired Navy captain Jon Duffy wrote after the initial strike. “International law does not permit such action.” A pair of Democratic lawmakers is seeking to force a congressional vote to halt such attacks. Good luck with that. It’s surely doomed, given how much pusillanimous slack lawmakers have cut presidents to wage war since World War II.
There is a growing and disturbing insularity in and around this Department of Defense. Its leaders disdain sharing information with the citizenry. They’re more interested in sidelining those who refuse to salute, whether it’s outsiders, a West Point professor, or books. The Pentagon, never perfect, is becoming increasingly brittle and disconnected from those in whose name it is supposedly serving. This is not going to end well.
Turning reporters into a steno pool
Apparently, Hegseth wants reporters covering the Pentagon to behave as lickspittlely as he does to President Trump.
Ain’t gonna happen.
Nothing highlights Hegseth’s out-of-his-depth-underwater-altimeter like his inane September 18 order barring Pentagon pen-pushers from reporting anything not preapproved for release by the Defense Department. It’s an unworkable solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Hegseth’s action only highlights his ignorance of how the press works, how the Pentagon works, and how the First Amendment works.
“The ‘press’ does not run the Pentagon — the people do,” Hegseth said. “The press is no longer allowed to roam the halls of a secure facility. Wear a badge and follow the rules — or go home.”
That might happen — some reporters might actually stay away if these new rules stick — but it’s not going to make much difference. That’s because most embarrassing reporting on the U.S. military doesn’t come from reporters inside the Pentagon. Vietnam’s My Lai massacre and the Pentagon (“Sure we lied”) Papers, and Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal come quickly to mind as stories broken by reporters beyond the walls of the five-sided puzzle palace.
This is just the latest clash between Hegseth and the press. He’s booted news organizations that have covered the building for decades from their Pentagon offices, dramatically cut back on press briefings, and even before this most recent edict curtailed reporters’ access(PDF) inside the building.
The Bunker spent nearly 40 years armed only with a Pentagon press pass, gathering string for stories and getting to know military and civilian defense officials. It was a two-way street that served the military, the press, and the American public. Hegseth is turning it into a cul-de-sacrilege.
Beards get the boot
In his continuing campaign promoting style over substance, Secretary of Whiskers Pete Hegseth has ordered new restrictions on military beards. Troops with skin conditions irritated by regularly shaving will have to go barefaced within a year or else face the end of their military career. “The Department must remain vigilant in maintaining the grooming standards which underpin the warrior ethos,” Hegseth wrote(PDF) in an August memo released September 15.
Troops suffering from pseudofolliculitis barbae — “razor bumps,” where freshly-shaven hair curls back into the skin and causes irritation — have been able to get waivers to allow them to avoid close shaves. But under the new rules, they’ll have one year to come up with medical treatments that may allow them to shave or, um, face expulsion. Unlike the U.S. military, razor bumps are not color-blind: the condition affects about 45% of Black service members, but only around 3% of white ones.
Yet with increasing Pentagon concern(PDF) over the prospect of war in the Arctic, Hegseth may want to consider freezing, or at least trimming, his new regulation. It seems beards offer “significant protection against frostbite injury to the face,” Military Medicinereported September 4. They “provide a lethality advantage to male soldiers operating in the cold, enhancing military exploitation of extreme cold environments.”
The U.S. military has remained largely mum as the Trump administration has run roughshod over legal norms, at least in part because of the wholesale firing of its top lawyers, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote September 19.
The Navy’s former #2 officer, a retired four-star admiral, was sentenced to six years in prison after being convicted on corruption charges for agreeing to “exchange a military contract for a lucrative postretirement job,” Michael Kunzelman of the Associated Press reported September 16.
Beijing, which recently unveiled its own nuclear triad of ICBMs, bombers, and missile-launching submarines, is flexing its atomic muscles as a warning to the U.S., Brian Spegele reported September 18 in the Wall Street Journal. Alas, it’s a safe bet Washington will take the bait, along with the hook, the line, and the sinker.
Thanks for dropping anchor at The Bunker this week. Once again, there’s no Bunker next week — see you October 8. If you like what you’re reading, spread the word! Forward this to a friend so they can subscribe here.
keep readingShow less
Top image credit: An International Women's Day march in Tbilisi, Georgia, on March 8, 2025. (Photo by Jerome Gilles/NurPhoto via REUTERS
As Georgian people think about upcoming local elections scheduled to take place on October 4, they might think about lessons from the past, and how they might shape their future choices.
One of the most inaccurate and unhelpful generalizations Western pundits and politicians make about Georgia is that, under its current government, led by the Georgia Dream party, it has aligned itself with Russia, at the expense of the West.
First, consider that a huge part of Georgia’s modern history is, of course, the memory of its 70-year occupation by the Soviet Union, starting in 1921.
Wandering through the darkened hall of the Exhibition of Soviet Occupation at the State Museum of Georgia in Tblisi two weeks ago, I was brutally reminded of what the Soviet Union, and, by association, Russia mean to many Georgian people.
Between 1921 and 1953, tens of thousands of Georgians were either summarily executed or put in gulags, and hundreds of thousands more were deported, under the Soviet dictatorship of Lenin, and then Stalin, who himself was Georgian.
Even though the repressions eased under Khrushchev and others, there is a palpable sense that the deeply religious Georgian people felt like second-class citizens under a godless Soviet regime. The Georgian Nationalist movement never died. More than a year before the Berlin Wall fell, a group of prominent independence activists gathered regularly in an apartment on Chavchavadze Street to plot a course to Georgian independence.
One of those leaders was Irakli Batiashvili, who I was fortunate enough to spend an evening with during my recent visit in that same apartment, surrounded by the ghost of momentous discussion.
Irakli played a pivotal role in orchestrating widespread public protests, starting in 1988, against Soviet rule. These protests peaked on April 9, 1989, when tens of thousands of Georgians gathered for peaceful protests in Rustaveli Avenue, in Tblisi. Realizing they were losing control, the Soviet authorities sent in the army, which set upon the protestors with trenching spades and tear gas. In the ensuing melee, 21 people died and hundreds were injured, including Irakli himself. April 9 remains Georgia’s Day of National Unity in remembrance of those who died.
Irakli Batiashvili himself was beaten so badly that people assumed he was dead and took him to the mortuary before, as he said to me without irony, “they decided I was still alive.” Georgia would go on to declare independence in 1990 before attaining it in 1991: Irakli was its first national intelligence chief, working closely with the CIA on its establishment.
So, he’s not a dyed-in-the-wool Russophile willing to ignore or forgive the sins of the past.
Indeed, when I told him that I personally sanctioned all the members of Russia’s current National Security Council, including Dmitry Medvedev and Sergey Naryshkin, he offered a beaming smile and shook my hand. “Well done!”
Rather, he is a person deeply proud of his country and determined to prevent it from becoming the victim of a great power tug of love between Russia and the West today. He supports Georgia Dream, even though he is no longer active in politics.
We discussed how choosing between Europe or Russia, which is how Georgian elections are often unhelpfully framed, is a false choice.
I consider that, for small states, it is an intensely dangerous choice. For Ukraine, which is a large country, the choice has killed or injured over one million people since 2022, emptied it of 5.7 million citizens, further displaced another 3.9 million internally, tipped the country into bankruptcy and cast its leaders in the role of fiscal demanders. That is a disastrous choice.
Anyone who genuinely believes that the same or worse might not happen to Georgia should it sanction Russia or, worse, open a second military front, is either misled, deluded or dishonest.
That for me seems to be the point of difference between Georgia’s fragmented opposition and the Georgia Dream party. The former wants to sail Georgia blindly into the storm of a war it cannot win under the EU flag, in the hope Western nations will come to the rescue, which they will not. People like Irakli Batiashvili would sooner not repeat history and in that he appears to represent the Georgia Dream’s worldview.
The governing party is navigating the immensely complex challenge of avoiding disastrous foreign policy choices, preferring to focus on improving the nation’s economic and social condition. Post-pandemic economic growth soared to 9.4% in 2024, with a medium-term outlook of 5%, according to the World Bank.
The “choice” in the local elections isn’t about being pro-Europe or pro-Russia, it’s about how best to sustain the development of a country that remains poor by Western standards. The OSCE has thus far declined the Georgian government’s invitation to observe these elections, which seems churlish, to put it mildly. Non-engagement is a passive effort aimed at delegitimizing a government that Euro elites dislike.
If you think these elections should be about foreign policy, then, having reflected on my comments about Ukraine, I’d invite you to recall the war against Russia in 2008 that led to Moscow’s continued occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which remains deeply offensive to many Georgians.
The West egged on that completely avoidable war by encouraging Georgian NATO and EU membership, to humor then-President Mikheil Saakashvili. Were his actions rooted in a historical hatred of Russia, from 70 years of Soviet occupation? I don’t know. I just see them as the actions of a leader who may have thought, quite wrongly, that the West would underwrite reckless choices.
By comparison, Irakli Batiashvili epitomizes the Georgian people: he’s humble, culturally rich, rooted in the Orthodox faith and proud of his nation. His worldview isn’t shaped by a desire to be close to one nation more than another, but rather for Georgia to find its own place in the world, on good terms with everyone, without sacrificing its unique identity.
Having fallen foul of Soviet brutality in 1989, Irakli Batiashvili also fell foul of political repression in independent Georgia in 2006 when he was arrested on trumped-up charges. The case hinged on his efforts to mediate in a growing conflict between Abkhaz militias (Irakli sees Abkhazia as part of Georgia) and the Georgian military which was reneging on its promises to allow the separatists a certain level of local autonomy. Irakli appeared on a Georgian TV news broadcast to talk about his efforts, only for the TV station to leak an altered transcript of a tapped telephone conversation between Irakli and a separatist leader, provided to it by the Interior Ministry of Saakashvili’s government.
All told, Irakli spent 18 months in prison, across two separate periods of time between 2006 and 2008 before being pardoned, following protests in Georgia and by global human rights organizations like Amnesty International. The EU Court of Human Rights would later judge that, in imprisoning Irakli, the Saakashvili government had breached its treaty obligation towards him, that a suspect should be considered innocent until being proved guilty.
These days, Irakli leads a humble life, teaching philosophy and culture at Tblisi State University, and reading and writing, in that small, revolutionary apartment, packed with beautiful artwork, paintings and pictures of his family, and books, including those written by himself, his wife and daughter. What a brilliant and swashbuckling life he has led. His warmth and generosity in hosting me was remarkable and, more than anything, I was struck by the observation that he is living his life today and looking to the future, rather than allowing himself to remain a prisoner of the past.
It is perhaps, then, ironic that most passive observers of foreign affairs today have little sight of the past, which blinds them dangerously to the future. As people prepare to vote in local elections in October, it occurs to me, as a complete outsider with no say over how the Georgian people run their country, that the choice is simple — not between Europe or Russia, but between living in a chaotic and repressive past, fuelled by grievance, or reaching for a better future, filled with hope.
keep readingShow less
Top image credit: David Milstein speaks during a panel at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference. (Screengrab via C-SPAN)
In late spring of this year, American diplomats in Jerusalem drafted an urgent cable. The war in Gaza, coupled with Israel’s decision in March to block all forms of aid from entering the strip, had left the region on the brink of disaster. A famine was looming, and the U.S. wasn’t doing anything about it.
But that cable never got back to Washington. In fact, it’s not clear whether it even reached the desk of Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel. In its place, David Milstein — a senior adviser to Huckabee — sent a cable that sounded like “an advertisement for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” according to two State Department officials with knowledge of the incident.
“It sounded like a propaganda statement,” one official told Responsible Statecraft. As mainstream aid groups condemned GHF for endangering Palestinian aid seekers, Milstein’s report praised the organization for meeting a “humanitarian need.” Roughly two months after Milstein sent his cable, the world’s leading hunger monitor declared a famine in Gaza for the first time.
The previously unreported incident highlights the extent to which Milstein has exerted influence over U.S. policy despite his seemingly modest position as an ambassador’s adviser. In the first eight months of the Trump administration, Milstein has become something of a pro-Israel enforcer, reaching across the State Department to steer U.S. policy and contest any information that casts Israel in a negative light, according to current and former State Department officials who spoke with Responsible Statecraft.
In an effort to strengthen U.S. support for Israel, Milstein has confronted colleagues he viewed as insufficiently pro-Israel, removed content critical of Israel from press statements as well as a major annual human rights report, and tried to get the U.S. government to refer to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” a controversial term often used by supporters of Israeli annexation of the region. Prior to his current role, Milstein worked in various capacities with pro-Israel Republican politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and GOP Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Milstein’s efforts first broke into public view in July, when the State Department fired Shahed Ghoreishi, who was serving as the department’s lead press officer for Israeli-Palestinian affairs.
Milstein, who is the stepson of conservative radio host Mark Levin, had on several occasions butted heads with Ghoreishi over press statements relating to Israel. Following a disagreement over whether to say the U.S. opposed forced displacement of Gazans — a point on which neither President Trump nor his peace envoy Steve Witkoff have expressed a consistent view — Ghoreishi was fired without explanation.
In an interview with Responsible Statecraft, Ghoreishi claimed that Milstein had “reached out to Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio’s office and used his influence” to get Ghoreishi fired. Milstein did not respond to a request for comment.
In a statement, State Department Principal Deputy Spokesperson Tommy Pigott said the department "has zero tolerance for employees who commit misconduct by leaking or otherwise disclosing confidential deliberative emails or information," adding that the comments contained in this article are "outrageous and dishonest."
"David Milstein is a strong and valued advocate for the policies of the Trump Administration and for the American people," Pigott said.
The Ghoreishi dispute left many in the State Department on edge. Milstein “actually did get someone fired,” a State Department official said. “Is he gonna find some way to throw me under the bus?”
How to blind an embassy
The roots of Milstein’s influence date back to the first Trump administration. When the U.S. decided to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the new facility swallowed up the American consulate in Jerusalem, which had previously acted as a de facto embassy to the Palestinians, with separate channels back to Washington.
This policy increased the importance of the U.S. ambassador to Israel, who now had direct control over the Palestinian section, meaning that they could block unwanted information from reaching Foggy Bottom. During the first Trump administration, “anything they didn’t like just didn’t go out,” recalled Mike Casey, a former foreign service officer who worked in the embassy from 2020 to 2024. “It never even gets to the ambassador for him to look at it and say ‘no.’” At the time, this largely meant blocking any cables noting concerns about Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Before Milstein there was Aryeh Lightstone, the chief of staff to Trump’s first term ambassador to Israel, David Friedman. (Milstein also served as an assistant to Friedman, though his influence remained limited.) Lightstone acted as a gatekeeper for Friedman, blocking any reporting on issues like alleged settler violence before it even reached the ambassador’s desk, according to Casey, who described Lightstone’s role as “unusual.”
“[Chiefs of staff] move paperwork and they do help with priorities and that sort of thing, but they're not there to suppress reporting that they don't agree with,” Casey told Responsible Statecraft. “For the ambassador to get involved [in policy debates] is normal. For the chief of staff to be doing it is unusual.”
When the Biden administration took over, the Palestinian Affairs section of the embassy regained its autonomy, allowing it to communicate with Washington without having to go through the ambassador to Israel. During the Gaza war, Amb. Jack Lew blocked his own staff from reporting “anything critical of the Israelis,” but the Palestinian office maintained a certain degree of independence, according to Casey.
When Trump returned to office this year, that independence disappeared once more, and Milstein stepped into Lightstone’s old role as the ambassador’s right-hand man. Lightstone, for his part, found his way back into government as an adviser to Witkoff. In that position, Lightstone has acted as a mediator between the U.N. and the GHF, drawing controversy earlier this year for “his refusal to hear criticism of GHF” from Western officials, according to Haaretz.
‘Raising concerns is considered insubordination’
When it comes to dissent, the Trump administration set the tone early. Before Trump’s inauguration, a low-level transition official met with State Department staffers and “asked who the PLO supporters were” in the department, a State official said, using the acronym for the Palestine Liberation Organization, which currently dominates the Palestinian Authority.
The incident, coupled with promises from political appointees to ferret out the “deep state,” raised concerns within the department. Particularly worried were officials who had signed onto “dissent cables” — a protected mechanism for contesting official policy internally — related to Gaza. (No officials are known to have been fired for signing onto a dissent cable.)
Staffers with relatively even-handed views of the Israel-Palestine conflict now find themselves afraid to speak up internally, leaving a great deal of latitude to some of Trump’s more emphatically pro-Israel appointees. Milstein has relished the opportunity to make his influence felt across the department.
In July, when Ireland was weighing whether to ban trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Milstein drafted a statement condemning Ireland for even considering the move, according to sources who spoke with the Washington Post. The effort “alarmed U.S. diplomats in Europe,” the Post reported, noting that the envoys wanted to discuss the issue privately with Irish officials rather than creating a public row with a close European partner. The diplomats won out in the end, according to the Post.
But career officials haven’t always been so lucky. When Milstein began his current job, he immediately launched his own review of the State Department’s human rights report about Israel and the Palestinian Territories. The original version, which had been developed by career officials and approved during the Biden administration, contained significant criticisms of both Israel and Hamas’s records on human rights. But when Milstein returned his own edits, “a lot of the information critical of Israel was removed,” a State Department official said. The final version focused mainly on criticizing Palestinian groups and was only nine pages long — nearly 100 pages shorter than the one issued by the Biden administration the previous year.
In his efforts to advance pro-Israel views within the State Department, Milstein often relies on questionable sources for news and information, an official said. One such source is Palestinian Media Watch, which has drawn criticism for its emphatically pro-Israel stances and its alleged tendency to cherry pick controversial quotes from Palestinian Authority officials. “He’s talking about it like it’s a credible news source” without indicating “how biased it is,” the official added.
A senior State Department official described Milstein’s approach as emblematic of a broader culture of fear within the second Trump administration. “I worked for Trump appointees in the first administration, and it is fundamentally different this time around,” the official said. “Raising concerns is considered insubordination. That language is clear from the top down.”
Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.