On First Things' Nihilistic Apology for Trump's War with Iran

Only honesty about America can bring an end to this vile, neocon war

The aftermath of the targeted US attack on the Minab girls school[ Photo Credit: By Mehr News Agency,]

The journal First Things has, since its founding, labored to reconcile two contradictory propositions about the nature of the United States -- propositions about who and what we are. One of these propositions holds that the U.S. is a country where truth matters (the America of “We hold these truths to be self-evident …”). The other proposition holds that the U.S. is a country that privileges above all else the pursuit of one’s self-interest (American ‘freedom’). The potential for a clash between these two existential positions is very obvious. After all, from the second perspective, doesn’t truth only matter if, and to the extent, that it promotes ‘our’ advantage?

A noteworthy spokesman for the first of these takes on America, John Courtney Murray, S.J., held that:

The American Proposition rests on the … traditional conviction that there are truths; that they can be known; that they must be held; for, if they are not held, assented to, consented to, worked into the texture of institutions, there can be no hope of founding a true City, in which men may dwell in dignity, peace, unity, justice, well-being, freedom …¹

The Murray-ite America is an essentially good America. It is an America not simply willy-nilly compatible with Catholic Christianity, it is Catholicism’s ideal medium. This conviction about America’s goodness informed the founders and most prominent early contributors to First Things -- men such as Richard Neuhaus and Michael Novak – and they frequently quoted Murray in their writing. America’s goodness became an article of faith. As a result, that which is in America’s interests merged imperceptibly with what should be done, what is good in itself. What hurts America in any way and for any reason, for that same reason must needs be condemned. When it comes to foreign policy matters at any rate, this has long been the tenor of First Things discourse; which is another way of saying that First Things’ stance is thoroughly neoconservative at least in this respect.

The founding father of self-interested America was, of course, John Locke. Eric Voegelin has noted that “Locke makes the curious attempt to propagate pleonexy as conventional justice; he institutionalizes the ‘desire to have more than the other man’ by transforming government into a protective agency for the gains of pleonexy.”² The Greek word pleonexy means grasping for more, grasping at more than one’s due share. The American ‘pursuit of happiness’ has no internal limits or boundaries -- nor external ones. The need for empire and expansion is at one with the accepted American norm of cutthroat competition and ‘disruptors’ at home.

Although Americans like to think of themselves, following Murray, as ‘the good guy,’ America hot in pursuit of its own self-interest becomes, in fact, a tyrant. Who has a better shot at successfully pursuing self-interest than the one who can lord it over everyone else, force them to obey and be subservient? What interest does self-interest have in limiting itself, merely because it is just to do so, whenever justice contradicts ‘self-interest’?

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The current editor of First Things, R.R. Reno, has written an essay about the United States’ war against Iran. His essay illustrates the philosophical incoherence that inevitably results when one fails to understand, or ignores, the contradiction intrinsic to the American founding.

Reno opens his essay with the following rather remarkable passage:

The machines of war have sprung into action once again in the Middle East. Bombs are falling in Tehran. Missiles are being flung this way and that. A supreme leader is felled in a targeted airstrike. An explosion kills schoolchildren … [emphasis mine, PRG]

Note how Reno makes use of impersonal constructions and the passive voice to disguise who is responsible for all these actions. Where there are active (in the grammatical sense) constructions, they name bombs and explosions, not persons, as the agents. This is dishonest. To say that 160 Iranian children were killed “by an explosion” makes about as much sense as to say that “U.S. president John F. Kennedy was murdered by bullets.” Indeed, there is a deep parallel between these two cases.

An honest account of these events would read more or less as follows: ‘The United States and Israel have once again initiated a war. They did so by launching missiles on Tehran. During the course of these attacks, the US and Israeli militaries targeted and killed the supreme leader of Iran who is also the leader of the Shia faith. US missiles also struck and killed a large number of Iranian school children.’

Analogous obfuscations, albeit by other means, permeate the entirety of the essay. Let us examine a few examples.

Reno acknowledges that according to Just War theory violence can only be the last resort, after all other means of achieving peace have been exhausted. He then conflates threats to Israel (“America’s ally”) with threats to the United States and then asserts that Iran has been at war with the United States and its ‘ally,’ Israel, for decades. The latest attack on Iran, Reno wants the reader to conclude, is not actually an initiation of aggression, it is simply part of an ongoing tit-for-tat.

The one thin reed of support he brings to bear in support of this point is his assertion that the Iranian military killed US soldiers by supplying IEDs to Iraqis who were resisting the US invasion of their country. Reno does not even raise the question as to whether the U.S.-initiated war against Iraq was a just war, despite it being extremely well known that it was waged on fabricated premises; and that even had those premises been true, the invasion would still have been illegal and unprovoked. Iraq had not attacked the U.S, it had not threatened to attack the U.S., nor, given the power imbalance, was it in any way plausible that Iraq would ever attack the United States.

The charge is that Iran provided support to Iraqi resistance to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Let us assume that there is credible evidence in support of this charge. What moral weight does it carry? From the perspective of the neoconservatives, as we have already noted, the moral problem is already predetermined by the fact that someone has engaged in resisting U.S. aggression and expansion. Such a way of framing the matter makes sense from the perspective of a tyrant, perhaps, or from the perspective of the mafia, but not from any moral perspective of which I am aware.

Reno then attempts to bolster his argument about the alleged exhaustion of all other possibilities other than war by making a manifestly false statement. Astonishingly, he writes that the Trump administration “had been engaged in negotiations with Iran concerning its nuclear program” but that these negotiations failed, and, indeed, were pointless because “As has been the case for two decades, Tehran played a cat-and-mouse game in these negotiations, appearing to concede when the United States has exerted economic and military pressure, and then backtracking as the U.S. backs off.”

To realize the foolishness of such a description of the “two decades” of negotiations between the sides on the nuclear question, it should have sufficed for Mr. Reno to read an everyday newspaper, or listen to CNN. Who does not know that Iran had already consented to strict constraints on its nuclear programs under the JCPOA agreement successfully initiated during the Obama administration? Trump, to be sure, subsequently asserted, without evidence, that it was “a very bad deal,” but the fact that the Iranians were adhering to the terms of that arrangement has been affirmed by no less an authority than the American Academy of Arts and Sciences which, in a detailed paper on the history of arms control, clearly states that Iran was complying with the agreement. The American Academy report further noted that “President Donald Trump’s obsessive loathing of Barack Obama and the delusion that he could compel Iran to make a better deal drove him to renege on the JCPOA that constrained Iran’s nuclear activities.”³

Perhaps, from Mr. Reno’s perspective, the JCPOA is no longer of any interest, as it already belongs, from the American perspective, to the distant past. (It was, after all, way back in 2018 when Trump unilaterally withdrew from the agreement.) Nothing changes, however, if we examine the present moment. On the eve of the Feb. 28 US and Israeli attack on Iran, as of this writing less than two weeks ago, the Omani minister of foreign affairs Al Busaidi made the following declaration: “If the ultimate objective is to ensure forever that Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb, I think we have cracked that problem through these negotiations by agreeing [on] a very important breakthrough that has never been achieved any time before … The single most important achievement, I believe, is the agreement that Iran will never ever have nuclear material that will create a bomb.”

The fact of this breakthrough in the negotiations may likely have greatly increased, from the Israeli perspective, the urgency of initiating hostilities. Giving the world more time to digest the import of Omani’s announcement would have further undermined the Israelis’ already extremely weak case for initiating this war. Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu has admitted on numerous occasions that he has been yearning to attack Iran for four decades. Only now has Netanyahu finally encountered that -- perhaps fleeting -- moment when a US president is sufficiently addled, or compromised, to back it up.

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Voegelin, in his analysis of Plato’s Gorgias, makes the perennially relevant point that it is impossible to have a worthwhile discussion with an interlocutor who “misuses the rules of the game” and who is intellectually dishonest. Voegelin further notes that the young rhetorician Polus, one of Gorgias’ students, makes use of the ploy of prolixity --monopolizing the floor by going on and on – in order to come out the victor in a debate. I mention this last point by way of an analogy. Contemporary American propaganda strives to keep things short. That is, each individual ‘essay’ or ‘content’ contribution tends to be no more than a seven-minute read. Reno’s essay is likewise short. The floor is nonetheless monopolized by means of a pervasive ruling out of bounds of any argument except those deemed acceptable in ‘polite society.’

I know Reno to be an educated scholar and I have read many things by him with which I completely agree. However, the onset of a rapidly expanding war that many are already describing as WWIII, a war being fought for no rational reason whatsoever, is not a moment when we can indulge in the luxury of politeness if it means ignoring things that aren’t true. (The truth, after all, as the philosopher D.C. Schindler once noted, is, when all else fails, the only thing we have left for solid support. Well, all else has now failed.)

And so, though it gives me no pleasure to do so, we must continue our analysis. Consider, if you will, the following long-ish excerpt from Reno’s prose:

On Sunday, Pope Leo asked political leaders “to assume their moral responsibility to stop the spiral of violence before it becomes an irreparable abyss.” He called for “reasonable, authentic, and responsible dialogue.” The Trump administration can claim to have pursued exactly that path, but to no avail. The Iranians were determined to force the issue by rejecting curtailment of their nuclear program. Under the circumstances, perhaps it was reasonable to decide that another round of hot war was necessary to force Tehran back to the negotiating table, this time with a willingness to abandon its nuclear weapons program.

I don’t pretend to know if realistic alternatives to warfare were available. In theory, it’s always possible to keep talking. But the principle of last resort is prudential, not theoretical. Just war reflection accords a benefit of the doubt to political leaders, who must weigh many complex factors.

What we have written earlier in this essay already suffices to expose the falseness of nearly every line of the passage just quoted. We have already exhaustively proven that it was precisely the Trump administration that repeatedly tore to shreds every attempt at dialogue and agreement. I want to focus the readers attention, however, on something else – on Reno’s style. It reminds me of nothing so much as the propaganda piece written for ‘a respectable paper’ by Mark Studdock, the protagonist of C. S. Lewis’s dystopian novel That Hideous Strength. When the intended audience of a propaganda piece views itself as part of an intellectual elite, it is effective for one’s tone to be confidential – to invoke a sense of a ‘we’ who are in the know. An air of sophistication is enhanced by sounding (but not actually being) measured and reasonable. The views of the ‘other side’ must be duly noted.

In the case of Reno’s essay, the views of the other side, in the person of Pope Leo, are noted — and immediately dismissed. Reno states that he “doesn’t know if realistic alternatives to war were available.” Reno then descends into gaslighting by falling back on invented facts about a ‘good-faith effort’ at dialogue when it was precisely the good faith which was prominently and completely absent on the side of Trump and his real estate broker friends who, as if to intentionally mock the very idea of a serious dialogue, were all that the administration could manage to muster.

A similarly propagandistic tone and style permeates, in fact, the entire essay, and by no means just the passage cited above. Further on, Reno invents out of whole cloth that the aims of the American war on Iran are ‘limited’ and ‘reasonable,’ and have to do with, incredibly enough (!), the need to defend “national sovereignty.” And yet, it is precisely the principle of ‘national sovereignty’ that is being denied by the United States and Israel, because both are seeking not a reasonable measure of security for themselves, but a final and complete security.

The realists of international affairs, Morgenthau, even Kissinger, realized that a quest for unlimited ‘security’ can only eventuate in permanent war. Such a logic, though, is precisely what the US has pursued now for the past several decades, and that is now being pursued wildly, even insanely, by the Trump administration and its Starship Trooper Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. We have already seen, in the case of Mr. Reno’s treatment of the Iraq war, that resistance to the expansive aggression of the US has been interpreted by him (in another case of gaslighting) as aggression against the US. But if ‘aggression’ is so defined – as resistance to US aggression – if such a definition is accepted, why, this gives a justification for US, and Israeli, military action of literally infinite scope and duration!

Reno, as his essay draws to a close, sighs deeply about the risk that this killing and destruction may turn out to have been all for naught (!). He nonetheless reassures the reader that there is no danger of things getting out of hand: after all, Trump’s goals are ‘limited’ (sic):

The current military operations show no indication of escalation to a ground war with invading armies. The restricted aggression suggests that the Trump administration wishes to apply only as much force as is necessary to degrade Iran’s military capacities and force the Iranian government to make concessions in the nuclear negotiations that will follow a ceasefire.

And yet the Trump administration has not ruled out a ground war, as noted in a recent article in the Washington Post; indeed, the same article points out that the 82d Airborne division recently abruptly halted its training exercise and is being readied for deployment to the Middle East. On March 6, Trump declared that the aim of the war is Iran’s “unconditional surrender” – the exact opposite of a limited aim. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has declared that the war will be waged in such a way as to “unleash American power, not shackle it,” and has dismissed as “stupid” rules of engagement that limit the use of force.

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Some, having considered my argument, will still disagree. They will point to what has not been addressed here: to various evils (very possibly some of them real) of the Iranian regime. They might point to threats to Israeli, as opposed to U.S., security. There is no time or space here to address such objections in proper detail. But neither would it be proper to ignore them.

Iran, a friend pointed out to me, after all, has crowds that shout ‘Death to America!’ Such crowds have also described the U.S. as ‘the great Satan.’ How is that not a threat? I will limit my response to the following two points.

First, Iran under President Masoud Pezeshkian has been a very different place. His rhetoric has been soft, measured, to the point of being too polite and measured – it has been interpreted in the U.S. as weakness. Pezeshkian was elected on a platform of coming to an agreement with the United States, not on a platform of demonizing it. The demonizing, especially lately – read the text of Donald Trump’s State of the Union Speech on the topic of Iran! – has been almost entirely in the opposite direction.

Second, if we recall that not all nations are as forgetful of history as is the United States, we will have to admit that Iranians have every reason to feel hatred for the United States government. It was the U.S. that overthrew, in a CIA coup, its democratically elected president in 1953, replacing him with a dictator puppet backed by a cruel secret police force, the SAVAK. Almost immediately after the 1979 revolution overthrowing the government of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the U.S. helped arm and finance an Iraqi war of aggression against Iran, a brutal war that took some half a million Iranian lives. Israel for many decades has bombed and killed Iranians with complete impunity. In 2018, President Trump tore up the treaty the U.S. had signed with Iran, a treaty that the West had never honored, but insisted that Iran do so. Despite this terrible record, the current Iranian government repeatedly showed its readiness to come to the table to negotiate a modus-vivendi. The US and Israel destroyed that opportunity by attacking Iran. Now we have what we have.

This essay began with a discussion of the two visions of the United States, one of which, I asserted, was described by Eric Voegelin’s observations about pleonexy, the quest for more than one’s due. US foreign policy, like that of Israel, is all about pleonexy -- the endless pursuit of more than what is one’s due, the pursuit, as I have termed it, of infinite security, a policy which can only mean the absence of any security at all for everyone else.

I have not forgotten about Israel’s ‘security needs.’ Israel in its foreign policy behavior exemplifies precisely this absence of limit, this failure to accord any measure of recognition of what is due to others, in the first instance to the Palestinians. Israel began by seizing Palestinian land. Now Israel is pursuing -- and with particularly intensity in recent years -- the extermination of Palestinians tout court.

A few intellectuals in America occasionally concern themselves with philosophy, with ‘truth.’ No one in Washington bothers with such matters, such concerns which, in the characteristic jargon of the current American president, are only fit for ‘losers.’ The reality of present-day American politics was nowhere more boldly, or in a manner of speaking more ‘truthfully’ described, than by Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy Steven Miller. In his Jan. 5 interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Miller stated “Jake, we live in a law, I’m sorry, we live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

The logic of Miller’s foreign policy concept is hardly original. It was already stated before, in 1925, by an Austrian painter. He wrote, in Mein Kampf: “ .. in a world in which planets and suns follow circular trajectories, moons revolve around planets, and force reigns everywhere supreme over weakness, which it either compels to serve it docilely or else crushes it out of existence, man cannot be subject to special laws of his own.”⁴

The opposite of this logic of force can only be the logic of limit. Truth limits violence. We need to return to it.

1. John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 1960).

2. Eric Voegelin, Plato (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), 33.

3. The same report by the American Academy notes, in reference to the arbitrary US decision to withdraw both from the JCPOA agreement with Iran, and the ABM treaty with Russia, that “To many international observers, the troubling conclusion is that the United States feels that its economic and military power permit it to withdraw from agreements without severe consequence. Many nations now question whether the United States is a trustworthy negotiating counterpart.

4. As cited by Simone Weil in The Need for Roots (London: Routledge, 2002), 237. In her commentary, Weil makes the point that Hitler’s mistaken understanding of the moral and physical universe is far more widespread than we generally credit. What adherents to his ugly philosophy ignore, she points out, is that limit — a notion she associates with grace — is an intrinsic feature of the universe. “In the sea,” Weil writes in a later passage, “a wave mounts higher and higher; but at a certain point, where there is nonetheless only space, it is arrested and forced to descend. In the same way the German flood was arrested, without anyone knowing why, on the shores of the [English] channel.”