Mike Watson
Summer is just around the corner, and it’s already heating up in the Middle East. Last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed Iran had hidden evidence of some tests related to building nuclear weapons and had enriched enough uranium to make nine nuclear bombs on short notice. Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei then rejected the most recent American proposal in the nuclear negotiations and denounced "the rude, insolent U.S. leaders." Donald Trump fired back: "Time is running out on Iran's decision pertaining to nuclear weapons, which must be made quickly!"
The back-and-forth has perplexed and disoriented much of Washington. Joe Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan recently said that Trump is "negotiating something that, in its broad elements, is going to look and feel pretty similar" to the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran. "I seem to be on the same page as Donald Trump," he continued. The strain has been too much for many of the Israel haters who claim to speak for Trump’s political base and favor an Obama-esque approach to the Islamic Republic. They have run into a major force in American politics, one that Khamenei should fear: America’s Jacksonians.
Before they crossed the Atlantic, the original Jacksonians were some of Europe’s most formidable warriors. British statesmen sprinkled these people, who originally hailed from the lawless borderland between Scotland and England, around imperial trouble spots. Their settlements in Northern Ireland gave them the name "Scots-Irish," and at the time of the American Revolution, they blocked Spanish expansion up from Florida and American-Indian raids across the Appalachians.
Other types of Americans, such as the Midwest’s heavily Catholic "Reagan Democrats," grafted onto the Jacksonian tree. Walter Russell Mead, who first identified this group in Special Providence, describes their values as "a deeply embedded, widely spread populist and popular culture of honor, independence, courage, and military pride." A "Jacksonian hero dares to say what the people feel and defies the entrenched elites." Andrew Jackson was one such hero; another is Donald J. Trump.
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