Marc A. Thiessen, the man behind such bangers as the Iraqis “will greet us as liberators,” and the overarching rhetorical case for President George W. Bush’s failed Iraq War, has inexplicably become one of the voices that US President Donald J. Trump is listening to on the Middle East.
In a more honorable culture, Thiessen’s abysmal track record would have evoked enough shame on his part that he’d at least never again show his face in public–and he’d certainly not offer any advice on topics, notably the Middle East, that he got so catastrophically wrong two decades ago.
An F/A-18F Super Hornet Strike Fighter Squadron 103 is parked on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69) as the ship operates in the Arabian Sea on Dec. 5, 2006. The Eisenhower is in the Arabian Sea in support of maritime security operations.
A U.S. Sailor prepares an F/A-18F Super Hornet aircraft for launch from the flight deck of the world’s largest aircraft carrier, Ford-class aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78), while underway in the Caribbean Sea, Nov. 25, 2025. U.S. military forces are deployed to the Caribbean in support of the U.S. Southern Command mission, Department of War-directed operations, and the president’s priorities to disrupt illicit drug trafficking and protect the homeland. (U.S. Navy photo)
Misreading the Reagan Revolution
But we don’t live in such an honorable culture. We live in twenty-first century America.
And Marc Thiessen is clearly a well-connected neoconservative.
Under these conditions, Thiessen can shield himself from serious criticism by offering claims that run counter to reality and blanketing them in appeals to Ronald Reagan.
That ought to do the trick.
No more worrying about those troublesome questions regarding his level of expertise in the Middle East or his previous track record on unpopular wars of choice in the Middle East.
Thiessen fancies himself as some interlocutor for Trump who channels the spirit of the long-dead Ronald Reagan. He advises Trump to ignore the decisive Midterm defeat.
After all, Reagan lost his Republican majority in the Senate in 1986, despite having a sweeping presidential victory two years before.
And Reagan still won the Cold War four years later.
What a remarkable world Thiessen and his fellow neocons must live in!
Anyway, Thiessen clearly doesn’t understand that Reagan won the Cold War by walking away from his earlier hawkish stances. Reagan entered office vowing to escalate against the Soviet Union to break it.
Yet he quickly began de-escalating and seeking a negotiation partner in Moscow.
When he finally got one in the form of Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan didn’t bomb the USSR. He didn’t blockade the Black Sea. Instead, Reagan talked with Gorbachev.
The two men found an equilibrium.
Reagan did not bomb Moscow as negotiations were underway in a bid to assassinate the Soviet leadership, as the Americans and Israelis did on February 28.
Reagan talked to Gorbachev. The two men formed a relationship.
They worked to end the Cold War.
Reagan understood the fundamentals of the conflict in ways that the Washington elite did not.
He understood that the internal contradictions of the Soviet Union would collapse it and that Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost policies were only exacerbating those internal contradictions–to say nothing of the unpopular Soviet-Afghan War.
By removing barriers to diplomacy with the USSR, Reagan calculated he could remove the ever-present threat of the US and NATO from Soviet citizens’ minds, forcing them to focus instead on their declining state at home.
For Thiessen to make such a specious comparison in his Washington Post article, he shows what those of us who’ve followed his career for years understand: Thiessen, like the neocons more generally, is a shallow thinker.
They live by flawed historical analogies; they base their actions on what foreign interests want, and their entire ideology is anathema to the word “conservative.” Alas, these are the people the American Right was told were the greatest thinkers of all.
It’s no wonder why the neoconservatives were the root cause of the implosion of two Republican presidential administrations this century, that of George W. Bush and now Donald J. Trump. Yet, Thiessen is still listened to.
Doubling-Down On Failure
What is Thiessen’s magical elixir for getting Trump out of the mess that Thiessen and his fellow neocons put the forty-seventh president in?
It is to double down on the very same behaviors that got us here in the first place.
It is to erode what little approval the American people still have for Trump, at a time when the forty-seventh president is set to fight for his political (and likely legal) life as Democratic majorities take their seats in Congress on January 3, 2027.
Thiessen, Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro, et al., are demanding that the president “finish the job” against Iran. If he does not get a victory in Iran, then that failure will define the president’s legacy.
The absolute ignorance of these claims by Thiessen and his ilk is astounding.
It is so obviously absurd that it beggars belief that any person who rises to the top of America’s cutthroat national political system could ever fall for the siren song of neoconservatism, especially when the forty-seventh president was the man who, in 2016, rose to prominence in the GOP partly because of his avowed opposition to the very same foreign policy that Marc A. Thiessen and the neocons espouse.
Trump knows he’s glammed up on a loser in the Iran War.
He’s just too arrogant to admit it too loudly. And Trump certainly is unable to be the bigger man and walk away, saving the American people much time, money, and blood.
Instead, Trump continues entertaining losers in the definitional sense, like Marc A. Thiessen or Mark Levin. Both of whom keep enchanting him with their ideological wiles to make him believe this idea that we simply aren’t killing and blowing up enough of Iran.
As Trump’s own War Department insists, American warplanes and missile strikes have hit more than 15,000 targets.
Yet, the Iranian regime appears unmoved. In fact, Iran retains its lethality according to US intelligence sources.
With America’s arsenals of essential defensive systems and standoff offensive munitions drained, the question is what Americans can achieve militarily by returning to war.
What objective is going to be met by this escalation?
Given the severe limitations now placed on those stockpiles, and the fact that Iran can still resist, how effective would any military operation be?
Of course, Marc A. Thiessen can’t ask such questions. Since he has never apologized for supporting the Iraq War, Thiessen isn’t self-aware enough to ask them.
In fact, in his laughable column, Thiessen writes that, “Total victory will come in one of two ways: Either the enemy surrenders or it is defeated.” So, regime change.
And that is not happening, even if the Americans go full bore militarily against Iran once the USS Theodore Roosevelt arrives in the region this Sunday.
Trump Is Committing Legacy Destruction
And make no mistake: if Trump listens to the likes of Thiessen, the Iran War will absolutely define his legacy as the forty-seventh president.
He will go down as one of the worst presidents in US history.
He will be remembered as the man who broke the back of the US military to fight an unpopular war of choice, on dubious grounds, to help a foreign ally, like Israel.
The Trump program for Iran will permanently disrupt global shipping, ensure prices everywhere remain high, and make it impossible for the Republican Party ever to win an election again.
That’s the most un-Reagan outcome I’ve ever heard of. But Marc Thiessen says that Trump isn’t Reagan-ing hard enough.
Because if there’s one thing that Marc Thiessen knows, it’s what got Trump elected in the first place, and how to win wars of choice in the Middle East.
Oh, wait, he doesn’t know those things. That explains quite a bit, actually.
About the Author: Brandon J. Weichert
Brandon J. Weichert is the Senior National Security Editor at 19FortyFive.com. He also manages The Weichert Brief on Substack. Weichert is the co-host of The Mario Nawfal Show on Twitter/X. He is the author of four bestselling national security books, most recently A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine (Encounter Books). His next book, Fortress Americas: A New Monroe Doctrine (Tucker Carlson Books), is due out December 8. Follow him via Twitter/X @WeTheBrandon.
