Israel exposed the war inside Trump's White House.
Three factions claim to define "America First." Israel exposed the fault lines between them — and showed which vision is winning.
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This is a guest essay by Guy Goldstein, a third-generation Holocaust survivor.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Three camps are fighting for control of U.S. President Donald Trump’s foreign policy, and they agree on almost nothing.
All they agree on is the hat.
“Make America Great Again” flies over all three of them, which turns out to be useful, because a slogan everyone wears is also a slogan you can check. It makes a promise: America, greater. Hold each of the three to that promise and watch what happens, because two of them are wearing the words while doing the opposite.
The first camp wants to bring the power home. Its loudest voices sit outside the building. Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Steve Bannon — the whole populist chorus that treats every carrier group as a betrayal of the forgotten American. Inside the room its sympathizer is Vice President JD Vance, though his loyalty wobbles the moment a real war is on the table.
Their theory is fortification: Stop spending American strength on other people’s borders, seal your own, build the walls high, and let the world sort itself out. It is the most “America First” thing a person can say, which is why it polls so well in the only focus group that counts: the president’s own sense of his base.
A fortress deters only as long as the army inside it can still reach the horizon. Pull the projection out and the fortification curdles into absence. The world does not hold still while you pour the concrete. The seat you vacate does not stay warm and waiting; Beijing sits down in it, or Moscow, or Tehran, and none of them are saving your place.
Measured against the hat, the “Retreat Camp” makes America safe and small — safe for a while, small for good.
The camp controls far less than its volume suggests. When Trump decided to join Israel’s war on Iran, Carlson came to the Oval Office three separate times to talk him out of it. Trump listened, nodded, and bombed Iran anyway. Then he walked out and called the men who had lobbied him kooky and disloyal. MAGA is Trump, he said; MAGA is not the other two.
That is the whole camp in a sentence. It owns the noise. It does not own the decisions. The serious-restraint writers figured this out long ago and stopped claiming him, and now they call him what the record calls him: a hawk who lets them talk. What the camp gets to cheer are the pauses, the ceasefire that freezes a war in place instead of ending it, the three-day truce in Ukraine timed to a Russian parade. The camp keeps mistaking the quiet for the cure.
The second camp wants to buy the greatness. Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Tom Barrack, the dealmakers — men who look at a region on fire and see a table waiting to be set. Their theory is the transaction. Lead with money, lead with leverage, lead with the inducement, and keep the guns holstered as a last resort that ideally never arrives.
On paper it dazzles. Witkoff’s Gulf tour came home with two trillion dollars in announced deals, Saudi money, Qatari money, Emirati money, the kind of numbers that fill a press release and a campaign ad in the same afternoon.
Read the word announced again. Announced money and banked money are different things, and only one of them is real. A pledge is a feeling with a number attached, and it holds for exactly as long as the other side believes you can still do something they need or fear — which means the deal was never really about the money. It was about the force standing behind the money, the same force this camp likes to leave in the garage.
Spend that down and you become a rich country that can be safely ignored, a contradiction that resolves quickly and badly. A year on, the receipts are coming due. The Saudi money is quietly shrinking, throttled by a budget deficit and an oil price that will not cooperate, and the grand normalization with Israel that was supposed to crown the whole approach has been refused, conditioned on a Palestinian state no one can deliver.
The press releases were real. The deals behind them are still notional. Measured against the hat, the “Transactional Camp” makes America look like a winner for one news cycle and a mark by the next.
The third camp wants to earn the greatness, and it is the only one carrying a theory of what the greatness is even for. Secretary of State Marco Rubio runs it. Their theory is dominance, older than the hat and plainer than the deal.
Power is real only when it is used, and respected only when it is real. Strong allies beat dependent ones. The institutions earn their deference when they are useful and lose it the minute they are not.
Rubio laid it out at Munich in February, in language so carefully calibrated that the room applauded a message which would have drawn boos from the same chairs a year earlier. He had said the harder version in December, that the assumptions American foreign policy was running on had been built for a world that no longer existed. Munich was that same doctrine with the edges sanded smooth enough to travel.
Rubio spent the year turning the hemisphere back into that of America, and he did it with no Israel to do the lifting. He leaned on Panama until it walked out of China’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” the first Latin American country to quit it, and a Panamanian court tore up the Chinese concession that ran the ports at the canal’s mouth.
The operation that pulled then-President of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro out of Caracas and into American custody was his too. China called it pressure and coercion, which it was, and that was the point. None of it was a deal announced and left to ripen. It happened, because the force behind it was real.
The Middle East is the doctrine’s loudest bet and its least settled, a ceasefire with a decapitated Iran that frays by the week. But a country does not need to win every hand to have a record, and Panama and Caracas are already on the board. It is also the camp that fights the wars and loses the news cycles, because a doctrine said out loud is a doctrine that can be read back to you in a hostile voice.
Rubio explained in March, accurately, that Washington had known Israel was going to act, known it would draw Iranian fire onto American troops, and chosen to strike first to keep American soldiers alive. Every word of it was true, and the base detonated, because to an ear trained by the “Retreat Camp,” a secretary of state describing how American and Israeli interests lined up sounds like a confession that the tail wags the dog.
He walked it back the next day. The doctrine did not change. Only the volume did.
The market noticed even when the base would not. When Trump put the question to a room of his largest donors at Mar-a-Lago, who should carry the movement after him, the room leaned to Rubio over Vance, and the bettors moved their money the same direction inside a week. The doctrine camp is not losing. It is winning quietly while the other two win loudly, which in this administration is a more precarious place to stand than it sounds.
The three camps are not arguing in front of a blank slate. They are arguing in front of a man whose own instincts are split three ways, and each camp has a grip on a different part of him.
Trump’s personality is the “Dominance Camp.” He needs to be the strongest man in the room, the most feared and the most respected, and humiliation is about the only thing he treats as a true emergency.
His experience runs with the “Transactional Camp.” He spent a whole life turning everything into a deal, and even now his deals run less on negotiation than on dominance with a handshake — do what I want and we will call it mutual.
His politics pull toward the “Retreat Camp” — the coalition that carried him into office, helped along by something genuine in the man, a real hatred of being stuck in someone else’s war. He once called off a strike on Iran with 10 minutes left on the clock because he could not stomach the casualties.
So two drives live inside the same person and pull against each other: the one that wants to dominate and the one that wants to come home. That tension is the entire game. The “Transactional Camp” feeds the first and dresses it up as a bargain. The “Retreat Camp” feeds the second and dresses it up as principle. Only the “Dominance Camp” offers him a way to want both at once and call it a doctrine.
The deepest drive usually only wins the biggest fights. Trump’s need to dominate decided Iran, over the screaming of his own base. But the biggest fights are rare. The small ones arrive daily, the routine deal, the offhand concession, the war he would rather not pay for, and in the daily traffic the other two camps win far more than they lose.
That is how a great power drifts. A thousand small decisions, each one a win on the day.
Which brings the hat back around. “Make America Great Again” was always a promise about standing, about being the country the others have to arrange themselves around. Hold the three camps to it and the trap closes on its own. The fortifiers hand the standing away to keep the peace. The dealmakers spend it to book a headline. Only the third camp, the one willing to be feared, keeps the thing the hat actually promised.
The loudest America Firsters in the room are quietly running the surest plan to make the country smaller, and they will tell you so themselves, at full volume, wearing the hat.
The west hasn’t learned yet that you cannot make a deal with radical Islam. DT has negotiated and probably sold his sole to the devil. Except for one thing. It’s all an illusion.
This deal is outrageous! It makes Trump look like an imbecile. He most definitely is!