How Trump Rebuffed D.C. Warmongers With One Surgical Strike

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.

Rachel Bovard is the vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute. She served on Capitol Hill for over a decade, including as legislative director to Sen. Rand Paul and the executive director of the Senate Steering Committee.