LEE SMITH: The Return of the Echo Chamber.
The Trump administration set four clear goals: to eliminate Iran’s navy, most of which is now at the bottom of the sea; further degrade its nuclear and ballistic missiles facilities, much of which have been either destroyed or severely damaged; and end the regime’s support for regional proxies, like Hezbollah, now being rolled up by Israel’s Lebanon campaign.
Trump says he’s ready to end the war, save for one last thing: a thousand pounds of highly enriched uranium (HEU), which the Iranians could conceivably turn into a bomb. The administration knows where it is, buried under the rubble left by a B-2 bomber attack during the June strikes. The Iranians can either hand it over or the U.S. will take it. But, as Vance told the media after returning from Pakistan, the HEU and no enrichment are Trump’s two redlines.
Vance isn’t an Obama mole but as leader of the GOP’s so-called “restraintist”—i.e., isolationist—camp he shares many of the Obama faction’s ambitions and anxieties, especially regarding Israel, its place in our foreign policy and how pro-Israel voters shape our domestic politics. While Obama and his circle are fixated on the Jews, restraintists like Tucker Carlson, Vance’s friend and the man usually credited with the vice president’s meteoric political career, are determined to marginalize evangelical voters.
The Obama faction and Vance’s restraintists are therefore structurally aligned, and the former are confident they have a shot at forcing Trump to accommodate Iran because they’ve got a man on the inside pushing things their way. As Carlson put it: “There are people in the White House … working really hard, really late, trying to fix this, to get a peace, even one that diminishes us.”
In yesterday’s Commentary newsletter, Abe Greenwald wrote of “Trump as the Guardrail:”
While Vance works to ingratiate himself with the delusional right, Trump has cut them off decisively. Theo Von is just about the only one of them whom Trump hasn’t gotten around to attacking. In essence, Trump left Vance with one Israel-basher to endorse, and Vance took the opportunity to endorse him.
Trump, for all his outlandishness, retains some longstanding bedrock presumptions about the world and America’s place in it. He possesses a certain clarity that’s nearly gone extinct in everyone else. Trump knows who’s right and who’s wrong in the Middle East. He knows who our friends and enemies are. He knows that sometimes there’s no substitute for American hard power. And he knows when to cut ties.
Compare that to the next generation of so-called conservatives, with their death threats to a widow, conspiracy theories, Jew-hatred, and a calm institutional voice to legitimize it all.
And don’t even mention the left. The liberal media and the Democratic Party are embracing socialists, Islamists, and those who combine both. Yesterday, their darling of the moment, Hasan Piker, was at Yale defending an “End the American Empire” resolution.
All of which is why Donald Trump looks more and more, however improbable, like the last sane man standing.
Speaking of Tucker:
