Christian Conservatives Draw a Hard Line Against Iran War
The American Conservative · R · trust 41/100
Tucker Carlson’s response to the president’s Easter threats was just one example of an important trend.
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Tucker Carlson’s most telling break with MAGA had nothing to do with Israel or Iran or President Donald Trump. It was the atomic bomb. Pulling too hard at this particular thread can unravel the entire conservative project, as Carlson’s vehement critics immediately recognized.
“It’s wrong to drop nuclear weapons on people and if you find yourself arguing that it’s a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil,” he told Joe Rogan in 2024. (Carlson emphatically reiterated the point on a podcast this August.) Backlash from the right was swift, perhaps because many conservatives understand—consciously or otherwise—how central this moral question is to their political history. The conservative order that cohered after Hiroshima and Nagasaki accepted a difficult premise: that vanquishing our enemies or at least containing their power was a task so existential it justified mass killing, via nuclear warfare if needed.
This spring, Carlson again criticized U.S. militarism in Christian terms. After Trump’s infamous Easter Sunday threat to Iran, Carlson said , “Desecrating Easter was the first step toward nuclear war. Christians need to understand where Trump is taking us.” Prominent Catholic conservatives are similarly skeptical of the Trump administration’s moral justifications for the war. When Joe Kent, a practicing Catholic, resigned from his position as counterterrorism director, he published an open letter to Trump that said, near the end, “I pray that you will reflect upon what we are doing in Iran, and who we are doing it for.”
The postwar conservative movement sprang up from the ashes of Japan, as the Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons turned places like Cuba and Korea and Guatemala into existential battlegrounds. Americans and their leaders came to believe our nukes promoted world peace and our cause was categorically just, premised on a Manichean struggle between good and evil. Soviet power was built on Leninist internationalism, the logic went, so the struggle against Lenin’s heirs was a struggle to prevent the global spread of Bolshevism with nukes.
This view begot something of a rational paranoia, both before the Great War and after it. President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954 said the “possible consequences” of losing Indochina to the communists were “just incalculable to the free world,” citing “falling domino” theory, the principle President Harry Truman first relied on to justify military assistance for Greece and Turkey.
The “Truman Doctrine” was summarized in the president’s 1947 declaration that the U.S. must “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” This would extend from Korea to Vietnam but also from the Congo to Nicaragua to Iran in decades to follow.
Iran is an instructive and timely example. Writing of the early 1950s, Jack Taylor reported in the UK Tribune , “Anglo-American officials and intelligence agents met at the [British] embassy to consider ‘The Communist Danger in Persia,’ a paper predicated on the suggestion that [Iran’s Prime Minister] Mossadegh ‘would not hesitate to cooperate with the Communists if it served anti-British purposes.’” This, Taylor says, “was followed by more overt attempts to cajole the United States into supporting a coup on the ground that it was a necessary means not of preserving Britain’s oil monopoly but preventing Iran from falling to the Soviets.” One CIA assessment fretted that Iran “seemed headed for an economic collapse and political anarchy,” which would all but ensure its devolution into a “Soviet satellite.”
The left often downplays how such fears rattled the minds of Americans not yet a decade removed from the first mushroom cloud. Even Steven Kinzer, the highly-regarded author of All the Shah’s Men , a groundbreaking history of the CIA coup, cautions , “There’s a great argument, which I don’t think we can ever answer today, as to how seriously Russia was looking at Iran as a target for a possible takeover.”
In the 1950s, Americans could easily be persuaded to see the mere possibility of Soviet expansion as a threat. While often wrong, that mindset is at least understandable. Time and again, this paranoia would turn potential partners—or neutral parties—into enemies, from Guatemala to Indonesia. Of course, as Kinzer and authors like David Talbot have established, these interventions sometimes shared convenient overlap with powerful business interests, which also often shared convenient overlap with leadership in the CIA.
The consequences of post-Hiroshima foreign meddling, CIA coups, and ground invasions haunt virtually every conflict facing the U.S. today. “Domino theory,” however, is much less persuasive these days. The modern version sometimes swaps China for the Soviet Union, as in modern Cuba, where China appears to have an intelligence foothold. But Americans born after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the declassification of Cold War records are less easily persuaded by dressed-up modern domino theory. It’s much more difficult for the hawks to rely on their time-worn justifications for interventionism.
Christians, who were knit tightly into the fabric of the movement conservative “fusionist” alliance, are reconciling themselves with these failures. Combating the threat of nuclear Bolshevism’s global creep was an easy cause for Western Christians to embrace. This remains true today regarding Chinese communism and political Islam.
But the question of whether American resources would be best reserved for relief of the American poor weighs heavily on the right. So too do the questions of whether interventions even achieve their stated goals and whether American hegemony is even feasible in a shrinking globe and the age of asymmetric warfare. Civilian casualties in places…
Read the original at The American Conservative →
Open in TruthVane →