AG Report 6.24.2025
The Anti-Interventionist Crowd Has a Rough Week
Last week’s newsletter highlighted that the anti-interventionist crowd got nearly every prediction wrong about how the war with Iran would unfold. Those inaccurate predictions, largely based on dishonest spin intended to deceive their audiences into defending otherwise indefensible positions, did not prompt the influencers and voices leading the effort to pause or reevaluate. Instead, the same pro-appeasement voices moved on and engaged in a barrage of strawman arguments. They spent the entire week before the U.S. strikes emphasizing opposition to policies that almost no one was advocating, including a full-scale invasion of Iran. Their final tactic was to extensively downplay the threat posed by the anti-American terror regime. They did this by ignoring the regime’s rhetoric and its long history of sponsoring terrorism and promoting violence aimed at Americans.
In his interview with Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson pretended he had never heard of the IRGC plot to assassinate Donald Trump despite the details being widely reported. Next, the anti-interventionists suggested Trump was simply being misled and that there was no evidence the Islamic Republic was pursuing a nuclear weapon. This conclusion relies on ignoring extensive intelligence cited by Israeli and American officials, as well as the IAEA report from May 31, which showed the regime was sprinting toward the finish line. That report revealed that the regime had doubled its stockpile of 60% enriched uranium over just four to five months. As the report noted, that level of enrichment has no civilian use and has depleted their stockpile of uranium suitable for civilian purposes. No country with a nuclear weapon was holding a similar stockpile of highly enriched uranium. Regime officials still cannot explain why they did so, as the only plausible reason was to build a bomb. The anti-interventionist crowd chose to ignore this evidence and engage in conspiracy-mongering, suggesting the United States was being dragged into a horrific war by Israel, all while Israel was itself fighting the war and sacrificing lives to do so. Their last desperate grasp for relevance focused on an out-of-context line from DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s testimony in March. However, this relied on ignoring the rest of her testimony and banking on their audience’s ignorance that weaponization is the final step in obtaining a nuclear weapon, and as noted in the analysis of the IAEA report, can occur in a relatively short period. Secretary of State Marco Rubio made that distinction clear during an interview with CBS News on Sunday.
The problem with this crowd is that they consistently start with a conclusion that suits their preferred policy prescription and then insist on ignoring anything that contradicts it, even if that means being completely disconnected from reality. This is why their views fall apart when challenged with facts. Luckily, Donald Trump chose to ignore them and do what was best for the country. The result is that the country that has been at war with us since 1979 and the main source of destabilization in the region has been completely defanged. They have lost their main terror proxies, their ballistic missile stockpile is dwindling, and their nuclear program has been destroyed. Then, when they were forced into choosing between the fall of the regime or peace, they signed up for a ceasefire on Monday. This was the ultimate demonstration of how peace through strength actually works. All the people who insisted that appeasement was the only path to peace or that any military action would lead to escalation now look foolish. The world is better off because they were ignored, and there should be immense gratitude to the Israelis and the current administration for doing the right thing.
Looking at the specific claims of Tucker Carlson is particularly amusing in retrospect:
He predicted that in week 1 after airstrikes on Iran:
$30 gas
Economic collapse
Thousands of Americans will die.
For week 2:
China, Russia, Brazil, India, and other countries would join the war on behalf of Iran.
It would lead to a World War, and the United States would lose.
Keep that in mind the next time anyone looks to Tucker for any analysis on any foreign policy topics. His entire shtick of Baghdad Bob-style lying on behalf of enemies of America got exposed in real time this week.