The Iran peace deal is still a matter of “fingers crossed” that it lasts and is observed, but should it do so, the implications for U.S. politics are profound. The “neocon” faction that has been pushing the United States into Middle East wars for several decades may finally lose influence, and if so, it is unlikely to regain it. That would be a relief; the wars are horribly expensive, and the Middle East is now of no interest to the United States, economically or otherwise.

Fifty years ago, the 1973 Arab oil crisis awakened the world to the importance of the Middle East. Previously, colonial regimes had installed puppet monarchies in the region, although even by 1973 those puppet monarchies were in the process of being ousted by leftist or military coups. Israel had been installed in 1948, arbitrarily for the Palestinians already living there, and that had already caused a succession of wars, notably in 1973 itself, but there seemed no reason why the West should get involved, beyond supplying Israel with enough arms to defend itself.

This changed because U.S. oil production had gradually been declining, and the environmentalists inserting glue in the works of Alaskan and other oil development made the U.S. and the West in general dangerously dependent on Middle East oil – by 1979 less than half the oil consumed by the United States was produced there. Had the Middle East been a reliable supplier, there would have been no need for oil prices to rise as much as they did, but by 1980 the oil market only cleared at a dollar price roughly ten times that of 1972 (though inflation and the dollar’s decline had eroded some of that gain).

With their additional market leverage, the oil producing Middle Eastern countries started asserting themselves, while the non-oil producing Middle Eastern populations developed a resentment of the West that led many of them into terrorist groups. The first and most damaging change was the rebellion against the Shah of Iran’s rule – the Iranian population thought oil wealth was so automatic that even the rule of fanatic Islamist mediaeval clerics could not stop it. How wrong they were! Those clerics began by fighting an impoverishing eight-year war against an equally oil-producing neighbor, Iraq, ruled by a secular despot and carried on squandering oil money without the slightest regard to the welfare of the people they ruled.

Meanwhile the neocons had been trending politically rightwards – only a few of them lived past 90, but the hereditary element in their leadership allows us to treat them as one movement, despite its 80-year duration. The 1948 Progressive Presidential candidate Henry Wallace emerged from the same American left milieu as many of the neocons’ intellectual forebears; at that time many of them were not merely socialist but Communist-adjacent. Wallace himself was more interesting. Not so much politically – he had never really understood capitalism and as Agriculture Secretary was responsible for the expensive and economically damaging agriculture subsidy programs that still disfigure the U.S. economy and fiscal position. Then as Vice President he had been seduced by a visit to the Soviet Union in 1944 into believing that Communism worked, a belief he foisted on the U.S. public, whether it wanted it or not, for the next five years. As a politician, he was both a failure and thoroughly pernicious, as is well brought out by Benn Steil in his excellent 2024 biography “The World That Wasn’t.”

Wallace, however, had a life beyond politics, as few politicians do. As a young man, he had edited “Wallace’s Farmer” a family-owned journal for the agricultural community and had become interested in the possibilities of breeding hybrid corn varieties. He founded a hybrid seeds company “Pioneer Hi-Bred” which eventually became a Fortune 500 corporation. Then as Vice President he had visited Mexico in 1943, taking hybrid seeds with him and explaining how Mexico could raise the yield of their maize crop using hybrids. Since he was Vice President of their northern neighbor and a man with whom the socialist Mexican government felt comfortable, they took his advice and planted Wallace’s seeds widely. The following year Norman Borlaug arrived in Mexico, spent the next two decades spreading hybrid seed technology there, and from the middle 1960s took it worldwide as the “Green Revolution.” Wallace meanwhile was not done; in retirement he revolutionized the breeding of U.S. hybrid chickens.

The neocons, alas, did not follow Wallace into plant or chicken genetics. Instead after the 1956 Hungarian uprising they turned against Communism and became especially militant in pushing U.S. attempts to overthrow it, calling themselves “neo-Conservatives” — to distinguish themselves from those lonely souls who had been Conservative all along — and remaining leftist Big Government supporters on domestic policy. President Reagan’s U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick was a notable acolyte. Once Soviet Communism fell in 1989-91 (almost completely independently of any neocon efforts) they looked around for other wars to start and found the Middle East.

Initially, the neocons had only moderate influence on U.S. policy, but the 9/11 attacks and George W. Bush’s hysterical over-reaction to them gave the neocons essential control of much of the U.S. government, especially the security services. Any attempt to reduce the size of the U.S. government was abandoned, and instead legislation such as the Patriot Act was passed to increase the neocons’ reach. Unsuccessful and very prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, neither with a comprehensible casus belli, gave them control of the U.S. government, whether Republican or Democrat, for the next 15 years.

Two factors combined to dent their control. First, from around 2000 fracking became feasible to extract oil and gas, of which the U.S. became an exporter in LNG form. The Left tried hard to forbid it (and succeeded in some of their “rotten borough” jurisdictions such as New York state) but by 2020 it had made the U.S. self-sufficient in oil. The Biden administration threw all the roadblocks in its way that it could think of, but once Trump was re-elected in 2025, U.S. self-sufficiency in oil was assured and it was able to supply LNG to the Europeans whose Russian supplies had been cut off.

Second, much to the neocons’ horror, a Republican maverick candidate appeared, Donald Trump, smashing the neocon favorites Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio or in emergency Ted Cruz. Initially, this was not too much problem; the neocons were able to control Trump’s cabinet appointments (since he knew nobody in Washington) and, aided by a great deal of chicanery, thereby ensure that his first term made little dent in their overall control, even if no new wars could be started.

With their two impeachments, the first materially aided by the new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the neocons thought they had got rid of Trump, aided by the Democrat shenanigans in the 2020 election. Then a new playground opened up for them with Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2022. Since their advent to power in 2001-02, the neocons had demonized President Putin, treating him as if the Soviet Union had never fallen and Russia was still Communist. During the Obama administration they had expelled Russia from the G7 group of leading nations, while their inexorable eastward expansion of NATO threatened Putin in the same way it would have threatened Tsar Nicholas I, the previous Russian ruler whom Putin most resembles. With their EU bureaucracy allies and the help of the Castroite dictator Zelenskyy, the neocons have been able to prop up Ukraine and prevent any kind of peace with Russia from being concluded.

The neocons’ latest stunt was to embroil the U.S. in war with Iran, despite President Trump’s base voters’ deep antipathy to yet another futile war in the Middle East. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu assisted with this, presumably seeing it as a unique opportunity to remove Iran as a threat to Israel; I would guess he now realizes his mistake. With no plan to restore the Shah, the only possible genuine governmental improvement in Iran, there was no upside to the war and very severe “tail risk” downsides for both the U.S. and Israel — one for Israel possibly being that U.S. public support of Israel could deteriorate from unwavering to equivocal.

The United States was unable to defeat either Iraq or Afghanistan, though it spent decades trying; Iran has a population larger than that of both those countries put together and terrain with the difficulties of both. Fortunately, President Trump and his advisors had the sense to realize that a ground invasion of Iran for an attempted “regime change” might very well not succeed, even given a decade, and that the American public’s patience would wear out years before victory was even conceivable.

The Middle East is now condemned to market a commodity that is in global surplus, given the possibilities of fracking, and that a large political faction in the West wants to taper out of using. They have wasted their wealth on conspicuous consumption of flashy, pointless monstrosities like the Burj Dubai, and have glutted their population with unwanted immigrants of two types: Third World helots to do the actual work and the sillier type of Brit, who think paying zero income tax and suffering through the occasional Iranian drone attack will make them rich. While Europe needs either the Middle East or Russia, the United States does not, and Vladimir Putin’s Russia is in any case a great deal easier to deal with.

With a bit of luck, it will soon be not merely twilight for the neocons, but the dead of night, and they can go back to being unheeded Communists, a political direction in which many of them appear to be heading. For the rest of us, long may President Trump and his rational advisors rule!

-0-

(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)

The post The Bear’s Lair: Nighttime for the Neocons appeared first on True Blue Will Never Stain.