True to form, the Democrats immediately signalled their readiness to fund the war, on the assurance that there was a ‘plan’. As Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin put it, ‘we’re in it’. They had no disagreement of principle, having been fully complicit themselves in the Gaza genocide – all they offered was cavilling about process and tactics. And why not? The Democrats had long assimilated Trump’s first-term foreign policy lines regarding China and the Middle East. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jefferies vied to out-hawk Trump on negotiations with Iran: ‘no side deals’ they insisted. The Democrats voted through Trump’s massive military spending bill; they gave a standing ovation for his sabre-rattling against Iran in the State of the Union address; there was also quiet admiration in the Democratic establishment – openly expressed by Hillary Clinton – for the way he bullied European vassals into bumping up their NATO spending…

A striking datum of this war is how few attempts have been made at selling it, rhetorically dignifying it, morally arming it or situating it in some context of shared Western interests. While the belligerati rehearse exhausted arguments about armed liberation, Pete Hegseth waxes lyrical about ‘death and destruction from the sky all day long’; while they talk de-escalation, Trump demands ‘UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER’; where they seek intelligibility, the administration offers barefaced lies, evasions, contradictions and grandstanding. Of course, since the Gaza genocide, in which Washington spearheaded a global coalition behind a far-right extermination campaign while liberal apologists cultivated a studied obliviousness, the belligerati have refined their capacity for cognitive dissonance. But the situation has moved on. They may once, two decades ago, have been useful to a violently adventurist, rightist administration going to war – but no more. The right no longer caters to, nor needs, its liberal outriders. They hang on out of habit.