Don’t look now but the foreign policy divisions among the conservatives gathered at the annual National Conservatism conference are no longer contained. Today they finally spilled out, like gushing hot lava or whatever metaphor is best, all over Breakout Session B.
Fascinatingly it wasn’t over the Ukraine War, or China, but over Israel.
For many realists and restrainers who include themselves in this annual event — dominated by New Right conservatives who are a bit diverse but at this confab largely support state sovereignty, traditional values, and “the idea of nation” — today was a bit of a victory. For years, "NatCon", launched in 2019 by Yoram Hazony, a staunch pro-Israel nationalist, had largely stayed away from foreign policy; a rare panel on China here, one on NATO there, interspersed with overwrought conversations about the threat of Islamism here in the U.S. and abroad.
But included this year in D.C. are two sessions hosting voices from the right-of-center realism and restraint faction, including remarks on Wednesday from National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty, entitled “Why Restraint is Conservative.” If NatCon is the intellectual underpinning of “America First,” it has finally come around to asking if entangling alliances, especially decades-long ones that seem to be driving us off a cliff to the unknown, are indeed “America First.”
At ground zero of this question is the U.S.-Israel relationship and it is causing a conservative schism, which played out quite viscerally in a debate Tuesday between Curt Mills, editor and executive director of The American Conservative, and Max Abrahms, assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University. It was hosted by Daniel McCarthy, who is a former editor of TAC and now edits Modern Age.
Abrahms came out swinging to call all realists today – especially John Mearsheimer — “wrong” on the issue of Iran and the Middle East writ large. In fact, he called them all “MAGA isolationist realists” who have become “insane” in their wrong-headed analysis since being “right” on the failures of the post-9/11 wars. On Trump’s “successful” bombing of Iran to stop it from going nuclear, Abrahms said of these “Soros and Koch funded” think tanks and other R&R voices:
“(They said) any American intervention in Iran would be just like the Iraq war. They said that (President) Trump and (DNI) Tulsi (Gabbard) were lying, or at the very least totally wrong, about Iran's nuclear weapons capability, that the U.S. has no strategic interest in Iran, that Trump is some kind of a weak snowflake who can't ever stand up to Israel, that he'll only intervene due to Israeli pressure against his own volition, that the war will be another regime change war, that it will require ground forces and a long term occupation, that it will result in thousands of American deaths and international isolation, and it will be another so called never ending forever war…And that Israel may well deliberately kill Americans all over the Persian Gulf in a series of false flag operations. Now this is some really insane stuff. This is some really crazy stuff. It's probably the most inaccurate Mideast punditry that you can find anywhere.”
Abrahms said Trump had always been adamant that Iran could never get a nuclear weapon and he “substantially degraded Iran's nuclear weapons program without setting off another idiotic, never ending regime change war. This is why the 12-day war was such a success.” As for realists, they have no sense of what counterterrorism is about, and should stick to the Ukraine War in their analysis, for on that score, they are right, he added.
Mills quickly pointed out that there was a deal with Iran on the table and Trump could have achieved much more, and without bloodshed, if he had let the negotiations go on and had not gotten sucked into the vortex of Israel and its supporters in Washington who so desperately wanted to bomb Iran.
But before that Mills first brandished a brief against Israel and "the Lobby" that some would say was particularly gutsy with NatCon organizer Yoram Hazony in the room. Mills blasted away at Israel as “perhaps the world's historic case of the tail wagging dog, as former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon...has taken to labeling (it) a vassal state, calling the shots in the world's most powerful empire and that regime change in Tel Aviv — his words, not mine — is necessary.”
“I don’t want to talk tactics at all,” he said. “I seek to talk strategy,” he shifted. To which he continued:
“Why are these our wars? Why are Israel's endless problems America's liabilities? Why are we in the national conservative bloc, broadly speaking, why do we laugh out of the room this argument when it's advanced by Volodymyr Zelenskyy but are slavish hypocrites for Benjamin Netanyahu? Why should we accept America First — asterisk Israel? And the answer is, we shouldn't.”
He said he would not concede that Israel had beaten Iran in the 12-day war, and that a ceasefire was quickly forged for Israel because Iran had penetrated its defenses and we could no longer endlessly supply its missile defenses before running out of our own (something that had been referenced by Rep. Riley Moore, R-W.Va, in an earlier speech, albeit about Ukraine).
Mills also lambasted the Trump Administration’s crackdown on speech here in the U.S. in the guise of “antisemitism” in order to repress criticism of the war in Gaza and the U.S. role in it.
“One could be forgiven for believing the only people this administration is reliably deporting are supporters of the Palestinian cause after riding back into power on the appeal of free speech, enshrined in the First Amendment of this country's Constitution. If conserving that isn't conservatism, I don't know what is. This administration has used its influence to attempt to curb and intimidate speech on Middle East issues, particularly the State Department. After assembling and potentially generationally realigning a cohort of voters disgusted with woke pieties and suffocation of dialog with incessant accusations of racism, Republicans have all too eagerly embraced holding the whip themselves, accusing countless critics as anti-Semites, instead of engaging on the issue.”
The questions from the audience were 90% sympathetic to Mills, though it was difficult to know what the audience was thinking. Shifting body language, mumble-grumbling, and stray bursts of encouragement registered for both sides, at any given moment. There was some audible support when Abrahms declared that Palestine must not be given a state, lest it be construed as a reward for Oct. 7.
Therefore, an opening in the debate is what was asked for and was received, but a glance at the three-day schedule doesn't convey how much a shift on Israel, if any, might be occurring in the larger body. Alongside restrainers Dougherty and Arta Moeini (Institute for Peace & Diplomacy) in a session tomorrow are Heritage Foundation’s Victoria Coates, author of “Battle for the Jewish State: How Israel—and America—Can Win,” and Town Hall’s Kurt Schlicter who a year ago was saying “Israel was absolutely right to kill everyone in its path to save its hostages.”
Still, as Moeini tells me “it's encouraging to see NatCon doubling down on the diversity and coalitional nature of the Right to identify bold new approaches to US foreign policy.” (Which he hopes will help foster “a cohesive grand strategy for the post-liberal, multipolar era and reset America's relationship with the world to preserve US power and competitiveness — unburdened by ideology and the globalist trappings of our past and present.”)
That might be a tall order. McCarthy says he is just happy to see these subjects (though there are no Ukraine War panels to speak of ) on the dais. “Returning to a foreign policy that prioritizes the national interest and puts America first calls for hard choices,” he told me, “and NatCon is putting them on the table, to be fully deliberated upon by conservatives and by the country.”
