Social Conservatives and the Iran War

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 06, 2026

It’s going well so far, isn’t it? It always goes well. At first.

Nevertheless, I wish he hadn’t done it.

I am referring to President Trump’s decision to launch Operation Epic Fury, the joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran that has, thus far, decapitated Iran’s leadership and damaged its missile infrastructure, naval forces, and military command systems so as to…well, to do what, exactly?

Don’t get me wrong. Some of my earliest political memories from my childhood are of the Iranian hostage crisis. Our fellow Americans blindfolded and frog-marched in front of the cameras, the morning newspapers and evening news declaring “America Held Hostage, Day [X],” the images of Iranian terrorists burning our flag and chanting “Death to America.” I remember the massacre of our marines in Beirut in my early teens. In my 30s, soldiers who had lost limbs to Iranian-made IEDs in the Iraq War were a common sight.

I don’t mourn the death of Iran’s wicked leaders. I am glad for the possibility of greater stability and fewer threats of terrorism and nuclear destruction, if that should be the result. But will it be? And what will the Iran War mean for the domestic politics of Catholic causes that are, for better or worse, yoked to the political fortunes of President Trump? We have seen this movie before, and it did not end well for us.

Seven years ago I gave an interview to the Stephen Herreid Show that was titled “Neocon Foreign Policy KILLS Social Conservatism.” It was a discussion of an article I had written for Crisis Magazine on how decades of American military interventionism had been disastrous both abroad and at home. Interventions like the Iraq War had destabilized entire regions, empowered America’s enemies, brought death and destruction to indigenous Christians, and politically discredited social conservatives who were associated with those wars.

I was hardly alone. Every Catholic ex-neocon turned born again-Buchananite who voted for Trump felt the same way. We voted for Trump three times because we thought it would mean the end of endless U.S. interventions in the Middle East. And yet, somehow, here we are again.

Yes, I know. It’s different when Trump does it. He is smarter than George W. Bush. He doesn’t believe in the “You break it, you own it” rule. He doesn’t put boots on the ground. He doesn’t pour enormous amounts of American blood and treasure into stupid wars. He’s a quick in-and-out guy. He showed this in Venezuela this year and in his earlier intervention in Iran last year.

That is what we are being told, anyway. And I hope it is true. In fairness to Trump, it is possible to overcorrect, to overlearn lessons from recent history. I think of Tucker Carlson, for instance, as a walking, talking, overcorrection.

Nor am I a stranger to nuance. In fact, I seem to hold an almost-unique niche in Catholic discourse. I am pro-Israel. But pro-Israel Catholics tend to be neocons and I am a populist. I am aligned with Protestant Zionists on domestic fights for the unborn and the family. But I think many Protestant Zionists are actually Israel’s worst enemies, not her best friends, and that they are making it tougher for Israel and for us Catholics who are aligned with them on domestic social issues. I am sympathetic to a form of Zionism myself. But only to the “minimalist Catholic Zionism” outlined by Gavin D’Costa in his recent interview with the aforementioned Stephen Herreid.

And I think launching Operation Epic Fury was a bad idea.

Citing Operation Midnight Hammer—the quick U.S. military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities last year—as proof that Trump will not waste American blood and treasure demonstrates the problem. If it was such a success, why are we now engaged in the biggest U.S. military intervention in the Middle East in decades?

But look, I agree that Trump is not Bush. At least not in that sense. I don’t think he will waste American blood and treasure in the same way, or to the same degree, that Bush did.

Where Trump does now remind me of Bush is that we who have sought to re-moralize America and to defend religious liberty—Christians, social conservatives, pro-lifers, pro-family activists—are once again yoked to the political fortunes of a foreign war. As with Bush’s Iraq War, so with Trump’s Iran War. If the ship goes down, we are going down with it.