Line of Argumentation

From Mason Letteau Stallings:

At the beginning of the Iraq War, David Frum published an article in National Review entitled “Unpatriotic Conservatives,” attacking those on the right opposed to the war—including the founders of this magazine, Patrick J. Buchanan, Scott McConnell, and Taki Theodoracopulos. Almost a quarter-century later, Frum’s arguments stand out as particularly lazy and dishonest smears. Almost everyone acknowledges that the Iraq War was a mistake sold to the American people on false pretenses, directly causing the deaths of 460,000 Iraqis and 4,506 American servicemen, destroying Iraq’s ancient Christian community, and replacing a stable government with a power vacuum that has been ripe for sectarianism and terror. Those who opposed the war now stand vindicated, even if many lost their careers due to their opposition to the Iraq War.

But, at the time, the Bush speechwriter chalked their opposition to the war not up to well-thought-out (and later vindicated) analyses of the disaster that the war would bring to the Middle East and the quagmire that it would be for United States, but instead to supposed lack of patriotism and personal opposition to the neoconservatives. “They began by hating the neoconservatives,” Frum wrote, in the part of his article that has become the most infamous. “They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.”

One would expect Frum’s line of argumentation to remain in the dustbin of history. But, in the midst of the current war with Iran, somehow this argument returned. The most noteworthy proponent of this argument—albeit in a more lowbrow form—has been Ben Shapiro, the co-founder of the Daily Wire and a popular hawkish podcast host.

“There’s a coalition of people who are uniting to take down the United States,” Shapiro wrote in a recent op-ed, describing people who oppose the Iran War. “These people are cowards, plus liars, plus people who despise America.”

Another line of attack taken by both Frum and Shapiro is to attempt to accuse those on the right opposed to the war of not being real conservatives, as there are some on the left who also happen to oppose the war.

“They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe,” Frum wrote in 2003.

Shapiro has made similar arguments when attacking non-interventionists. For instance, in a December 2025 speech at the Heritage Foundation, Shapiro attacked the prominent conservative media presenter Tucker Carlson for his foreign policy orientation, which, according to Shapiro, “has become essentially indistinguishable from the thought of far-leftists like Noam Chomsky.”

Since the start of the war, Shapiro has continued this, calling those conservatives opposed to the war as being part of the “horseshoe right,” implying that they are somehow in cahoots with the left in opposing a foreign war.

Contra Shapiro, Frum, and others, if anything it is deeply conservative to oppose the war in Iran. America’s great conservative statesmen, from John Randolph of Roanoke to Robert Taft, have been markedly noninterventionist in foreign policy, seeking to preserve the republic bequeathed by the Founders and fighting back against attempts to turn America into an empire that, though (in the words of John Quincy Adams) it “might become the dictatress of the world” would “be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.” The principles of geopolitical noninterventionism and neutrality comprised an important part of the American tradition, and anyone who seriously seeks to conserve this tradition will recognize this. While Frum and Shapiro use the label “conservative” to describe themselves, are on matters of foreign affairs utterly disconnected from historical American conservatism.

Shapiro’s arguments, though mirroring Frum’s, are considerably less convincing. Whereas the Iraq War initially had broad support, the current Iran War only has the support of 27 percent of Americans. The original conservative opponents of the Iraq War were a small (though correct) minority, and Frum et al. could write them off as kooks. Today, it is implausible that the majority of Americans who oppose or question the war with Iran are “uniting to take down the United States” or “despise America.”

Shapiro is not the only one to make the argument that conservatives opposed to the Iran War are “anti-American.” The radio host Mark Levin often whines about those he deems to be “isolationists,” calling them “the Woke Reich” (apparently borrowing a phrase from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu). Levin also routinely attacks noninterventionist media figures, such as Carlson—who Levin says “hates America, our Judeo-Christian beliefs, President Trump, and MAGA”—and Steve Bannon, whom he accused of “aiding the enemy” for hosting, Trita Parsi, one of America’s foremost scholars on Iran. 

But Shapiro, unlike Levin, is broadly intelligent. He is a Harvard Law graduate; unlike Levin, he does not write books criticizing the “Franklin School” or attacking St. Thomas More for writing a satire titled “Utopia.” One might expect him, as a former supporter of the Iraq War (he wrote an article in favor of invading Iraq in 2001, as a UCLA undergraduate), to have some level of introspection about adventures abroad, or to at least explain to the audience why they should trust him on matters of Middle Eastern war and peace. Instead he is reviving neoconservative canards about war skeptics. We’ll see how that ages.

Through Michael Brendan Dougherty:

English Catholics were in an assertive mood at the dawn of the 20th century. The Catholic Emancipation Act was passed in 1829, lifting many of the most important legal disabilities from Catholic citizens. A significant number began to serve in the Houses of Parliament.

As part of its response to the modern world, the church had developed a very public celebration and proclamation of its faith that the bread and wine, once consecrated at Mass, truly become the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ. They called the 1908 event a Eucharistic Congress and decided that the 18th such gathering should happen in London, the seat of the world’s largest empire, and the most powerful Protestant nation on earth. The summit of any such Congress is a public procession — a religious march through the streets — with the Eucharist held aloft in a golden throne called a monstrance.

The papal legate of the time explained that the choice of London was meant to honor England for its tolerance. It was “proof,” he said, of England’s “liberty enjoyed by her subjects in exercising their own opinions, a system not merely written in her statute-book, but reduced to actual practice.” Cardinal Serafino Vannutelli explained to the Times of London, the real intent of the march: “The members of the Congress are not assembling in England with any political intent,” he said, “They come with an object which is exclusively religious — to affirm with all simplicity their faith in the Eucharist, recalling the time when that faith was universal in England.” In this way, Vannutelli was articulating what would later become a liberal orthodoxy, that religious belief, even when proclaimed publicly, is not a political act.

Not everyone agreed. “It is impossible to deny,” the London Spectator editorialized, “that this assemblage of princes of the Church and of lesser members of the Roman hierarchy from all parts of the world wears the appearance of a demonstration, and almost of a challenge, which excites apprehension in respectable quarters, and has given rise to regrettable effusions of bigotry in others.” Nevertheless, the Metropolitan police agreed to a parade route.

It turned out that Prime Minister Herbert Asquith would need to intervene. A few marginal “No Popery” groups had publicly campaigned that a Eucharistic procession was still technically barred by law. The very law that gave Catholics their political rights still restricted them from performing their rites and wearing their vestments outside of churches — out in public.

Asquith prevailed upon the organizers to desist from their plans. On the one hand, he would delicately mention that such a march was dubiously legal. But he also stressed a wish for safety, pointing to the passions of sectarian Protestants as a danger his police might not be able to control. This was the leader of the Liberal Party, a time memorialized in history as the zenith of “liberal England.” And yet, his liberalism was moderated.

A march would happen, just without the Eucharist. And members of religious orders — Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuits — would process in their simple black clerical garb. Some of them carried their distinctive habits on their arms, in what was then a gesture of protest. Catholics had planned the event partly to highlight liberal tolerance. Instead, the event served to demonstrate the opposite.

I thought of this recently when Reverend Douglas Wilson, a pastor in Moscow, Idaho, was pilloried by all the good and the great for a video in which he said in his vision of a future Christian republic, there would be no public calls to Muslim prayer. Asked if there would be Catholic processions, he said they would be disallowed by law, too. Commentators treated him as if he were bearing the rack and rope of the religious wars, everything we escaped several centuries earlier. I happen to have met Wilson, after years of occasional correspondence, at a National Conservatism Conference. We patiently debated the finer points of soteriology with each other.

But for those familiar with the controversies of 1908, what Wilson is describing isn’t some pre-modern tyranny; it’s how a liberal state would function, or dysfunction, under Protestant cultural and political supremacy, a condition he means to achieve by means far more peaceful than those that England actually used to achieve it.

Far from an exotic threat, it should be a familiar one. We don’t live in a polity in which Wilson’s tribe of Calvinists predominates, but in which secular progressives do. Those secular progressives aren’t mad about Eucharistic processions. They’re mad that Catholic hospitals don’t perform abortions or “gender-confirmation” mutilations. They’re mad that Catholic colleges don’t allow same-sex couples to have couples’ dorms. Or that hospice nuns prefer not to remunerate their hired help in the form of discounted contraceptives. And they are suing and legislating on behalf of their convictions — convictions I would argue that are just as metaphysical as the doctrines they oppose.

And that is why I have a hard time accepting the account of Francis Fukuyama, that our modern polities have effectively pushed religious questions into a private realm. If they would, then the Catholic Church’s opposition to contraception wouldn’t be the subject of lawfare. Can he really be so sure that religious fights have disappeared into the background? Our last large legal fight about the definition of marriage was settled by the Supreme Court in 2015. It was settled along lines anticipated six years earlier by a doctrinal revision in the Episcopal Church, the ghostly ecclesial body that carries on the spirit of America’s now progressive establishment.

Chesterton said that America, having been founded on creeds, has the soul of a church. Well, it’s a church always redefining its heretics.

To Michael Lind:

The Iran War of 2026 is more than simply a third Persian Gulf War, following George H. W. Bush’s 1991 Gulf War and the Iraq War launched by his son in 2003. Rival great powers didn’t back America’s enemy in the first two wars. In contrast, the current operation against Iran and the post-2022 war in Ukraine are two proxy flashpoints in the same great-power conflict — Cold War II.

At the global level, Cold War II is a struggle between the incumbent superpower, the United States, and a rising challenger, China. And unless Washington adopts a less ambitious global strategy, the United States is doomed to lose Cold War II.

The reason is simple: America’s strategic objective — perpetual US military hegemony in East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East — is far too costly to achieve. In contrast, the goal shared by China and Russia — a multipolar world of great-power spheres of influence — is not only possible but probably inevitable. The Chinese dragon and the Russian bear can patiently wait until Uncle Sam exhausts himself from overextension and then goes home, just as he did when he abandoned Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. And the major beneficiary of America’s military overextension is likely to be its greatest rival — Beijing.

The sharpest figures in the Trump orbit appreciate this, and see the linkages between the various flashpoints. But the administration as a whole can’t resist the strategic hubris and haphazardness that has characterised many post-Cold War American governments — indeed, with the new Iran War, the Trumpians have displayed this tendency on overdrive.

Consider: At last month’s Munich Security Conference, for example, America’s envoy to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, observed: “China could call Vladimir Putin and end this [Ukraine] war tomorrow and cut off his dual-purpose technologies that they’re selling.… You know, this war is being completely enabled by China.”

Whitaker was right. The People’s Republic has allowed both Russia and Iran to evade American and European sanctions by buying their oil, with the help of “shadow fleets” and transactions denominated in China’s currency, the yuan. In addition, Beijing has supplied the Islamic Republic with components used in its devastatingly effective (and remarkably cheap) Shahed drones. The Chinese are reportedly negotiating to provide Iran with antiship missiles and have likewise transferred dual-use technology, which can be used for both military and civilian purposes, to the Russian defense industry.

More: the Chinese regime has helped Iran to use its Beijing’s encrypted Beidou-3 global satellite navigation system and provided the Islamic Republic with stealth radar systems. For its part, the Kremlin has supplied Tehran with satellite intelligence showing the location of US naval ships and aircraft in the Persian Gulf. The backscratching is mutual. Iran has supplied Russia with thousands of drones used in Ukraine.

In one telling, America’s new war against Iran helps advance its position in Cold War II, by taking out the weakest of the three pillars that uphold the adversary’s Eurasian power. Yet this is a comforting after-the-fact narrative, typically offered by academics and magazine writers. They do it to console Western audiences dismayed by the war’s aimlessness and potentially devastating consequences for American prestige as the Iranian mullahs appear to hold on and even squeeze Washington.

In reality, China and its ally Russia benefit from Trump’s foolish diversion of American military resources to the Persian Gulf. To sustain the operation, the United States has stripped South Korea of missile defence systems and dispatched them to the Middle East and has diverted two guided-missile destroyers based in Japan to the Persian Gulf area. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a war with China over Taiwan, the United States would run out of missiles in less than a week.

The Iran war benefits the Sino-Russian entente in other ways. It has divided NATO, with President Trump denouncing America’s European allies as “cowards” and then calling on them for aid. Having stumbled into a trap, Trump has humiliated himself and the nation by begging Beijing to help in the Persian Gulf. On March 14, in a Truth Social post, Trump desperately called on China along with other countries to send “War Ships, along with the United States of America, to keep the Strait open and safe.” China declined the invitation.

What incentive does Beijing have to rein in its proxies Russia or Iran? While watching Uncle Sam struggle in the steel traps of Ukraine and the Persian Gulf, China’s leaders can focus on capturing one global industry after another and increasing the dependence on China of other nations — including America’s own allies.

Long ago, Chinese leaders viewed American over-extension abroad as a means for diminishing US power. In a 1958 speech, Mao Zedong told his fellow Chinese Communists that US military bases in Taiwan, Lebanon, and elsewhere were “nooses”: “The nooses have been fashioned by the Americans themselves and by nobody else, and it is they themselves who have put these nooses around their own necks…. The longer the US aggressors remain in those places, the tighter the nooses round their necks will become.” Then as now, China benefits when the United States wastes its resources on wars in peripheral countries.

The military realm is not the only area in which Washington is losing Cold War II. Whether in the form of hot wars or cold wars, modern great power struggles ultimately are wars of economic attrition. As in the two World Wars and the first Cold War, the side with superior industrial resources tends to prevail. It matters, therefore, that in the words of economist Richard Baldwin, China is “the world’s sole manufacturing superpower.”

In 2025, China manufactured more goods than the next eight largest manufacturing countries combined. In addition to being the workshop of the world, the Middle Kingdom dominates global trade. Today, only 30% of the world’s countries trade more with the United States than with China, down from 80% at the turn of the millennium.

During the first Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for global influence in part by competing to finance projects like Egypt’s Aswan Dam. In today’s Cold War II, China has far outpaced America as the world’s leading source of development finance, providing $68 billion to developing countries, compared to only $39 billion from the United States in the first two decades of the 21st century. Indeed, the United States spent a paltry $76 billion on infrastructure in other countries over the past decade or so, compared to China’s $679 billion.

With the help of unpatriotic American corporations and investors, moreover, China has made the US defence and civilian economies dependent on Chinese factories. In 2023, China was the largest supplier in critical US military supply chains — ahead of Britain, India, and Japan.

China controls 80% percent of global graphite, necessary for batteries, 62% of fluorspar used in nuclear fuel and semiconductors, and a majority of the world’s magnesium, necessary for aircraft and missiles. Raytheon, a major US defence contractor, has declared that it is so dependent on Chinese suppliers that decoupling its supply chains from China is impossible. And while the Biden and Trump administrations have sought to boost US rare earth mining and processing, the American military may be dependent on China for at least a decade.

But surely America is far ahead in tech research? Wrong. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, China leads global research in 90 critical technologies, the United States in 74. In quantum computing, a frontier technology, China is ahead of the United States, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

What, then, is America’s comparative advantage over China as a great power? China has surpassed us in manufacturing, but we Americans lead the world in militarism — in lashing out here and there without a sense of deep strategic purpose or an appreciation for the problems associated with scarcity.

Since Trump’s second term began in January 2025, the United States has bombed governments or nonstate actors in seven countries — Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia. The Trump administration has illegally engaged in the extrajudicial murder of around 100 alleged drug smugglers on the high seas in the Caribbean and Pacific, even though drug smuggling doesn’t carry the death penalty in the United States. Likewise, the United States has kidnapped the president of Venezuela and allowed Israel to assassinate most of Iran’s leadership in a Pearl Harbour-style sneak attack, before unleashing an American military campaign of massive bombing of Iran with no evident plan to counter Iran’s violent response — or even a cogent definition of victory.

In the same period, China, while quietly enabling its Russian and Iranian proxies, hasn’t bombed any countries or killed any foreign nationals. Indeed, while the United States for decades has been almost constantly killing suspected terrorists, bombing and invading multiple countries, and piling up foreign civilian corpses all over the world, China has grown rich and influential without firing a shot.

Since 1979, when it fought a brief war with Vietnam, China hasn’t fought any wars, although it has engaged in border skirmishes with India and has bullied other countries with shows of force in the South China Sea. By avoiding military quagmires and concentrating on internal development and strategic trade, China in the last three decades has become the dominant manufacturing power on earth.

And here is the absurd result. Even though the United States gets less than 10% of its oil from the Persian Gulf, American soldiers must die or be maimed for life and American taxpayers must spend hundreds of billions of dollars to prevent Iran, whose largest customer is China, from blocking oil shipments to China by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq — all of whose largest trading partner is also China.

Meanwhile, American taxpayers must also spend money on European bases and fund the war in Ukraine to protect the European Union, which imports one and a half times as much from China as it does from the United States, from a hypothetical invasion by Russia, whose largest trading partner is… also China. In East Asia, Washington spends a fortune to defend Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan — all of which trade more with China than with America — from a hypothetical attack by China. Why China would want to attack its trading partners is never made clear.

In short, America’s global grand strategy consists of using the US military, reliant for weapons on Chinese supply chains, to protect China’s trading partners from China or other Chinese trading partners, at the expense of American soldiers and American taxpayers.

Cold War II is also fought in the arena of legitimacy or “soft power.” Does the claim that America fights other people’s wars for them so they don’t have to defend themselves result in gratitude to the United States? According to a poll this month, citizens of Canada, Britain, Germany, and France now regard China as a more reliable partner than America. In the United States itself, according to the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs, public opinion has shifted under Trump, away from confrontation with China to “friendly cooperation and engagement with China,” rising to 53% of respondents last year, up from 40% percent in 2024.

Why wouldn’t people in nations all over the world have a more favorable view of a repressive but unwarlike state like China, which makes first-rate consumer products and offers trade and investment opportunities, than they would of the United States, which, under any president of any party at any given time tends to be killing people in multiple foreign countries while boasting that it is the greatest country ever?

While the People’s Republic has risen to global industrial and commercial supremacy by following former Chinese leader Hu Jintao’s slogan “peaceful rise,” the arc of the United States since the 1990s can be described as “violent decline.” Post-Cold War America has repeated the strategic mistake of leaders in London in the three decades after 1945, when Britain imagined that it was still a major power because its troops were still machine-gunning natives in places like Kenya and Oman, even as it lost its manufacturing leadership to Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan; Uncle Sam is the new Colonel Blimp.

America’s bungling militarists in both parties can’t even tell us what they imagine a US “victory” in Cold War II would look like. In the world wars, the strategic goal was stripping Germany and Japan of their foreign empires, without which they would be nothing more than medium powers. In the Cold War, the similar goal of the United States and its allies was achieved when the Soviet Union gave up its essential Eastern European empire, even before the USSR disintegrated along lines of nationality, leaving the Russian core smaller than it has been in centuries.

But China’s power, like that of the United States, is based on its own internal population, workforce, and markets, augmented by peaceful, civilian trade and investment. Outside of Tibet and Xinjiang, China is an empire of commerce, not conquest. Absent total collapse, China is likely to be a superpower, and Russia a regional great power, for centuries or millennia, under regimes of any kind. If it survives the current American-Israeli onslaught, which is likely, Iran will likewise endure as a civilizational state, albeit as a client of Moscow and Beijing rather than a fully coequal partner in their Eurasian bloc.

China, especially, is well-poised to inherit the outcome of Cold War II. If East Asia is defined as China, Taiwan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Japan, then China accounts for around 90% of the East Asian population. If Germany had made up 90% of the population of Europe in 1914 or 1939, it would have been the European hegemon without any need to augment its strength by conquering its neighbours.

Even if China and Russia were to adopt multiparty liberal democracy tomorrow, national pride, expressed through free and fair elections, would prevent their new democratic leaders from accepting humiliating, permanent subordination to US military power in their own neighborhoods. The same would be true of a proud and patriotic Iranian democracy freed of the mullahs. Somehow, the Trump administration, which promotes nationalism and sovereigntism for the United States, hasn’t figured out that other nations may feel strongly about their sovereignty, too, and be willing to die for it.

Sadly, we know how today’s Cold War II will end: in the eventual abandonment by the United States of its attempt at permanent US global hegemony, and the adoption by default of the Chinese and Russian alternative, a multipolar world characterised by spheres of military influence and trade blocs based on a handful of regional great powers. One need not have any sympathy for Putin’s gangster regime or China’s Communist dictatorship to recognise that their vision of world order is likely to be achieved, while the delusory post-1989 goal of American global hegemony can never be realised.

A multipolar world order is inevitable, because American voters since the fall of the Berlin Wall have never been willing to pay the costs, in American taxes and American blood, that would be required for the United States to be “the sole superpower” in every region on Earth for generations or centuries to come. American voters thought they were getting less unnecessary foreign military intervention in 2008 with Obama, who then launched new wars of regime change in Libya and Syria, and in 2016 with Trump, who has now begun an unnecessary and disastrous third Persian Gulf War. But sooner or later, the war-weariness of the American people will bring an end to the fantasy of a global Pax Americana built on drones and bombs. Perhaps we Americans in the 2030s or 2040s will finally get the kind of patriotic statesman we did not get after the Cold War — an American de Gaulle, who will liquidate too-costly overseas commitments and focus, at long last, on nation-building at home.