By John B. Carpenter, Op-ed contributor Sunday, March 29, 2026iStock/photovsDr. Dinah Dye recently offered a thoughtful critique of “Replacement Theology,” arguing for a paradigm of fulfillment rather…

[View Article at Source]Most American “allies” are security dependents that bring big risks and few benefits. The post Client Tails Wag the U.S. Dog appeared first on The American Conservative.

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Foreign Affairs America First, Israel Second Every fruitful partnership depends on correct priorities. I am the unusual political creature who is both unapologetically America First and firmly pro-Israel. As someone on the older edge of the millennial generation, it falls to people like me to bridge the realism of the MAGA movement with the strategic clarity of the postwar Republican tradition. These positions are not in conflict. Properly understood, they are aligned. America is not a moral abstraction. It is a great power. We built a global architecture of alliances, bases, and forward presence for one purpose: to advance American interests. From the Pacific to Europe, our position in the world is not charity. It is leverage. It allows us to shape outcomes on favorable terms while minimizing the cost in American blood and treasure. The Middle East follows the same logic. The United States operates from Al Udeid in Qatar, maintains the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, and sustains a network of relationships across Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and Iraq. Yet most of these are not true alliances. They are arrangements of convenience. When pressure rises, these states hedge. Qatar shelters Hamas leadership. Others flirt with China and align themselves with alternative power centers. They accept American protection while preserving optionality. That is not partnership. Israel is different. Israel acts. Israel fights. Israel delivers. It provides actionable intelligence on Iran and terrorist networks. It develops battlefield technology that strengthens American capabilities. It directly degrades shared threats, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian proxy forces, reducing the burden that would otherwise fall on the United States. In a region defined by hesitation, Israel operates with clarity and force. That makes it valuable. But value does not erase hierarchy. The alliance only works if America leads. The United States is the senior partner. Israel is the junior partner. This is not a statement of preference. It is a statement of fact. The American economy approaches $28 trillion. Israel’s is roughly $550 billion. The United States has a population of about 340 million. Israel has a population of fewer than 10 million. American power underwrites the global system. It provides the capital, the weapons, the diplomatic cover, and the military umbrella that sustain the regional balance. Remove American power, and the structure collapses. Because we carry the system, we set the terms. Every American should understand that Israel is the junior partner. Every Israeli should understand that American interests are paramount. Clarity is not hostility. It is stability. It prevents drift. It prevents resentment. It prevents the kind of strategic confusion that turns a useful alliance into a liability. A junior partner aligns with the strategic direction of the senior partner. Not the reverse. That means no blank checks. No automatic commitments. No expectation that American power will be deployed for objectives that do not directly advance American security and prosperity. Any framework that reverses this order is not America First. This is why support for Israel, when properly structured, is not a contradiction. It is an extension of American strategy. We do not retreat from the world. We shape it. We maintain relationships that produce tangible returns. We keep partners who punch above their weight, but only if they operate within a structure that serves American interests. Some voices on the right, including Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Nick Fuentes, reject this framework. They argue for distancing ourselves from Israel while showing a degree of sympathy for actors rooted in Islamic fundamentalism. This is not realism. It is incoherence. It abandons the one regional partner that actively confronts shared enemies, while downplaying the threat posed by movements that openly define themselves in opposition to the United States. America First does not mean isolation. It means prioritization. It means discipline. It means understanding that alliances are tools, not obligations. They exist to serve American power, not dilute it. The United States built the current international order. We maintain it. We decide how it is used. The alliance with Israel remains valuable, but only under one condition: the hierarchy is respected and the benefits flow in the right direction. This should be reflected in policy through conditional aid, operational coordination tied to U.S. objectives, and a clear doctrine that American force is never committed absent direct national interest. America First. Always. Without exception. The post America First, Israel Second appeared first on The American Conservative.

Culture Antiwar Art for Conservatives The horrors of war are a recurring theme in the great Western art of the last century. By now, the argument has a bleak familiarity: Conservatives lack the toolkit to make good art, and all too often they lack the perception to recognize good art. Something like this position has been sketched in countless think pieces, including a recent one in First Things (“Why Can’t Conservatives Create Art?”), and has been substantiated through such regrettable ventures as the substitute Super Bowl halftime show led by Kid Rock.  Last year, in these very pages, I reviewed a book whose title sums up this depressing state of affairs: 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (But Probably Haven’t Read). Actually, it is the book’s subtitle that is most discouraging of all: It refers to the grim reality that there exists a vast trove of great literature that is simply beyond the ken of many conservative-minded people—those who, theoretically, should be most attuned to the riches of Western civilization. But the author Christopher J. Scalia rightly argued that conservatives have claimed as their own a very particular subset of books that seemingly ratify their worldviews, such as Atlas Shrugged or The Lord of the Rings. As Scalia put it: “The problem is that our reliance on them obscures the significance and abundance of conservative ideals and principles in literature more broadly.” Scalia was right. Many conservatives operate on the principle that art not explicitly engineered or marketed to appeal to them—say, a book promoted on conservative media, or a movie produced by Daily Wire Studios—is somehow inimical to their worldview. It’s their loss: They adopt a needlessly adversarial posture towards mainstream works simply for being mainstream. For antiwar conservatives, however, the situation is a bit simpler: There exists a whole body of great books, movies, and music premised on the notion that war, especially war undertaken fecklessly or in the absence of sincere diplomacy, is a horror. That much antiwar art is associated with the left is merely a reflection of the fact that Republican Party branding often conceals its strong noninterventionist heritage. Today, however, the left’s enfeebled response to the Iran War shows that it was more exercised by Donald Trump’s tax returns than it is by his tragic foreign policy fiasco. In this environment, it is long past time for anti-war conservatives to claim this corpus as their own.  Calling all conservatives: put down your Ayn Rand and pick up some Kurt Vonnegut. As is made clear by contrasting the plodding capitalist homilies of Rand with the zippy comic wisdom of Vonnegut, antiwar art has among its many virtues the capacity to induce abundant laughter. Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22—two of the funniest books of the last century—marshal satire, surrealism, and sarcasm to communicate their antiwar vision. Similarly, Robert Altman’s 1970 movie M*A*S*H suggested that gallows humor was a means for its cast of Korean War army medics, led by Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould, to retain a state of compos mentis. “The picture has so much spirit that you keep laughing—and without discomfort, because all the targets should be laughed at,” wrote Pauline Kael in her famous New Yorker review of M*A*S*H. “The laughter is at the horror and absurdities of war, and, specifically, the people who flourish in the military bureaucracy.” War rattles the soul not just for the costs it exacts—in lives, in spiritual wellbeing, in treasure—but for conferring the authority to grant it to rudderless, often non-veteran elected officials and gung-ho, myopic military brass. This devilish insight is at the heart of the greatest of all antiwar comedies, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964). Possessed by the notion that communists have among their aims the takeover of the water supply, the insane Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) takes steps to assure the commencement of World War III. But the seemingly non-insane characters in the movie are equally feckless and reckless, including lame President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) and wild-eyed General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), who anticipates and outdoes Pete Hegseth in the nonchalant swagger with which he discusses armed conflict and its costs. Anti-war conservatives should embrace M*A*S*H, Dr. Strangelove, and other movies made in the same spirit—including Richard Lester’s How I Won the War (1967)—because they all make the same essential point, one that comes close to the libertarian position against war: The officials tasked with prosecuting war are too often unworthy of their office.  Of course, the treasury of great antiwar art encompasses far more than satires: Read or seen today, Norman Mailer’s novel The Naked and the Dead, Stanley Kubrick’s film Paths of Glory, and John Hersey’s nonfiction book Hiroshima permit a public estranged from firsthand or even secondhand experience with war to experience its devastations. The great films about Vietnam range from unrepentantly dovish, like Hal Ashby’s Coming Home, to touchingly patriotic, like Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, to searingly outraged, like Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War, but none portray that war as anything other than a cataclysm. The reason conservatives should claim anti-war art, though, is not just because it is on the side of the angels but because it is good. If these works were incorporated into the list of approved conservative art, think pieces about our artistic ignorance would disappear overnight. “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” is a better song than anything by Jason Aldean; and, sorry, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” is superior, as music and message, than anything by Lee Greenwood. I promise that conservatives will be more edified (and entertained) by seeing the Mike Nichols film version of Catch-22 than by buying a ticket to the allegedly non-woke Scary Movie sequel. A first step to upping the cultural literacy of conservatives is rediscovering our peacenik past. The post Antiwar Art for Conservatives appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Client Tails Wag the U.S. Dog Most American “allies” are security dependents that bring big risks and few benefits. Since the end of World War II, the United States has built an ever-expanding global network of military allies. The term “ally” may legitimately apply to Britain, France, Japan, Germany, and a few of Washington’s other security partners, but most of the so-called allies are merely small U.S. security dependents. They constitute potential burdens and dangerous geopolitical snares for the United States while providing few if any strategic benefits.  An especially worrisome aspect of these relationships is that such clients spend considerable effort trying to manipulate, even pervert, U.S. policy to support their parochial objectives. That dynamic creates the danger of small clients gaining undue influence over Washington’s behavior. A security client tail thus may succeed in wagging the U.S. dog.  There are ample signs that such a development is currently taking place in three regions. One is the Middle East, where Israel has made a concerted effort for years to drag the United States into an armed confrontation with Iran. The second region is central and eastern Europe, where NATO countries, especially some of the smaller and least responsible members, seem determined to keep the United States entangled in the Western alliance’s proxy war pitting Ukraine against Russia. The third region is East Asia, especially the Taiwan Strait, which could become an arena for a confrontation between Washington, Taiwan’s de facto protector, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Washington would be wise to jettison or at least sharply limit all three sets of commitments as soon as possible. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pursued a blatant strategy of trying to manipulate the Trump administration into eviscerating Iran, Israel’s principal regional adversary, and he has been extraordinarily successful. The Israeli regime convinced Trump and other U.S. officials that Tehran poses an imminent threat by building a nuclear arsenal. It was the same discredited argument that Tel Aviv has used since the 1980s, but this time it succeeded. When Israel launched aircraft and missile strikes against Iran’s air defenses and other targets in June 2025, Washington assisted that effort in myriad ways, like sharing important intelligence data. Ultimately, the Trump administration authorized its own attacks using America’s B-2 stealth bombers. In late February, Israel launched another assault against Iran, this time joined by the U.S. White House officials and lawmakers have argued that the United States had to take military action against Iran because Israel was going to attack regardless and American troops and assets would be exposed to retaliation. For a superpower to implicitly concede that a small client state had forced its hand was more than a little unsettling. Such an admission highlights the potential risk of linking America’s policy and fate to that of a foreign client. The behavior of Washington’s NATO clients in Europe has been just marginally less dangerous and irresponsible. Influential officials in those countries appear to have no interest in improving the West’s dangerously tense relations with Moscow.  Ursula Von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, and Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, are among the worst offenders. NATO’s central and east European hardliners continue to demand that Russia withdraw its forces from all portions of Ukraine occupied since 2014, including Crimea, which the Kremlin seized in retaliation for the U.S.-facilitated coup that ousted Ukraine’s elected president, Victor Yanukovych, whom many in the West perceived to be pro-Russia. European Union foreign ministers have frequently insisted that Ukraine be allowed to join both the EU and NATO, with the strong implication that Kiev would then have the right to allow its new allies to station troops and even offensive weaponry on Ukrainian territory. Indeed, news reports indicated that the EU is considering establishing two military bases in Ukraine to train new soldiers even though Russia has threatened to strike any Western forces operating inside Ukraine.  “We have been discussing the training of the Ukrainian soldiers, also on the soil of Ukraine,” Kaja Kallas said. “We have identified two training centers that could be used for that purpose.” Such inflammatory posturing has more than a little potential to draw the United States into an expanded confrontation with the Kremlin. Taiwan, a longtime U.S. economic and security client, is roiling the situation in East Asia. From 2008 until 2016, Ma Ying-jeou of the moderate Kuomintang Party (KMT) served as Taiwan’s president. Ma embraced a policy of conciliatory engagement with Beijing, an approach that stood in marked contrast to the extremely assertive policies of his predecessor, Chen Shui-bian, the first candidate of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to win the island’s presidency. During Ma’s two terms, economic ties between Taiwan and the mainland soared, as did tourism and other interactions between the two political entities.  However, a combination of external and domestic factors (including rampant corruption in the KMT) produced a decisive victory for DPP presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen in Taiwan’s 2016 presidential election. PRC leaders denounced Tsai in the most inflammatory terms and returned to the policy it pursued during Chen’s tenure of trying to isolate the island diplomatically and intimidate it militarily. The PRC intensified its efforts to induce the few small countries that still maintained diplomatic relations with Taipei to switch their ties to Beijing, and 10 of them did so during her presidency. Militarily, the PRC boosted both the frequency and size of its exercises in the Taiwan Strait. Those coercive measures against Tsai’s administration backfired. She won a landslide re-election victory in 2020, and for the first time, the DPP also secured control of parliament. Tsai’s vice president, Lai Ching-te (William Lai) succeeded her following the January 2024 election, and he is even more hardline than she was. Indeed, Lai devoted nearly all of his initial national address to making the case for Taiwan’s right to sovereignty. As one prominent Taiwanese columnist noted, “Never before has a Taiwanese president devoted an entire speech to laying out clearly, point-by-point and unequivocally how Taiwan is unquestionably a sovereign nation.” Just a few months after Lai’s election in 2024, PRC forces conducted extensive military drills directed against Taiwan. That pattern occurred again later in the year. Throughout 2025, the pace and scope of PRC military activity continued to increase. In late 2025, especially menacing exercises took place. Given Washington’s longstanding implicit commitment to defend Taiwan, those are not soothing developments. Small security clients are thus creating serious potential problems for the United States in at least three major regions. Smart great powers do not incur such risks on behalf of dependents masquerading as important allies. Washington should offload these geostrategic liabilities as soon as possible. The post Client Tails Wag the U.S. Dog appeared first on The American Conservative.