Only Trump supporters are surprised by the President's bombing decision

America's involvement in the latest Middle East conflict was always inevitable

POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Over the weekend, President Trump's bombing of Iran's three nuclear sites has split his Make America Great Again supporter base. His normally outspoken and brazen acolytes have been learning to mid-air somersault as they seek to rationalise and excuse the President's decision.

These commentators, after all, are the ones who have bleated an America First policy of non-interventionism. The bombing goes against everything the MAGA movement stands for. They say domestic policy, protectionist trade, and American nationalism are utterly incompatible with global interventionism and that spinning the Middle East roulette wheel and claiming you can foresee the outcome is utter madness.

But why are they surprised? The MAGA movement aspires to a status of selective global engagement. For most of the 19th century, Britain was diplomatically isolated, having what Lord Palmerston called "no eternal allies" to whom she owed favours. The obverse of this, of course, was that no other country owed favours to her.

Trump's hostility to NATO lends credence to this ambition, but his unwavering allegiance to Israel continues to tie America's fate to the Middle East. His decision to strike Iran on the back of Israel's attack on June 13 can hardly come as a shock when the President has continued America's tradition of long-standing military and economic support for the country.

American foreign policy has always been split: on the one hand, some believe the country should be an inspiring "Shining City on a Hill" example to others. Conversely, others are convinced that only intervention and a total military and economic global hegemony will liberate the world from despotism and fanaticism and shape it in America's image.

The two dominant ideologies in the United States about foreign policy are interventionism, which encourages military and political intervention in the affairs of foreign countries, and isolationism, which discourages this.

This is an old controversy dating back to the Founding Fathers, who struggled to reconcile the opportunities of continental security with the realities of a British, Spanish, and French imperial world. No president has ever managed to reconcile their ambition with what our own former Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, called "Events, dear boy, events."

In the American tradition, there has never been a clear demarcation between Left and Right, Democrats and Republicans, on whether the US should embrace a global role. "America First," after all, was first deployed by Woodrow Wilson, who was reluctant for the country to enter World War 1 (it, of course, subsequently did in 1917).

Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson's Republican bitter rival and predecessor, believed the country should "Speak softly and carry a big stick." Roosevelt's approach to foreign policy was to negotiate peacefully and maintain a strong military presence to back up one's words.

In the 19th century, the United States transitioned from an isolationist, post-colonial regional power to a trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific power. Debates about restraint and international engagement are still the same as they were at the turn of the last two centuries and just as self-deludingly hypocritical.

President James Monroe declared the eponymous Monroe Doctrine in 1823, which opposed European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere. It stated that further European colonisation or intervention in the Americas would be viewed as hostile toward the United States. Monroe nevertheless expanded trade and pacified relations with Great Britain while growing the United States at the expense of the Spanish Empire, including obtaining Florida with the Adams–Onís Treaty in 1819.

Likewise, Dollar diplomacy, notably during the presidency of William Howard Taft, sought to minimise the use or threat of military force by using the United States' economic power to further its aims in Latin America and East Asia. With no loss of irony, Taft was a proponent of American imperialism in the early 20th century, and like his presidential descendant, he considered North American economic integration with Canada inevitable.

More often than not, internationalism is forced upon leaders. America passed successive Neutrality Acts in the 1930s to keep the country out of the Second World War. By the time of the Pearl Harbour attacks on December 8, 1941, America had been involved in a Destroyers-for-bases deal in 1940, and this was followed by the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941, which allowed the U.S. to sell, lend or give war materials to nations Roosevelt wanted to support: Britain, France, and China. The Truman Doctrine of 1947 likewise promised unabated assistance to anti-communist allies.

Security does not begin or stop, as Trump tends to forget, at a literal border. No one presumably ever wants war, but it is a house of cards to build a cult of personality, as Trump has done, around the notion that he is not an international adventurer, a NeoCon imperialist, or an American Caesar.

The Iranian regime is one of the most awful the world has seen. Since the Iranian Revolution and the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979, they have tortured and tormented their people more than any foreign power. The regime's clear ambitions have consistently drawn strong opposition from Western countries and neighbouring states in the Middle East. The Trump presidency cannot pretend this reality does not exist, and Israel certainly cannot.

"Trust in Trump" is now an exercise in faith. The problem, as Trump supporters will soon discover, is that the central tenets of MAGA are contradictory and more at home in a pre-WW2 world where the world was less interconnected. Complexity begets complexity, and only the stupid believe that war is an Occam's razor. You can do nothing, you cannot do everything. This is the irony of superpowers.

America has been, and very likely will always be, caught in a game of setting an example to the world and being the world's policeman. It is a question for history as to whether this example is a good one or not. To defend its interests, the US has engaged in extrajudicial, covert, and military engagements in the name of everything from security to humanitarianism.

Even with a superficial reading of American foreign policy history, it is remarkable that Trump's supporters believed the President could buck the trends and debates of the last 250 years. America's involvement in the latest Middle East conflict was always inevitable.