My young family and I were in Israel when the military and the Mossad began their offensive operations against Iran on Friday, June 13, commencing what President Trump has since called the “12-Day War.” Although the Mossad’s intelligence and the Israel Defense Forces’ rapid establishment of air superiority inside Iran proved to be nothing less than extraordinary, my wife and I lived on pins and needles for those first few days of the war. We had to be ready day or night, at a moment’s notice, to drop everything, grab our 6-month-old baby and race to the house’s “safe room” (that is, bomb shelter).
Trust me: This is not a fun way to live — especially not with an infant. Meanwhile, too many of Iran’s ballistic missiles — considerably more lethal than the rockets typically fired into Israel from Gaza and Lebanon — were evading Israeli air defense. They were finding their targets. Too many homes were being destroyed, and too many people, tragically, were being killed. Though a proud Jew and Zionist, and even the author of a recent book on Israel’s fate, I decided to do what any American parent of an infant would do in such a situation: get us home.
I am a Floridian, and I heard about a program the state of Florida had launched to evacuate American citizens from the war zone. We first took a bus to the Jordanian border. We next got to Amman, where we spent the night. We then flew to Cyprus, a hub for those fleeing (and returning to) Israel, where we also spent a night. And finally, we flew from Cyprus to Tampa, where Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis surprised our group by meeting us at the airport.
The day after my family got home to Florida, the world changed in an instant: Trump ordered Operation Midnight Hammer, delivering a devastating — perhaps fatal — blow to the Iranian regime’s three most prized nuclear facilities, Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan. In his brief remarks at the White House following the strikes, Trump repeatedly linked the national interests and fates of the United States and Israel. Despite months of tendentious leaks, palace intrigue and the often-parroted media reports of a rift between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that bilateral relationship is clearly stronger than ever.
Looking back at both the pre-strike debate and the post-strike fallout, the more interesting question — especially given the hostility toward Trump’s move from certain high-profile talking heads within the broader MAGA fold — is perhaps this: Is Midnight Hammer an aberration from Trump’s “America First” foreign policy doctrine, or is it entirely consistent with it?
As the definitive essay on the topic, a 2019 Foreign Policy magazine article — appropriately titled “The Trump Doctrine” — from former Trump administration national security official and current State Department Director of Policy Planning Michael Anton put it, Trump’s conception of “America First” means that he has “no inborn inclination to isolationism or interventionism, and he is not simply a dove or a hawk.” By contrast, Trump’s foreign policy instinct is “Jacksonian”: It is a strand of pragmatic conservative realism that is intuitively skeptical. The mindset echoes George Washington’s famous farewell address, which warned against getting overly involved overseas, but it also remains able, willing and eager to lash out and strike if necessary to defend core American national interests.
In short, Trump has no interest in reprising the Bush-era moralistic nation-building enterprise, but he also has no interest in burying America’s head in the sand and pretending that we simply have no interest in events abroad. It was Trump himself, after all, who both withdrew from President Obama’s flawed nuclear deal with the Iranian terror regime and eliminated Islamic State founder Abu Bakr Baghdadi and Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian general who commanded the Quds Force.
There are indeed some fools, ignoramuses and scoundrels on the right who keep trying to mislead their MAGA-friendly audiences by imputing to “America First” views that do not put America first and are not held by the president himself. But they are losing that battle: According to a recent CBS News poll, an astounding 94% of self-identified MAGA Republicans support Operation Midnight Hammer. It certainly seems that in voting for Trump, these Americans favored stopping the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism — a regime whose raison d’être is eliminating the “little Satan” of Israel and the “big Satan” of the United States — from acquiring the world’s most dangerous weapons.
After decades of debate about the Iranian nuclear program and months of pearl-clutching about the alleged imminence of World War III, the United States has devastated the illicit nuclear weapons program of a terrorist regime that chants “death to America” on a daily basis — without a single American casualty, without any extended American troop presence on the ground and with a quick post-strike ceasefire to boot. To achieve a decades-long-sought foreign policy objective in this fashion is nothing less than astonishing. Operation Midnight Hammer is one of the greatest acts of presidential statesmanship and leadership in modern American history.
It’s also “America First” in action. And looking back at the entire ordeal years from now, I strongly suspect it will also make everything my family went through in evacuating the Middle East more than worth it.
Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. @josh_hammer
