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  "description": "Decades of effort went into building the case for a U.S. war with Iran, and now it has finally arrived. But for Washington’s think tanks and policy circles, it is not what they had in mind.",
  "path": "/the-neocons-long-awaited-war-with-iran-is-not-what-they-expected/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-25T11:57:21.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.thegeopoliticaldesk.com",
  "tags": [
    "Subscribe now"
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  "textContent": "U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran caught many off guard.\n\nThe president had distanced himself over the years from prominent neoconservatives, like former Vice President Dick Cheney and former National Security Advisor John Bolton.\n\nHe also ran his campaign as the “pro-peace ticket” and denounced regime change wars during stump speeches.\n\nThis disconnect has created confusion, helping grow the perception that this was a war Israel pushed the United States into.\n\nWhile Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu played a major role in convincing Trump that the timing for military action against Iran was auspicious, this reasoning ignores a much more complex reality.\n\nThis war was not an outlier, but the consequence of decades of narrative building and political lobbying portraying Iran as one of the United States’ greatest geopolitical enemies.\n\nYears of work by a wide range of legislators, think tanks, media pundits, and Washington policy circles stirred emotions against a minor ideological adversary, inflated Iran’s global capabilities and built a perception that war was inevitable.\n\nDonald Trump, increasingly erratic in nature, may not have much affinity with the George Bush era neoconservatives, but has long been personally vulnerable to one of the most dominant narratives in U.S. defence policy due to his own dislike of the Islamic Republic of Iran.\n\n## Water to a fish\n\nThe United States and Iran have not had a good relationship since 1979, when Iranian revolutionaries overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah and took staff at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran hostage.\n\nThe failure of Operation Eagle Claw to extract the hostages birthed a deep-seated sense of American humiliation among its political elite, driving them toward a mentality of “payback”.\n\nFrom 1979 up until 2001, there was a growing list of Iranian affronts, often tied to ambiguous foreign-based plots, that reinforced an emotionally charged view of Tehran as a persistent nemesis in U.S. policy circles.\n\nPost-9/11 developments essentially locked in the sense of strategic confrontation against Iran, with intense lobbying for direct American military action growing against Tehran.\n\nThe incoming administration of neoconservatives, members of the Republican Party who argued for the U.S. to spread democracy and capitalism against “international tyranny”, built a new global framework in which the U.S. would oppose the “axis of evil”, made up of Iraq, North Korea, and notably Iran.\n\nDespite this, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the long occupations that followed, severely weakened the neoconservative movement and pushed it to the fringes of the Republican Party.\n\nYet, Iran’s position as a primary U.S. antagonist got stronger, notably driven by Iranian activity in Iraq, America’s most politically and militarily sensitive theatre for almost a decade.\n\nFor actors like North Korea, the last member of the “Axis of Evil”, scrutiny would wane, with Trump even seeking diplomatic rapprochement his first term.\n\nSince 2001, a near-constant political and media narrative has continued to liken Iran to China or Russia in its capabilities and intentions towards the United States.\n\nWhile Iran and the United States were adversaries, seeking different political outcomes in the Middle East, the country’s capabilities have been vastly overstated.\n\nThis narrative of rising Iranian power began to build on itself, and soon became the political norm in Washington.\n\nIn the halls of Congress, national security experts and think tank leaders gave briefings claiming Iran would ultimately represent a threat to the homeland as a result of its oft-overblown illicit global networks allegedly stretching from Lebanon to the jungles of Paraguay.\n\nIn reality, Iran was a country straining its global standing through foreign adventurism, relying on weak regional partners, while failing governance at home and struggling to suppress growing internal dissent.\n\nYet this narrative became so strong that when President Barack Obama finalised the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), an international agreement that would have imposed enforceable nuclear restrictions on Iran, conservative commentators decried it, arguing it would never be able to stop Iran’s seemingly inevitable march towards a nuclear weapon.\n\nWar, not diplomacy, had become the only perceived way to stop the Islamic Republic.\n\n## Sleepwalking towards war\n\n### This post is for subscribers only\n\nBecome a member to get access to all content\n\nSubscribe now",
  "title": "The neocons’ long-awaited war with Iran is not what they expected",
  "updatedAt": "2026-03-25T13:44:09.831Z"
}