The Panicans

What Trump's Strikes Exposed

The Third of May, 1808 by Goya

“They had an almost irresistible tendency to degenerate into a kind of lolloping amble.”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

The reactions to Donald Trump’s military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities were strange. There was something bizarre and off, not just in the outrage from his political opponents, but in the discomfort voiced by many within his own camp. Much of that unease, I suspect, came not from Jacksonians but from libertarian-leaning conservatives, for whom any use of American power abroad, no matter how limited or strategically sound, triggers instinctive opposition.

Ironically, while libertarians often present themselves as hard-headed realists, their arguments against force projection frequently slip into the language of moral authority, as if America must earn the right to act in its own interest. It’s a bizarre, almost masochistic worldview, one that holds the United States to a standard so impossibly high that action becomes indistinguishable from guilt, and inaction is treated as virtue.

They speak of restraint and non-intervention, but their underlying assumption is Wilsonian: that legitimacy comes not from strategic necessity but from a kind of moral purification. In fact, they mirror the very liberal internationalists they claim to oppose and are ultimately detached from how the world actually works.

Some of this is understandable. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan left a psychological scar, not only on the public but on the national imagination. The trauma of being misled, of trusting an elite consensus that unraveled into chaos, has conditioned a generation of Americans to instinctively expect the worst from any military engagement. They don’t hear “surgical strike” or “deterrence”; they hear “nation-building,” and “dead Americans.”

However, and unfortunately, the result is a kind of mental paralysis. Which is characterized by an inability to distinguish between reckless interventionism and the strategic use of force. So deep is the skepticism toward American power that many can no longer recognize when it’s being wielded effectively.

This mindset has given rise to a certain type, I call him the Panican—a figure who sees American power as inherently destabilizing, who becomes hysterical at the mere mention of military action, and who responds to every use of force with the same recycled vocabulary of doom: “Vietnam all over again,” “WWIII,”…

The Panican is not interested in context, outcomes, or deterrence; he speaks in warnings, grand apocalyptic scenarios, not arguments. His thinking is reflexive rather than analytical. For the Panican, every use of force is a mistake, every assertion of strength a provocation, every alignment with allies a trap. What Trump’s military actions revealed more than anything is how deeply this posture has infected even the ranks of those who claim to oppose the liberal foreign policy consensus.

In his visceral recoil from the use of force, the Panican reveals a deeper estrangement from the tragic nature of politics. The Panican reveals himself not as a realist, but as a closeted idealist. He retreats into the comforts of moral absolutism and non-violence, mistaking fantasy for principle. He believes, almost religiously, that diplomacy can always prevail, that adversaries are ultimately reasonable, and that projecting power is a provocation rather than a safeguard. He is an eternal optimist, about the intentions of others, the stability of the world, and the idea that restraint alone ensures peace. But this worldview is only possible to adopt from within the cocoon of American security.

The Panican forgets, or refuses to acknowledge, that he sleeps peacefully at night not because the world is benign, but because there are U.S. military bases, an Army, a Navy, making sure it stays that way. His delusion is a luxury paid for by the very force he fears and wants to destroy.

The Panican refuses to acknowledge a basic geopolitical reality: American power, its deterrent capacity, its global credibility, and its alliance structure, depends on the ability to operate decisively in regions like the Middle East. But rather than confront that fact, he retreats into moral posturing or fatalism. Nowhere is this intellectual evasion more visible than in how the Middle East is discussed.

In general, the Middle East occupies a special place in the contemporary American collective memory. It’s seen as a “complicated” region, where sectarianism blurs the lines between friend and enemy. Those who continue to think in civilizational terms often forget why a place matters. In geopolitics, it’s pipelines, military power, and strategic chokepoints, not cultural nostalgia, that set the rules.

And nowhere is this confusion more acute than in how the West talks about Israel. For decades, conspiracy theories and latent antisemitism have completely distorted perceptions of the region. Israel is rarely treated as a normal ally pursuing its national interests; instead, it is cast as a manipulative actor behind every American move. This suspicion, which is also deeply embedded in elite discourse, has corroded the ability of many to simply think strategically about the Middle East. When power is used in the region, particularly in coordination with Israel, it is instantly seen as illegitimate.

This has produced a broader epistemic failure: an inability to process facts about the region without filtering them through the trauma of past wars, ideological rigidity, or cultural cynicism. In this sense, the Panicans view any projection of American power as a prelude to catastrophe. They see Trump’s targeted strike on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure not as a calibrated deterrent, but as the first domino in an inevitable chain of escalation. The Panicans assume the worst not because the facts demand it, but because they’ve lost the conceptual tools to distinguish between military strength and hubris, between statecraft and folly.

But the Panicans are wrong. Their hysterical outbursts, their schizophrenic paranoia, and their compulsive references to past disasters are out of touch with the present situation. The Middle East today is not the Middle East of the 2000s. There is no American ground invasion, no regime-change project, no grand delusion about exporting Jeffersonian democracy to the desert. What exists now is something very different: a coalition of U.S. partners—Israel, the Gulf states, Turkey—aligned around shared threats, chief among them Iran. Strategic strikes and hard deterrence are not preludes to occupation, they are tools to prevent larger wars, not start them.

What Trump’s military decisions made undeniable is that the Panicans aren’t just incapable of thinking strategically about power—they’re fundamentally alienated from the very concept of national interest. Especially since in a region like the Middle East, it’s not power that destabilizes, it’s the vacuum left when America refuses to act.