Joe Kent, the now-former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, has strange opinions about a lot of subjects. Among those topics: Russia’s war with Ukraine (Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demands are “very reasonable”), the true winner of the 2020 United States presidential election (Donald Trump), the cause of the war with Iran (Israel), the reason the U.S. went to war with Iraq under President George W. Bush (also Israel), and the reason Charlie Kirk was killed (very possibly Israel).He also believes that the war with Iran is dumb. And on this point, to date, the evidence is on his side.The Trump administration and its allies are belatedly coming to grips with the military and economic costs of a war that has proved far more complex than they imagined. But as they continue to pour resources into fighting in the Middle East, they seem not to apprehend another consequence: the effect on their party of yet another failed war, this one waged side by side with Israel. If Kent’s criticism of the war proves prescient, his other beliefs, especially those concerning Jews, will ascend in stature along with it. The most prominent Republicans publicly making a forceful case for foreign-policy restraint are the most bigoted ones. If the war goes pear-shaped, they will be poised to steer the party’s future.In the 1930s, “America First” was the slogan of right-wing isolationists, such as Charles Lindbergh and Father Charles Coughlin, whose ideology mixed populism, anti-interventionism, nativism, and anti-Semitism. World War II and then the United States’ long struggle against the Soviet Union drove that political style out of the Republican Party, to the point that Pat Buchanan, an “America First” conservative, ran a third-party protest campaign for president in 2000 against the Republicans and Bush. Trump revived the “America First” faction of the GOP with his stinging critiques of the Iraq War and neoconservatism, and with his use of raw nativism, which activated not only non-interventionists but also white nationalists and other previously sidelined groups.[Peter Wehner: How Trump killed conservatism]These two Republican factions have polarized against each other on a cluster of issues: Russia, Israel, anti-Semitism, and populism in general. That is, rightists who oppose aid to Ukraine tend to be skeptical of Israel and at least open to having anti-Semites in the Republican coalition. Conservative hawks tend to have the opposite position on all of these points.Trump has held both sides in place through personalist rule. Anybody who supports Trump—however disreputable or criminal they might be—can be in the party, nobody in the party can oppose Trump, and the party’s platform consists of whatever Trump has said at any given moment, even if it contradicts what he claimed to stand for yesterday. The holdover Republicans who have remained attached to the party’s old identity (hawkish, pro-Israel, anti-Russia, opposed to anti-Semitism) have squabbled with its newer entrants. But those disputes could be settled by Trump, who has repeatedly declared, “I am MAGA.”When Tucker Carlson sparked one of the right’s periodic rows over anti-Semitism by giving the white nationalist Nick Fuentes a friendly interview, Trump mused, “You can’t tell him who to interview. I mean, if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes—I don’t know much about him—but if he wants to do it, get the word out,” and added, “People have to decide.” During Trump’s second term, J. D. Vance has made a point of creating space in the party for anti-Semitic voices such as Carlson’s. “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform,” Vance said in December at a Turning Point USA convention. “We have far more important work to do than canceling each other.” Loyalty to Trump is the only currency that matters in this conflict.Accordingly, the warring factions have competed to depict themselves as the true embodiment of MAGA and paint their rivals as undermining Trump or deviating from his precepts.For most of the second Trump administration, the anti-interventionist faction has held the whip hand. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was once the dominant foreign-policy issue on the agenda, and on that issue, the anti-interventionists have shared Trump’s Russophilic instincts. Unlike the hawks, such as Vice President Pence and Senator Mitt Romney during Trump’s first term, the anti-interventionists never wavered despite the president’s various offenses against the Constitution. This made it easy and intuitive for the anti-interventionists to portray themselves as the loyal faction.To counter this, the hawks’ strategy has been to pretend that Trump’s beliefs are actually consistent with their own. The Bush-administration speechwriter turned Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen has written a series of columns wishcasting the president as a Russia hawk (“Trump won’t back down in the face of Putin’s escalation”) who is an enemy of the isolationist right (“the ‘restrainers’ are out of step with both Trump and his supporters”). But the exertion has been evident: A close reader of Thiessen’s columns could practically see sweat trickling down his forehead.In a similar vein, the interventionists’ approach to fighting anti-Semitism and skepticism of Israel has been to pretend that these currents entered the party without Trump’s involvement and against his wishes. A New York Post column by Rich Lowry, headlined “Tucker Carlson Aims to Poison Us With Hatred—But Donald Trump Stands in the Way,” captures the unsubtle message. After Kent’s resignation, Republican hawks denounced him as a kook and a traitor to the cause, without touching on the delicate question of why Trump appointed such a disreputable figure in the first place.The Iran war has turned the dynamic on its head. The president has decisively sided with the hawks. And unlike his previous saber-rattling moves, which involved either threats that he backed away from (Greenland) or short-term attacks (Venezuela, last year’s Iran bombing), this war is difficult to square with noninterventionism. Trump threw himself behind the neoconservatives’ long-held dream of a war with Iran whose end point is regime change or the regime’s forced surrender of its power projection.Now it is the hawks’ turn as the fair-haired child of the Trump coalition. The conservative interventionists can say that they, not the populists, embody Trump’s authentic vision. “What’s actually going on here is that you’ve got Tucker and Joe Kent and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie all pretending that what’s happening here is somehow unforeseen, a betrayal of MAGA—that somehow they all speak for MAGA better than the president who actually designed it,” the conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro told Politico.The president has given approving head pats to his hawkish defenders. He shared a Thiessen post, and he defended Mark Levin (a hawk) over Megyn Kelly (a populist) at the peak of an online spat, during which he called her “emotionally unhinged” and “toxic,” and she accused him of having a “micropenis.”The hawks are practically taunting the populists for their lack of influence. “This once-ascendant faction of MAGA is in a bind. Trump wants to win a war that Kent and his comrades wish he never started. They’re betting against the leader of their own movement,” Eli Lake wrote in The Free Press. “The anti-Semites who sought to dominate the right and steer American foreign policy are watching their dreams die,” Commentary’s Abe Greenwald gloated.But if you pay close attention to the chorus of hawkish praise raining down on the president, you can detect an undercurrent of concern. “Mr. Trump took by far the biggest risk of his public life when he approved Operation Epic Fury,” Barton Swaim noted in The Wall Street Journal. Shapiro called the war “unprecedented in terms of its political courage.”[Read: From ‘America First’ to ‘always America last’]Implicit in this praise is a concession that Trump’s decision might go badly. The hawks, as is their wont, have covered up this uncertainty with fervor. One of the Journal’s recurring editorials urging Trump to finish the job concedes in passing that Iran’s ability to close the Strait of Hormuz has caught the U.S. unprepared, asking, “Any ideas, Secretary Hegseth?” It calls to mind a scene in Airplane! where a flight attendant assures passengers not to worry about the turbulence they’re experiencing, as an unconscious captain is being dragged through the aisle, before asking, “By the way, is there anyone on board who knows how to fly a plane?”The hawks ought to rethink their faulty assumptions rather than assume that a plan for victory exists somewhere in the recesses of Pete Hegseth’s brain. Instead, they are demanding an even deeper commitment, brushing past the escalating military, economic, and political costs.If, as now appears at least somewhat likely, the Iran war ends in failure, the coalitional dynamic within the GOP would probably flip back. The traditional security hawks would be discredited, and the populist anti-interventionists vindicated.The hawks have comforted themselves with the thought that such a calamity won’t occur. Trump still commands strong support among his party, especially with MAGA Republicans. This is, of course, a tautology, because MAGA affiliation primarily indicates a willingness to support whatever Trump does.We can imagine what such a political outcome would look like, because it happened in the not-so-distant past. George W. Bush had a reservoir of bottomless support among Republicans. And even after the Iraq War turned undeniably sour, the party proceeded to nominate defenders of Bush’s policy for the next two presidential elections.It wasn’t until Trump came along to call the party’s former leadership weak losers who had made a terrible mistake that Republicans could even entertain the thought that Bush had failed. But once they did, the turn was complete. In a political culture that treats its leaders as unassailable, today’s god becomes tomorrow’s false prophet.Trump exploited that previously unspeakable sense of failure to discredit the incumbent Republican Party leadership. That is how the anti-interventionist faction gained a foothold in the party to begin with. Should he ultimately be seen as a failure, this faction will have an even easier time discrediting the Republican hawks than Trump did bullying Jeb Bush on the debate stage in 2015.Only, next time, the populist turn seems likely to be far uglier. Trump’s populist allies have learned that their most poisonous ideas have a potent audience. Figures such as Carlson, Fuentes, and the far-right influencer Candace Owens have developed mass followings by supplying the forbidden fruits of anti-Semitic paranoia that the old establishment withheld. They have tapped into a deep desire to blame Israel and a Jewish cabal for the world’s problems. If Trump is seen as having failed because of a war fought alongside Israel that was urged on him by the hawks, Carlson’s case against the Republican elite will become trivially simple.The Republican Party’s only force still resisting anti-Semitism is committed to the fantasy that it barely exists. Matthew Brooks, the head of the Republican Jewish Coalition, told reporters in November that anti-Semitism is “a very small, limited problem in our party.”[Will Gottsegen: A test for Trump’s most faithful]The Republicans willing to condemn anti-Semitism on the right are either afraid to or simply refuse to blame the figure who legitimized it. Instead, they have relentlessly ingratiated themselves with Trump and pinned their future on a war that has already veered far from the outcome they had expected, compounding a moral failing with a geopolitical blunder.Perhaps they believed that they could start a political transformation in the Middle East and somehow spread it back to the home front, erasing sour memories of the Iraq War and marginalizing the modern Lindberghites. They seem not to have contemplated the possibility that a very different transformation would occur, one that would burn down what remains of the party establishment, leaving a barbaric horde to inherit the ruins.