On Iran, What Would Pat Buchanan Do?
Consider four lessons from an America First patriot.
The United States and Iran are headed for war.
It would be a bloody and unnecessary conflict, and one that President Donald Trump ought to avoid. Fighting Iran would not serve U.S. national interests nor Trump’s political interests.
Perhaps the president understands that. Trump says he’d prefer to make a deal, not a war, with Iran. But wanting peace doesn’t guarantee you’ll achieve it.
Indeed, whatever Trump’s intentions, the U.S. and Iran appear to be climbing up the escalation ladder. Trump has threatened military action if Tehran doesn’t sign soon an agreement on its nuclear program, yet the president’s warnings seem to have made Iran less inclined to negotiate a deal. Trump also has declared that the U.S. will treat attacks by Yemen’s Houthi militants as emanating from Tehran, which funds but does not control the ragtag group.
Houthi attacks on American and Israeli targets have continued, with a Houthi spokesman pledging to counter “escalation with escalation.” Tehran, for its part, condemned Trump’s “bullying” and released a dramatic video showcasing tunnels lined with Iranian missiles. The message: We won’t back down.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is building up forces at Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean, deploying B-2 bombers whose 30,000-pound bunker busters could wipe out Iran’s underground nuclear reactors.
With an Iran catastrophe on the horizon, the president should ponder the insights of a great American patriot who has long opposed wars of choice: Pat Buchanan.
For decades, Buchanan promoted an America-First Iran policy that any U.S. president would be wise to adopt. In Buchanan’s writings and statements, we can discern one key lesson from each of the past four presidential administrations.
Under George W. Bush, Buchanan resisted post-9/11 war mania and in 2002 co-founded The American Conservative as an outlet for the anti-war right. Buchanan was a fierce critic of Bush’s Iraq War and of neoconservative schemes to march onward to Tehran after sacking Baghdad.
A few days after Bush invaded Iraq, Buchanan skewered neocons in the administration, the think tanks, and the media, writing that a “passionate attachment” to Israel motivated them to support U.S. wars against enemies of that foreign nation.
At the time, Benjamin Netanyahu appeared regularly on American television, urging the United States to destroy an “Empire of Terror” that comprised Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Iraq, and Palestine. These nations and groups posed little or no threat to America, yet neocons were eager to give Bibi what he wanted—and they had Bush’s ear and his confidence. The result was thousands of dead U.S. soldiers, trillions of dollars wasted, and a Middle East in turmoil.
Lesson number one: Trump must steel himself to withstand pressure from pro-war voices inside and outside his administration, and he should always question whether U.S. interests are, for them, top of mind.
The election of Barack Obama brought an opportunity to stabilize relations with Iran, and Buchanan argued in conservative media that the liberal president was right to pursue diplomacy. In a feisty appearance on Fox News in April 2015, Buchanan rejected host Sean Hannity’s argument that Iran was implacably evil. He observed that Iran was fighting Al Qaeda and ISIS—America’s enemies—and he downplayed Iran’s anti-Israel rhetoric as “beer talk.”
That July, when the Iran nuclear deal was finalized, Buchanan went on Newsmax and called the pact the “seminal achievement of the Obama administration in foreign policy.” Tehran, Buchanan said, desired reintegration into the world community and thus had every incentive to comply with the deal.
Lesson number two: Just as U.S. interests often diverge from Israel’s, they sometimes align with those of Iran, a rational actor that Washington can and should negotiate with, even without first threatening to destroy it.
After Trump assumed office and made clear his intention to withdraw from the Obama-era deal, Buchanan cautioned against the move. The president, Buchanan observed in April 2018, had campaigned against stupid wars and then filled his administration with uber-hawks who wanted to bomb Iran.
“Yet Iran appears not to want a war,” Buchanan wrote. “UN inspectors routinely confirm that Iran is strictly abiding by the terms of the nuclear deal.” Buchanan warned that trashing the accord might irritate America’s allies, strengthen Iran’s ties with China and Russia, and lead to a destructive and dangerous conflict.
Nevertheless, Trump withdrew from the deal in May at the insistence of National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Buchanan’s first two predictions came to pass. Whether his third prediction—chaos and war—will come true remains to be seen.
Lesson number three: Trump needs advisors who favor U.S. foreign policy restraint. As it happens, Trump now has a good excuse to fire the leading uber-hawk in his second administration, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, whose indefensible carelessness brought about this week’s embarrassing scandal, “Signalgate.”
In 2020, a few weeks after Joe Biden’s election victory, Israel assassinated an Iranian nuclear scientist. Buchanan discerned that one of Netanyahu’s aims was to send the incoming U.S. president a warning: Maintain a hardline Iran policy, or I’ll escalate tensions with the Islamic Republic myself.
Israel, Buchanan worried, was provoking Iran to box Biden in and sabotage his plan to revive the nuclear deal. In December 2021, Buchanan lamented Biden’s failure to save the accord and wrote that the president could get suckered into the kind of unnecessary wars that bring about “the death of great powers.”
Lesson number four: Netanyahu plays hardball, and he may foment crises that restrict a U.S. president’s foreign-policy options. Trump must be on guard against Israeli actions intended to drag the U.S. into war with Iran. When Israel broke the Gaza ceasefire last week, Netanyahu must have known that the Iran-backed Houthis would resume their Red Sea attacks in solidarity with Palestinians—and that the U.S. president would come under pressure to intervene.
Trump, in his inaugural address, declared that he wants to be remembered as a “peacemaker.” In the greatest line from that speech, he said, “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end—and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” As Trump navigates perilous international crises, he’ll stand a much better chance of achieving such success if he asks himself this question: What would Pat Buchanan do?
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