Our Iran Appeasement Reveals the Need to Declare Moral Independence
Humiliation in war is encouraged by a culture that knows nothing but the alternative between unthinking pragmatism and humility
The signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to fight a militarily superior enemy to secure that independence. 250 years later, the American president signed a “memorandum of understanding” with Iran — a far weaker and viler enemy — securing none of his stated war objectives, but acceding to most of the enemy’s demands.
Why has the world’s strongest military power allowed this to happen, in such dramatic contrast to the example of its founders? The answer we must consider is that there’s one final battle in the American Revolution still to be fought — not a military battle, but an intellectual one.
To explain America’s foreign-policy collapse, some will point to the commander in chief’s cowardice and cynical pragmatism about the upcoming elections. His character flaws are many and profound. But few would accuse the president of insensitivity to his base. He is obviously eager to continue appeasing Republican voters who welcomed his promise to stop “forever wars.”
But this just raises the question in a different form. How did once hawkish Republicans —traditional advocates of a confident American foreign policy — become so meek?
A clue to the answer — and a sign that the unfought battle is intellectual — is found in the thinking of the generation of Americans including Tulsi Gabbard, J.D. Vance, and Pete Hegseth who fought in the Iraq war, witnessed its failures, and now guide American policy.1
Hegseth, who led the “Department of War” into Iran, has put his thinking on record. His 2024 book The War on Warriors recounts his experience in Iraq with the Army’s 101st Airborne. There, as he led a platoon in search of al Qaeda operatives, he was regularly flummoxed by rules of engagement that handicapped his men’s ability to defend themselves and even mandated the release of suspected enemy fighters who would go on to attack them again.
The rules of engagement that bedeviled Hegseth exemplified the Bush administration’s overall approach to its “war on terror.” Time and again Bush sought to elevate the interests of foreign civilians and even enemy soldiers over those of American citizens and soldiers. We saw this not only in restrictive rules of engagement, but in the recurring insistence on dropping humanitarian aid along with bombs, and using war to spread the “democracy” that elected Iran-aligned Islamists in Iraq.
In Hegseth’s thinking, the error of Bush’s policy was to “conflate international law with just war theory.” “Just war theory” is the traditional Christian doctrine that Republicans have also recently invoked to justify the Iran war, in response to criticisms from Pope Leo. Hegseth’s invocation of that doctrine signals his underlying commitment to Judeo-Christian morality.
It’s undoubtedly true that various international treaties encouraged “humanitarian” restrictions that disabled America’s ability to fight a just war. But Hegseth openly doubts that any notion of “just war” can be translated into “universal rules” of war. He says men are too sinful by nature to follow such rules, so we might be “better off winning wars according to our own rules” rather than caring about what he dismissively calls “morality plays.”
Hegseth’s insistence that “just war theory” can never be translated into actionable rules amounts to the confession of a man — and of a nation — in the grips of a contradiction. It’s the contradiction between a morality that demands we humbly turn the other cheek to love our enemy, and the real-world practical requirements of military victory.
To resolve this contradiction is a key element of the American Revolution’s unfought intellectual battle.
But it cannot be resolved by having it both ways. The contradiction is real, and “just war theory” cannot dissolve it. That theory already drastically restricts permissible war and (as I have argued earlier) is in tension with Christianity’s pacifist roots. The pope himself recently repudiated it as inconsistent with those roots and the nature of modern warfare.2 We can either be good Christians or we can confidently fight wars of righteous self-defense and win. We cannot do both.
It’s well-known that Christian moral principles are defined in opposition to the practical needs of life, whether they concern warfighting or moneymaking or sexual fulfillment. So we should expect that a defense secretary trying to answer practical military questions will find little if any real guidance from those principles. He will conclude that warfighting inherently involves (in his words) “shades of gray.”
A culture whose moral principles repudiate practicality can offer no principled guidance for how to be practical. Whatever shaky confidence the practically oriented might muster is then unguided by any standards. This further encourages range-of-the-moment, shoot-from-the-hip pragmatism. We see this in Trump’s cynical foreign policy agenda of coddling dictators (Putin and Xi), betraying allies (Europe and Israel), and toying with weak neighboring rivals (Venezuela and Cuba) only because it’s easy.
The Iran war epitomized the spurt of confidence unguided by ideals. The decision to start the war was not the result of a strategic vision, guided by long-term commitment to achieving specific values, but the whim of a president likely looking to distract from domestic controversies. As a result, even very short-term contingencies, like a lack of cooperation from recently spurned allies or the Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz were not planned for.
Such a narrowly “practical” approach is also doomed to be ineffective, because nothing ambitious can be achieved without a single-minded focus on long-range goals — i.e., values. The shifting Iran war objectives (unconditional surrender, regime change, nuclear and ballistic missile disarmament, etc.) were announced and abandoned so quickly because they were unachievable in an unplanned, whimsical, unprincipled war.
In the face of failure arising from such thoughtlessness, it’s then easy to collapse in humiliation, especially if one’s only notion of a moral principle in the first place was humility.
The last, unfought battle of the American Revolution is to finally throw off the shackles of the morality of Christian humility. There was nothing humble about the Declaration of Independence. To declare to the world an intention to stand on your own feet and fight to the death for the right to the pursuit of your happiness is an act of rational pride, not humility. That declaration was possible only because of an Enlightenment philosophy of individual rights that consciously or unconsciously repudiated the Christian morality of humility.
But most American intellectuals never formulated a moral philosophy that fully sanctioned the pursuit of happiness or with it the doctrine of individual rights. They never completed the American Revolution because they never broke free from old European moral thinking (whether Christian or neo-Christian egalitarian). And so America has long struggled with a contradiction between the only moral philosophy it’s known since its founding, and its practical ambitions (in business, in technology, in military affairs) for living life and achieving happiness on earth.
This is why Ayn Rand called for “a moral revolution to sanction and complete the political achievement of the American Revolution.” It’s why she said “For a nation, as for a man, a Declaration of Independence implies a declaration of self-esteem. Neither can stand without the other.”
Anyone who cannot understand how a militarily powerful modern nation like America could capitulate to a weak, medieval theocracy like Iran must know on some level it is not for any failure of power. It’s for unwillingness to use it. But our will is guided by our moral code, and no matter how much many evade it, our dominant moral code says: “love thy enemy.” If ever we are to escape the cycle of spurts of unmoored confidence followed by humiliation, we must declare independence from that moral code and seek another.
Joel Schectman, Nancy A. Youssef and Vera Bergengruen, “At the Top of Trump’s Team: Angry Vets Who Want to Upend U.S. Foreign Policy,” Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2024.
Josephine Peterson, “Encyclical: What Pope Leo Thinks about ‘Just War’ Theory, Historic Church Apology for Slavery,” Catholic News Service, May 26, 2026.
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