When Tucker Carlson announced at the weekend that he had interviewed Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, he defended himself from anticipated criticism by insisting that his purpose was to “add to the corpus of knowledge from which Americans can derive their own opinion”.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with interviewing Pezeshkian, regardless of whether he is the president of a country officially considered hostile to America. When the journalist Peter Bergen went to Afghanistan to interview Osama Bin Laden after he declared war on America, US citizens had every right to know who he was and what he believed — coming from his own mouth. And Carlson is right to say that Americans have the right to hear out an adversary, especially if war is at stake, and make up their own minds.

But it is telling that the first person he went to for the “Iranian” perspective was the President of the Islamic Republic. Carlson could easily have spoken to Iranian dissidents who oppose the regime but also firmly oppose the prospect of US-imposed regime change. When the interview was published today, Pezeshkian used the opportunity to deploy the expected talking points, such as the suggestion that America and Israel created Isis. He presented the Iranian regime as a victim while omitting any mention of the country’s bellicose proxies. If one wants to be informed about the range of perspectives among Iranians pertaining to the conflict, interviewing Pezeshkian is about as illuminating and useful as interviewing Reza Pahlavi.

Yet the interview is especially pertinent in light of the tensions within the MAGA coalition and the American Right more broadly over the so-called 12-day war. Many feel disillusioned, even betrayed, that after all the promise of Donald Trump as a president who would extricate America from foreign entanglements and downsize the war machine, he has only entangled America even more in a conflict with Iran, the full ramifications of which have not yet been fully grasped.

It’s not a coincidence that Pezeshkian (through a translator) used the phrase “forever war” throughout the interview and laid the blame for the conflict not on Trump but on Netanyahu and his “agenda”. He recognizes that a large part of Carlson’s audience believes Netanyahu manipulated the US President to “drag” America into another long war — and prospective regime change — in the Middle East on Israel’s behalf.

The core problem with the conservative anti-imperialism of Carlson and his followers is that they think the American empire arose simply as the result of a bad moral choice or the iniquities of a nefarious, greedy elite, rather than out of real historical trends and necessities. This underlay Carlson’s dialogue with Daryl Cooper from last year about the “World War Two myth”: it was that war which confirmed America as a superpower, and its subsequent “myth” which provided a template to justify numerous regime-change wars since.

This is why their desire for America to exist free of foreign entanglements is a fantasy that can’t be realized. For the foreseeable future, at least, America will remain the most powerful capitalist state, and that necessarily comes with a global role that can’t easily be shaken off. This is the reality, with or without Trump. And it’s a reality with which the disenchanted “America First” Right is struggling to come to terms.

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Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

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