The fatal blind spot of the isolationist right

(Oct. 15, 2026 / JNS)

At this week’s National Conservatism Conference in Jerusalem, an ideological faction that prides itself on realism delivered a lecture steeped in pure fantasy.

Taking to the podium, Matthew Peterson, president of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, offered the Israeli audience a warning disguised as counsel. “Opposing endless wars is not hatred of Israel,” he said. “The future of the American-Israeli relationship is not going to look like it did in the past, nor should it.”

This rhetoric has become a familiar catechism among a subset of the American right. Echoing across conference panels and isolationist podcasts, the argument holds that America must turn inward, shed foreign commitments and stop getting dragged into Middle Eastern quagmires.

Supporting Israel’s existential battles, we are told, is an expensive relic of neoconservative dogma. It means entanglement in “endless wars” that serve foreign countries while depleting American blood and treasure.

One would hope that the head of an institute dedicated to preserving the “American Way of Life” would grasp what actually threatens it.

To call the civilizational confrontation with Iran an “endless war” for Israel is a catastrophic failure of geopolitical awareness and strategic imagination based on a fundamental misunderstanding of American interests.

The foundational flaw of Peterson’s argument and the broader isolationist argument is the false claim that U.S.-Israel strategic cooperation is an act of American philanthropic indulgence. This narrative presumes that America is the beleaguered benefactor constantly bailing out a needy client state.

But in this war with Iran, Israel has done far more to save America than America has ever had to do to save Israel.

For decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been open about its goals. It views Israel as the “Little Satan”—merely an initial obstacle—and the United States as the “Great Satan,” the ultimate target. Indeed, Iran has been at war with America since the current Islamic regime took power.

Thus, Iran’s revolutionaries seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in April 1983 and, six months later, a Marine barracks, killing 241 American servicemen.

Iran stood behind the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing that killed 19 U.S. airmen in Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon has assessed that Iranian-backed militias killed at least 603 American troops in Iraq. In 2011, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) plotted to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States in a Washington restaurant.

The U.S. Department of Justice has since charged IRGC operatives with plotting to murder former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton and U.S. President Donald Trump. Iranian agents hired hitmen to kill an Iranian-American journalist in Brooklyn, N.Y. Since February, Iranian drones and missiles have killed American soldiers in Kuwait and Jordan.

For most of those decades, Washington answered with diplomatic illusions, paralysis and appeasement. Israel stood on the forward edge of the battlefront—absorbing the kinetic shocks, eliminating terror commanders and dismantling the proxy network Tehran built on Israel’s borders while providing intelligence to Washington on the proxy assets Tehran had already placed within America’s borders.

The Pentagon spent 15 years, starting in 2009, building a weapon that could destroy Iran’s buried nuclear site at Fordow. In June 2025, the Israeli Air Force launched an unprecedented air armada and gained control of the skies over Tehran within roughly 36 hours of its first strike, crippling Iran’s air defenses. Nine days later, American B-2s flew to Fordow through skies Israel had already cleared to deliver America’s weapon, developed in America’s interests. Not one Iranian fighter rose to meet our bombers.

That is why America’s war this year is measured in months, not decades. All along, Israel has been degrading a fanatical regime whose strategic doctrine is built around the annihilation of the West and then, suddenly, Israel blew open the door and cleared the way for America.

An isolationist ignores Iran because he mistakenly believes the Islamic Republic poses no vital threat to the American homeland. However, as Col. Stephen Chill made clear in his indispensable analysis in RealClearDefense this April, an enemy does not need to flatten a city to end a civilization.

A High-altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP) weapon—a nuclear detonation 30 to 400 kilometers above the ground—requires zero precision guidance and zero atmospheric reentry. A medium-range missile launched from a commercial container ship off the coast, or a nuclear device placed in orbit (Tehran already has orbital launch capability), is all that is required.

A single high-altitude detonation can degrade infrastructure across the entire continental United States. The E1pulse fries the microprocessors and control systems that run everything. The slower E3 pulse couples into transmission lines and drives destructive current into the extra-high-voltage transformers that form the unshielded spine of the American electrical grid.

In a flash, the American way of life vanishes.

Water pumping and treatment stations stop within hours. The just-in-time diesel and refrigerated supply chains that feed more than 300 million Americans collapse in under a week. Hospital backup generators run dry when the diesel stops coming, and more than 10 million Americans who depend on insulin, dialysis and other refrigerated medicine face death within days to weeks. Communications go dark. Electronic banking and payrolls freeze completely.

Because colossal transformers are custom-built, depend heavily on overseas manufacturing, take years to produce and the U.S. possesses no meaningful strategic reserve, the outage lasts months or years, if recovery is possible at all.

This is an attack vector aimed squarely at our survival. And who is standing between the American homeland and a messianic Islamic regime that has amassed enough enriched uranium for more than 10 warheads?

Not the think-tank theorists in Washington, but the Israel Defense Forces.

I have spent much of this past year pressing the case for hardening America’s grid. That work has barely begun. Until it is done, the first line of defense against an Iranian HEMP strike is keeping Iran from ever building a nuclear weapon, and no one has done more of that work than Israel.

The Trump administration’s own National Security Strategy names, as a core American interest, keeping the Middle East from becoming a base for terror against the American homeland. An Iranian nuclear weapon is the gravest version of that threat.

Confronting Iran is an indivisible mission: eliminating its nuclear capabilities and ending its regime cannot be decoupled. For decades, Western policymakers indulged the fantasy that containment, sanctions or negotiated pauses could buy peace. That era is over.

When Israel strikes Iranian nuclear architecture, dismantles Hezbollah’s launch sites, eliminates IRGC leadership and exposes the Islamic Republic’s catastrophic vulnerabilities, it is preempting a civilizational catastrophe that would reduce the American heartland to pre-electricity darkness without the knowledge and ability to survive it.

To counsel restraint to Israelis in Jerusalem, months after that war, inverts cause and effect. Israel has never asked for American boots on the ground. It asks for munitions and moral clarity, and the job is not finished while the Iranian regime survives.

The outcome of this war should shape the U.S.-Israel relationship for a generation or more. Israel opened the skies over Tehran, America flew through and together they pushed back a threat that many in Washington had come to regard as nearly inevitable: an Iranian bomb capable of completely blacking out the American homeland.

That should be the single-most important talking point for the Israeli government in every conversation with Washington, Trump and those who support him as they head into the midterms.

If national conservatives truly care about safeguarding the American way of life, they need to go beyond isolationist sloganeering. Defending the United States requires more than building rhetorical walls; it requires recognizing where the perimeter fence actually lies.

The future of the U.S.-Israel relationship should indeed look different from the past. It should finally be recognized as an indispensable alliance in which a courageous frontline democracy has been doing the heavy lifting to ensure that the American homeland survives.