Never-Trumper Bill Kristol Proclaims Neocon Revival as Trump Contemplates ‘Regime Change’ in Iran
Never-Trumper Bill Kristol proclaimed the revival neo-conservatism after President Donald Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities and mused that perhaps the “current regime” was incapable of making Iran “great.”
Earlier in the weekend, Trump ordered attacks on three key sites in Iran’s uranium enrichment infrastructure, which were carried out using 30,000-pound bunker-busting bombs. Then, on Sunday, he mused that if the current regime was “unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”
In response, Kristol quipped back, “brb – starting up PNAC again…” referencing the defunct neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which famously pushed for the 2003 Iraq War.
While Kristol appeared to be joking, his attempt at humor also seemed to house an underlying truth. As Trump signals further openness to direct U.S. involvement in Israel’s campaign against Iran, some MAGA-sidelined neocons are inching back into the conversation, even if reluctantly.
“You’ve got to go to war with the president you have,” Kristol told The New York Times on Friday. “If you really think that Iran can’t have nuclear weapons, we have a chance to try to finish the job.”
In recent days, Kristol also publicly supported Israel’s strikes on Iran and stated: “I wish the president and his administration well in this crisis.”
Critics on the left and right were swift to pounce on Kristol’s comments to the Times.
Matt Duss, Senator Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) former adviser, slammed Kristol as having “delivered no votes,” but nevertheless now providing “the illusion of consensus for another catastrophic war.”
Journalist Glenn Greenwald was blunter: “The #NeverTrump neocons have been biting their tongues so hard over the last week.”
Indeed, Kristol has spent the last decade torching Trump as a threat to democracy. After the collapse of The Weekly Standard in 2018, which he co-founded, Kristol helped launch The Bulwark, a platform that fused anti-Trump conservatism with increasingly centrist and sometimes progressive politics.
Kristol followed his PNAC quip with several retweets, pointing to former President Joe Biden’s Russia regime change gaffe from 2022 and the military assistance provided to Ukraine in its war against Russia. He also shared posts slamming Trump’s deportation policy, indicating his jibe was not quite the full conversion to MAGA that some took it as.
