President Donald Trump monitors Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28, 2026. (White House) The joint U.S.-Israel military operation against Iran has already demolished Iran’s navy, air force, and leadership. “Similarly and totally obliterated are whatever slim hopes the isolationist forces ever had of capturing Trump’s Republican Party,” writes the Free Beacon‘s Ira Stoll. “The isolationist-industrial complex might as well be at the bottom of the Gulf of Arabia along with the Iranian Navy, given how irrelevant and ineffective it has shown itself to be.” Even the isolationists are confessing as much. One such character, Scott McConnell, wrote in a British magazine, the Spectator, under the headline, “I spent 25 years fighting neocons. Then Trump became one,” “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 … 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.” Another such character, the director of defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, Justin Logan, told Politico, “I would characterize the current moment as one of fear and paralysis. … There’s also a group of people who had aspirations or have aspirations to go into the government, who are asking themselves whether they still want to do so, and who are biting their tongues while they figure out the answer to that question.” The fear and paralysis he was apparently referring to wasn’t in Tehran but in places like the Cato Institute, the Orwellian-named Defense Priorities, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which really should be called the Quincy Institute for Irresponsible Statecraft, and their funders. The funders have invested millions of dollars and hours of time into trying to turn Republican foreign policy into some kind of cross between President Jimmy Carter at his weakest and Senator George McGovern’s 1972 campaign, which produced a 520 to 17 electoral college landslide for President Nixon. Precisely how little traction this camp has was visible in the March 4 Senate vote on a resolution “to direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities within or against the Islamic Republic of Iran that have not been authorized by Congress.” The only Republican senator who voted for it was Rand Paul of Kentucky. The other 52 Republicans voted, essentially, to back Trump’s military action. That pretty much sums it up: one out of 53 Republican senators. READ MORE: ‘Fear and Paralysis’ Grip Right-Wing Isolationists