The most dangerous battle facing Trump isn't in Iran

It had the feel of two ageing dons sparring in the senior common room, both smugly full of self-admiration with their own cleverness. This was the encounter between two of Maga’s leading intellectual apostles: Senator Ted Cruz from Texas Princeton University and Harvard Law) and one-time Fox News host, unrivalled leader in white grievance politics and influential beyond justification, Tucker Carlson.

- JON SOPEL

There was an "en garde" - and from there they parried and counterparried in an interview broadcast this week. There was the occasional lunge as the two fiftysomethings engaged in their dialectic on the wisdom or otherwise of Donald Trump allowing the US to become dragged into the Iran/Israel conflict.

It has been one of the articles of faith, one of the foundational beliefs of the Maga movement that America should not be the world's policeman - although the isolationist, pull-up-thedrawbridge, let the rest of the world get on with it school of thought is nothing new.

There's always been that strand to American thought, even if Trump is shouting it more loudly. There is also a more practical, realpolitik side to it in Trump's mind. Put simply, what good did it ever do a president? LBJ felled by Vietnam; Bush 43 and his neocon Iraq misadventure; Biden and the calamitous Afghan withdrawal. In Trump's mind, nothing positive ever comes of it, so why go there in the first place?

For all the lofty words between messers Cruz and Carlson the row boils down to this. According to Carlson, if America First means anything, it requires you staying out of other people's wars. Meanwhile, Ted "yeah, but" Cruz's view was Iran is a menace, we like Israel, they are our ally and we have to be on their side and the clincher: the mullahs in Tehran had earlier made clear they wanted to assassinate Trump, so America does have a dog in the fight.