The Classic Neocons Are Out, but They Might Still Get What They Want
Last week was not a good week to be an old-fashioned neoconservative. At least some Democrats are reportedly blaming Vice President Kamala Harris’ election loss on her decision to campaign with former Rep. Liz Cheney (R–Wyo.), war hawk extraordinaire and daughter of the neocon dark lord, former Vice President Dick Cheney. President-elect Donald Trump has ruled out bringing back two of his most hawkish advisers, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. The turbo-hawk Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) has reportedly said that he won’t be working in the administration.
And on Sunday morning, one of Trump’s sons—Donald Trump Jr.—publicly endorsed a call for “maximum pressure to keep all neocons and war hawks out of the Trump administration.” No wonder David Frum, author of former President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, is now complaining that the second Trump administration might drop its “veneer of loyalty to the United States.”
Yet the Trump administration may still end up pursuing the same Middle Eastern policies that the neoconservatives wanted. Two former officials obsessed with regime change campaigns in the region appear to be involved in the transition to a second Trump administration. Brian Hook is running the transition at the State Department. Joel Rayburn is “expected to play” a role at the National Security Council, according to Politico. Rep. Elisa Stefanik (R–N.Y.), who promised a new “MAXIMUM PRESSURE campaign against Iran,” has reportedly been offered the job of U.N. ambassador. And many contenders for Trump’s new cabinet are some lesser-known—but no less aggressive—hawks.
While Trump’s policies on China (a renewed trade war) and Ukraine (less military aid) seem easy to predict, his approach to the Middle East is up in the air. Staffing is going to be particularly important in how the second Trump administration handles the region’s conflicts.
A former attorney, Hook worked during the first Trump transition as director of policy planning at the State Department, where he helped push out Michael Ratney, then the U.S. special envoy for Syria, because he believed that Ratney thinks “Syria is lost,” according to a 2019 report by the State Department’s inspector general office. (The inspector general investigated Ratney’s demotion for ethnic bias after finding Hook’s written notes on Ratney: “Opposed strikes. Palestinian Arab. Not friendly to Israel.”)
Ratney, the envoy to Syria, was replaced with Joel Rayburn, a man The Wall Street Journal has described as part of a group of retired military officers “intent on containing Iran’s power in the Middle East.” Rayburn then tried to turn the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State into a weapon against the Syrian government, an Iranian and Russian ally. He worked closely on this project with former Amb. James Jeffrey, who infamously admitted to playing “shell games” to hide the number of U.S. troops in Syria from Trump.
In recent months, Rayburn has been posting gleefully about what he sees as an Israeli war to reshape Lebanon and to “checkmate” Iran.
Hook himself ended up leading the ominously-named Iran Action Group in the first Trump administration. Although he shied away from using the exact words “regime change,” his goal was clearly in that ballpark: In February 2020, he said that American pressure could move Iran toward “a truly representative government.” He also argued that Iran is not “entitled to a claim of self-defense” because it is not a “Westphalian” state—lawyer-speak for they’re not a real country with real sovereignty.
In August 2020, Hook sat on a panel with Haley and former Sen. Joe Lieberman (D–Conn.) at the hawkish United Against Nuclear Iran nonprofit to discuss the upcoming election. While Haley argued that many Democrats agreed with a hardline policy, and Lieberman said that he’s “optimistic that this regime in Tehran will collapse” on its own, Hook made a prediction that has since aged very badly: “The biggest threat that our allies and partners in the region face is not the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”
Today, Trump is reportedly considering Hook for secretary of state. Other names on the reported shortlist include Trump’s former national security adviser, Robert O’Brien; Sen. Bill Hagerty (R–Tenn.); Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.); former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy; and Trump’s former jack-of-all-trades, Richard “Ric” Grenell.
Pompeo may have dropped out of the running only at the last minute. On an October 29 episode of the podcast Honestly, recorded a few days before the election, conservative journalist Ben Shapiro said that Pompeo would “most likely” be back in the administration. “I know precisely the people talking to him—I’m not speculating about that,” Shapiro claimed. If that’s true, it shouldn’t be a surprise. Unlike Haley, who ran against Trump in the 2024 primaries, Pompeo has been described as a “legendary” Trump sycophant and a “heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.”
A few days after the election, however, many in the Republican camp began pushing back against Pompeo hard in public. Tech investor David Sacks and Donald Trump Jr. also pushed back against Pompeo in private, according to Drop Site News, which reports that Pompeo was done in by work for a Ukrainian telecom company (which re
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