Like everyone, I’m glued to the news coming out of Iran. I’m experiencing some depression, as one might, upon realizing that much of what one has worked on for 25 years has suddenly gone up in smoke, destroyed when Donald Trump discovered he was pretty much a neocon after all. Like everyone else, I have no idea what will happen in Iran, whether Trump’s bombing and perhaps breaking apart a very unpopular regime will lead to something better, or just chaos, a failed state spitting out a cohort of embittered men. But one can’t help but acknowledge the American right really likes bombing foreign countries, despite what had seemed an inexorable advance of right-leaning realist and restraint-oriented young foreign policy staffers and intellectuals who grew up or served during the Iraq war, and despite Trump’s successful effort to present himself as the “peace candidate” and my enthusiasm for his endeavor.

I don’t recall as vividly as I might the early days of the American Conservative, which we (Pat Buchanan, The Spectator’s own Taki, and I) founded in 2002 in great part to head off, or at least make a conservative case against, the looming Iraq war. It was exciting to run a magazine, but we were very isolated in DC. In the early days of the invasion, the city was full of hubris and militaristic triumphalism. The happening place to be every morning was a think tank where Richard Perle gave “black coffee briefings” on our military brilliance and the subtle plans of the collaborating Iraqi expatriates we were soon to empower. Iraqis were pulling down statues of Saddam Hussein! The nation’s leading conservative magazine ran a cover story impugning the patriotism of conservatives who opposed the war, including some (like me) who had written quite a bit for said publication. I was set in my ways and financially OK, but I had young staffers barely out of college beginning to wonder whether they would ever have careers in journalism or conservative politics. I remember sitting down with them and drawing upon my memories of Vietnam and saying this nation-building was not going to work out as well as it seemed right then. I was 90 percent sure of that.

Then Trump arrived as a vehicle to lead the Republican party out of this place. He hadn’t opposed the Iraq war, but was hardly its cheerleader. In the spring of 2016, facing off against George W. Bush’s younger brother Jeb, he described the war as a “big fat mistake” in a televised debate in South Carolina, arguably the most hawkish state in the union. He went on to win the South Carolina primary and then the presidency. If you yearned to believe good things were possible, Trump had, in that moment, exorcised the Republican party of neocon control.

As a New Yorker successful in a largely Jewish business, Trump seemed ideally suited for this. He liked Jews and liked Israel, but could somehow manage to talk about the country without the abject deference typical of most Republican luminaries. He joked about Israel lobbyists’ influence and their efforts to influence him. He seemed to know there was a wide range of Jewish opinion. We were so eager to believe that we had somehow prevailed over the faction that would push America into wars in the Middle East forever, that we rationalized otherwise worrying signs. Formal recognition of Israeli conquests. A crackpot Christian Zionist appointed as ambassador. Add to that what is probably the most decisive factor: Trump, lacking the political skill to enact legislation despite majorities in both houses of Congress, can make things happen only by giving orders. He tried that with tariffs, finding he could dominate headlines by a midnight posting of some random number on social media. The Supreme Court ended that. But with the military he can give orders and blow things up. “Mob boss in a tinfoil hat” was Ross Douthat’s depiction of what I once celebrated as MAGA populism.

My despair touches only politics. I’m a member of Trump’s golf club in Virginia, and the driving range just opened after a snowy winter. Despite months of no exercise except rehab for a torn rotator cuff, I can still hit a nine iron about 130 yards. I have crossed paths with Trump there a few times, so may have a chance to insult him to his face. I wonder how that would go. Baseball is starting up. I must have watched a video of a mic’d up Jazz Chisholm taking infield practice a dozen times, it gives me so much pleasure. What Russell Kirk called the permanent things.