The Republican split over the Iran war
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John Kiriakou's assessment of the 2026 war with Iran, delivered on a British panel programme a month into the campaign, was that Donald Trump had made "a disastrous miscalculation. Where do we even begin?" The consequence he identified was domestic: "there's a very significant split right now within the Republican Party here in the United States."

The broken expectation

The split, in his account, runs between the administration and the voters who elected it. "There were a lot of Republican voters who voted for Donald Trump because they believed that he really was the no-foreign-wars president."

Kiriakou grounds that expectation in a specific moment: "You might recall February 14th, Valentine's Day 2016, during a Republican debate in which Donald Trump called George W. Bush a war criminal for getting the United States involved in the war in Iraq." Against that record he sets the position a decade later: "and now all of a sudden, it's as though it's John McCain's neoconservative Republican Party again."

The two wings inside the administration

Kiriakou describes the incoherence as staffed rather than merely rhetorical. Trump "surrounded himself with some people like Tulsi Gabbard, for example, and J.D. Vance, who reportedly have been opposed to these foreign interventions, but then others like Marco Rubio, who is sort of the successor to the John McCain wing of that party." The result: "the party and the president himself don't know which direction to go."

See also

- Donald Trump
- Iran 12-Day War
- Marco Rubio
- Tulsi Gabbard
- JD Vance
- John McCain
