Source: Gideon’s Substack
by Noah Millman
“As the Iran War has metastasized, a number of conservative intellectuals who strongly supported President Trump have started jumping ship. … A common thread is the comparison of the Iran war to George W. Bush’s war on Iraq, and a belief that, by pursuing a similar war of choice for regime change in the Middle East, Trump is betraying the intellectual foundations and the clear and specific policy goals of the movement he started. I rejoice when any public intellectual admits error, something that happens far less often than it ought to do. But I’m not sure they’ve identified their error correctly, because their analogy isn’t quite right. The Iran War isn’t the right event to analogize to the Iraq War. Rather, Trump himself, and the whole idea of using him as a vehicle for transforming America from the top down, is what is analogous to the Iraq War, and was from the beginning.” (03/20/26)
https://gideons.substack.com/p/trump-himself-is-the-trump-movements