Donald Trump’s “America First” message promised an end to foreign entanglements, but his aggressive Iran policy tells us a different story. His administration’s decision to carry out airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in Isfahan, Fordow, and Natanz on June 21,...
Foreign Policy
Trump Was Never a Sincere Advocate of Realism and Restraint
by Ted Galen Carpenter | Jun 23, 2025 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, Politics
Expectations for a restrained foreign policy by a new Trump administration were naïve. We now have strong evidence. Even before President Donald Trump ordered B-2 bombers to attack Iran’s nuclear sites and plunge the United States into another Middle East war, it...
TGIF: This Is America First
by Sheldon Richman | Jun 20, 2025 | Foreign Policy, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
The Trump battle cry is America First. Revealingly, it is not Americans First. The former signifies, implicitly if not explicitly, national collectivism; the latter, individualism. To the extent Trump has a political worldview, it is not individualist. We cannot doubt...
War with Iran Is Not in the Interest of the American People
by Connor O'Keeffe | Jun 19, 2025 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy
The United States is, once again, on the precipice of entering another war in the Middle East. After months of productive negotiations between the Trump administration and the Iranian government to reach a new nuclear deal, the talks were broken off by a series of...
A Nuclear Iran Isn’t America’s Problem
by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Jun 18, 2025 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy
As the United States edges closer to another military entanglement—this time over the pretense of Iran’s nuclear program—it’s worth revisiting the controversial but deeply compelling argument made by the late Kenneth Waltz in his 2012 Foreign Affairs article, Why Iran...
America Last: No U.S. Demographic Supports War on Iran
by Connor Freeman and Will Porter | Jun 18, 2025 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy
There is not a single demographic in the United States whose majority is not opposed to American involvement in Israel’s war of aggression against Iran, according to a new poll published by YouGov and the Economist. Perhaps most crucially, this includes voters who backed Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection.
America’s Deception Strengthens Iranian Hardliners
by Ted Snider | Jun 17, 2025 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy
“I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal. I told them, in the strongest of words, to ‘just do it,’ but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get it done…Certain Iranian hardliner’s spoke bravely, but they didn’t know...
Eisenhower’s Most Important Lesson
by James Rushmore | Jun 16, 2025 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy
At this point, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address needs no introduction. The thirty-sixth president’s warning about the “acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” has been cited so often that its...