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How Trump Rebuffed D.C. Warmongers With One Surgical Strike Against Iran
The Federalist ^ | June 30, 2025 | Rachel Bovard

Posted on 06/30/2025 9:36:52 AM PDT by Kazan

For the first time in a generation, the United States is exclusively pursuing its vital interests, not the ambitions of its NatSec elites.

President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities last week might be a historical turning point. In a single stroke, Trump defanged the world’s leading state sponsor of terror. He radically reshaped the Middle East in favor of the United States’ interests and allies. And he sent an unequivocal message — roughly translated as “FAFO” — to enemies around the world.

The War Party’s Consistent Aim

For Americans wary of foreign military adventurism, Operation “Midnight Hammer” may have struck a similarly paradigm-shifting blow against another threat to our national security: Washington’s institutional Forever War Party.

The right talks often about unelected, unaccountable bureaucracies setting domestic policy outside our constitutional framework. But nowhere is the Deep State deeper than at the Pentagon, in our intelligence community, and the rest of Washington’s national security establishment. These agencies don’t merely — and often don’t, period — carry out the decisions of elected leaders. Rather, they shape the intelligence and narratives that define those decisions before they’re ever made.

They selectively present intel. They stoke policymakers’ fears and stroke their egos. In public statements, press leaks, and in secure briefings, they promote their narrative at the expense of alternative views — often of the truth itself. They narrow the range of “acceptable” options, smear dissent, and advocate for military action that feels inevitable. And when they don’t get their way, they fight back — even against Congress, even against their commander-in-chief.

Americans worry about being “dragged” into another quagmire, and these are the institutions doing the dragging.

They are the people who said Iraq would be a cakewalk, that Covid came from a market. They botched Benghazi and the Afghanistan pullout. They told us Kabul would hold before it fell in 11 days. They assured us that Hunter Biden’s laptop was disinformation and that Donald Trump was a Russian asset. All of it was false.

They are also the institutions that lied to President Trump about the number of troops in Syria. They called Beijing to undermine President Trump’s China policy. They lied to us for 20 years about our ringing success in Afghanistan.

Upstream and downstream of our constitutional policymaking process, the Forever War Party primes Washington for war. No matter the president, congressional majorities, public opinion, theater of operations, or interests at stake, the NatSec Deep State is always, always, always pushing and pulling America toward kinetic action.

I witnessed this dynamic firsthand in 2013 as a staffer for Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. At the time, Congress was debating whether to arm Syrian rebels against President Bashar al-Assad. The intelligence community came to Capitol Hill to brief us — not to answer questions. Lawyers came in force and made it clear that they would proceed with or without congressional approval. They weren’t interested in congressional input. It was only a formality. The real decisions were final.

No Responsibility

This would be bad enough if our NatSec establishment were as virtuous, wise, and efficient as they think they are. But a generation of almost uninterrupted failure, at home and abroad, says otherwise.

And yet, when things go bad — when soldiers and civilians die, when the intel turns out to be wrong, and a “targeted, surgical strike” turns into decades of nation building — NatSec Deep State bureaucrats aren’t fired — they are promoted! They win bigger budgets. They fail upward — to think tanks, consulting firms, defense contractor boards, and lucrative sinecures. Whether or not they think this or that war is good for the country, they know every war is good for them. So, Washington remains on a permanent, bristling war footing.

This is why so many conservatives worried last week when the Forever War Party started pushing Trump to join and escalate the war against Iran. It had nothing to do with our feelings about the Ayatollah, or Israel, or the troops, or Trump and his foreign policy team. The concern was that the Beltway War Blob would try to escalate surgical airstrikes into another Iraq or Afghanistan.

The Leak Hoping to Manipulate Trump

And they did! Before the ink had dried on Trump’s ordered ceasefire, anonymous sources inside the Pentagon illegally leaked a report that Fordo was not actually destroyed. It didn’t matter that the intel was selective, preliminary, and less than confident. Or even that intelligent services across the world contradicted its claims. The leakers knew the CNN reporter — the same correspondent who pimped the Russia Hoax in 2016 — would omit those details.

Within minutes, pundits, Deep Staters, and Establishment lawmakers were pounding the drum. The strikes had failed! Trump had to escalate! More bombs! Regime change!

The same depressing movie of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Bosnia, and Somalia was replaying. And then Trump flipped the script. He broke the pattern. He told them no.

Not only did Trump resist escalation. He refused even to flower his air strikes in pretty rhetoric about spreading democracy or the “rules-based international order.”

Before the B2s had even landed back home, the White House was telling the world this was an opportunistic one-off, not a utopian crusade. Trump’s war cabinet eschewed talk of regime change. Even the name of the operation — “Midnight Hammer” — was Trumpian, realist, and established peace-through-strength.

Washington is still reeling, not from the bombing, but from the fact that it stopped after one night. For the first time in a generation, the United States is exclusively pursuing its vital interests, not the ambitions of its NatSec elites.

Unlike his immediate predecessors, Trump is using American power as a tool of national interest, not moral redemption. Trump is the first non-ideological foreign policy president in more than a generation. Rather than refute realism, so far, “Midnight Hammer” seems to affirm it.

Events change quickly. But if, God willing, Trump can broker a successful ceasefire between Iran and Israel while taming Iran’s regional ambitions with one executed strike, it will be an accomplishment achieved against the will of a town perpetually wired for war.


TOPICS: Foreign Affairs; Front Page News; Government; Iran; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: iran; neocons; trump

1 posted on 06/30/2025 9:36:52 AM PDT by Kazan
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To: Kazan

DOH! I read “warm mongers” thinking glowbull warming cultists. 😂👍


2 posted on 06/30/2025 9:43:21 AM PDT by rktman (Destroy America from within? Check! WTH? Enlisted USN 1967 to end up with this💩? 🚫💉! 🇮🇱👍!)
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To: Kazan

The good news is that a slew of positions in the State Department are being dispensed with, or so I read.


3 posted on 06/30/2025 9:44:18 AM PDT by pingman ("Step right up! Get your free helicopter ride, courtesy of Pinochet Air!")
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To: Kazan

Authored by a Rand Paul ex-staffer. Proceed with caution and skepticism.


4 posted on 06/30/2025 9:50:43 AM PDT by Old West Conservative
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To: Kazan

Excellent article! Thanks for posting it!


5 posted on 06/30/2025 9:59:01 AM PDT by Flaming Conservative ((Pray without ceasing))
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To: Kazan

The neocons were Jonesing -bad- for a war. He had to give them a little hit on the war crack pipe to calm them down.

Pathetic, but likely true. Condeleeza was happy, Lindsey was happy, Kristol was happy, etc.


6 posted on 06/30/2025 10:12:55 AM PDT by DesertRhino (2016 Star Wars, 2020 The Empire Strikes Back, 2025... RETURN OF THE JEDI….There’s really not much to)
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To: DesertRhino

I thought we did the right thing, at the right time, to the right enemy, with just the right amount.

Wasn’t a war—was a “Hi, wake up! We’re back.” To the entire world.

There is a whole slew of Americans approving—like a bell curve between MIC Globalists Neo-cons on one side and Paleo-isolationist conservatives on the other end.


7 posted on 06/30/2025 10:21:10 AM PDT by Alas Babylon! (Repeal the Patriot Act; Abolish the DHS; reform FBI top to bottom!)
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To: rktman

.


8 posted on 06/30/2025 10:29:53 AM PDT by sauropod (Make sure Satan has to climb over a lot of Scripture to get to you. John MacArthur Ne supra crepidam)
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To: Kazan

Trump stopped the Israeli bombings too soon. I am sure Israel had more sites to destroy that would help the Iranian people to revolt. Other sites to disable-defang the Ayatollahs war machine.

Trump should have given Israel seven more days before a ceasefire. But Israel could not defy Trump because (my guess) Iran is so far away that they need US air force refueling airplanes, in addition to the ones they own. Plus they need to buy more US bombs and more US air-to-ground missiles to replenish their stocks.

I like the way Israel killed all the Russian air defense units in Iran. By firing air-to-ground missiles at them from far away. And out of the missile range of the Russian air defense units. Fake out! Bwahahahha! After these were easily destroyed Putin ghosted the evil Twelver Ayatollahs. Did not lift a finger to help them


9 posted on 06/30/2025 10:43:52 AM PDT by dennisw (There is no limit to human stupidity)
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To: Kazan; All
Trump merely kept one of his oldest campaign promises.
From the very day he announced at Trump Tower in 2015:

"I will stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons." (Source)

10 posted on 06/30/2025 11:39:55 AM PDT by montag813
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To: Kazan

Alternative Title: “How Trump Rebuffed Libertarian Isolationist Idealogues”


11 posted on 06/30/2025 2:21:52 PM PDT by mbrfl
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To: Old West Conservative

We need more like Rand Paul who adhere to common sense, logic, and the facts and not wishful thinking.

Current the BBA spends money we don’t have on trinkets we don’t need. That wishful thinking will destroy us before Iran...and before Putin.


12 posted on 06/30/2025 2:42:02 PM PDT by spintreebob (ki .h )
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To: Alas Babylon!

Regan attacked Grenada...why? Because Grenada was a threat?

No. Reagan sent a message, don’t mess with me.

Trump sent the same message. It was convenient that he had a legit reason for doing it.

Every president, early in his 4 years, should give others a wake up call. Otherwise the President will be played for all 4 years.


13 posted on 06/30/2025 2:46:28 PM PDT by spintreebob (ki .h )
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To: Old West Conservative

AFAIK when Trump threatened to primary Tillis, he didn’t say the same about Rand Paul.


14 posted on 07/01/2025 6:33:46 AM PDT by ding_dong_daddy_from_dumas (Re-imagine the media!)
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