Conservative anti-interventionist Tom Woods has written that "No matter who you vote for, you get John McCain." Which is to say, office seekers love to talk about how they will prioritize American interests and end regime change wars, and then when they actually take office they develop a strange case of amnesia about all these promises.
So it's happening once again. Sohrab Ahmari:
Second, there’s the role of anti-woke-ism as new skin for old wine. The hawks — not least Weiss, through her outlet The Free Press — championed popular grievances with the inanities of the “peak-woke” moment and successfully married this to the same old agenda. Many of the would-be populists were all too happy to go along, hailing a once-more culturally muscular and unembarrassed America as it pursued the very policies that they’d deplored just a few years earlier. As one online wit remarked somewhere: “Good thing [Secretary of War] Pete [Hegseth] purged the trannies from the military so beefy white guys can do a regime change in Iran.” Based and red-pilled!
Now, I'd be a knave and a fool if I'd ever believed that Bari Weiss's foreign policy priorities were the same as mine. But the anti-woke movement ―and in truth, the anti-lockdown movement as well―did have a lot of people who sounded indifferent to or skeptical about foreign adventurism. Until, that is, it came time to promote a new war.
One of Donald Trump's tragic flaws is that he's incapable of saying "no" to his big money contributors. Of course in the face of that kind of money and those kind of demands, his recent predecessors have only maintained a fig leaf of dignity, and he's just been more blatant. But it's also important to recall that that wasn't the promise.
