War, Midterms, and the CPAC Debate That Actually Matters

Every week this goes on, every American who comes home in a flag-draped coffin, every gas pump that hits five dollars — that's a Democratic ad. We built this coalition on getting out of other people's wars.

Two Visions of Conservative Foreign Policy

The Cruz argument is equally grounded in something real. Iran's nuclear program was, by the time the strikes began, weeks away from weapons capability. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had directly killed American servicemembers in Kuwait and in the Strait of Hormuz. The administration could credibly argue — and has — that failure to act would have constituted a strategic abdication, not a principled restraint [2]. When Cruz argues that the United States made the right call and is now winning, he can point to actual battlefield evidence. The Understanding War Institute's most recent assessment confirms that Iranian conventional military capacity has been degraded by roughly 60 to 80 percent across critical systems [2]. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, the kind of result American power rarely achieves so cleanly. The deeper tension at CPAC isn't really about Iran. It's about what conservatism believes regarding the use of American military power. And that debate — long suppressed under the weight of political unity — is finally happening in the open.

This is, in important ways, a healthy fight. The last time conservatives had this argument in earnest, it was 2003, and the stakes were an Iraqi weapons program that turned out not to exist. The circumstances here are materially different: Iran's nuclear progress was documented, the threat to American forces was immediate, and the military operation has so far achieved its primary objectives without the catastrophic mission creep that destroyed the Bush coalition. But the isolationist wing's concerns about congressional authorization and long-term commitment are legitimate constitutional questions, not defeatist hand-wringing [3]. A party that cannot tolerate internal debate about the costs and limits of military power is a party that will eventually make a catastrophic mistake.

The question conservatives need to answer is not whether Iran deserved this — they did. The question is whether we have a plan for the morning after.

— Richard Haass, Council on Foreign Relations (via Substack, March 27, 2026)

The Midterm Math Is Messier Than It Looks

Here is where I part ways with both the Bannon panic and the breathless progressive commentary that has been appearing in certain quarters of the media — the kind that looks at a couple of Florida legislative special elections and declares the Republican coalition in freefall [1]. The Florida results are interesting. An 11-point swing in a Mar-a-Lago-adjacent district deserves analysis. It does not, however, constitute evidence that a successful military campaign against a nation that has been killing American soldiers is a net electoral liability. Some of our more excitable colleagues seem to have confused "Democrats had a good March" with "Republicans lost the war."

The actual polling on Operation Epic Fury, when disaggregated from generic congressional ballot numbers, shows something considerably more complicated. Americans support military action when it succeeds. The question is whether the administration can maintain the definition of "succeeding" clearly enough to own the moment if and when a ceasefire is reached [2]. The Bannon scenario — in which a prolonged, costly war becomes a midterm albatross — is plausible under specific conditions: sustained American casualties, a significant rise in energy prices that persists through the summer, or a diplomatic failure that leaves Iran intact enough to claim it survived. Under those conditions, his warning is prescient. But the Cruz scenario — in which Republicans run in 2026 as the party that eliminated Iran's nuclear threat, restored American deterrence, and sent Tehran's proxies scrambling — is equally plausible if the administration can translate military success into a coherent political message. That message, notably, requires the Bannon wing and the Cruz wing to be in the same room speaking to each other, which is exactly what is happening in Dallas right now.

The Right Argument at the Right Time

What makes this CPAC moment genuinely worth paying attention to is not the drama of Bannon versus Cruz — that is, frankly, as much entertainment as analysis. What matters is that the conservative movement is having the argument it should have had before 2003, and before 2011, and before every other foreign policy decision that the Republican Party eventually had to own in uncomfortable ways. The America First constituency is asking: what are we in this for, how long, and at what cost? The interventionist constituency is asking: what does deterrence look like if we refuse to use force when the casus belli is this clear? These are not stupid questions. They are the right ones.

The party that can hold both impulses in productive tension — that can say "we struck decisively, we achieved our objectives, we are coming home with a result" — is the party that wins in November 2026. The party that either pretends the cost is zero, or collapses into recrimination before the ceasefire ink is dry, is the party that hands Democrats a message they could not otherwise have earned. The conservatives gathering in Dallas this week know this. The debate is loud because the stakes are real. That, at least, is encouraging [1].