A Jewish-American friend recently repeated a conversation he had with his non-Jewish, very conservative colleague while making coffee at their Manhattan office kitchen. “I’m tired of other people’s wars,” he said. He voted twice for Trump, thinks Israel is a friend, and says, shrugging toward the horizon, that “America’s gotta mind its own.”
You can hear that weariness now throughout the Republican base: a fatigue that doesn’t always distinguish between costly crusades and consequential commitments. The party that once cast itself as Israel’s surest ally is being tugged seaward by a new tide.
The numbers confirm what the harbor talk suggests. This summer, Quinnipiac found that Republican sympathy for Israelis dropped to 64%, a 14-point decline in a year, while those answering “don’t know” rose markedly, a statistical shrug replacing the old reflex of solidarity.
Overall sympathy for Israelis hit the lowest point since Quinnipiac began asking in 2001, even as sympathy for Palestinians reached a high. Pew, for its part, recorded a complicated picture: rank-and-file Republicans still view the Israeli people warmly (about two-thirds favorable) but are more ambivalent about Israel’s government (mid-50s favorable), a split that didn’t exist to this degree a decade ago.
Beneath those attitudes sits a broader reorientation. The Chicago Council’s 2024 survey registered the highest share in its 50-year series, saying America should “stay out of world affairs” (43%). Among Republicans, only a bare majority of 54% now favors an active US role abroad; nearly as many want to pull back. What was once the party of muscular internationalism has become, on many questions, the party of strategic recoil.
No one has worked that change harder than the stars of the populist Right. When Israel struck Iranian nuclear sites in June and the United States followed with its own “bunker-buster” strike, isolationist talk-show host Tucker Carlson blasted the president as “complicit in the act of war.”
He told his subscribers, “If Israel wants to wage this war, it has every right to do so… But not with America’s backing.” He signed off with the line that trickled into the movement: “Drop Israel… let them fight their own wars.”
Candace Owens, another extreme right-wing TV host, has gone further into crudity and myth. Her 2019 contention, “If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great… okay fine,” was no slip of the tongue; she doubled and tripled down after October 7 with provocations that Jewish watchdogs said reminded them of blood-libel tropes, and she parted ways with The Daily Wire amid accusations of antisemitism. Ben Shapiro, founder of The Daily Wire, called her conduct “absolutely disgraceful.”
This is the noise the average Republican hears, in podcasts and push alerts, and it is having policy effects. The Chicago Council’s flash polling around the Iran exchange showed overall ambivalence about US force: more Americans opposed than supported using bunker-busting weapons (35% to 27%).
But partisan divides were crystal clear. A 52% Republican plurality favored the strikes, while Democrats opposed them; if Iran attacked US personnel, 79% of Republicans said they would back US airstrikes in response. In other words, the MAGA isolationist argument is not yet a consensus even within the GOP. It is an argument, loud and rising, against an older, hawkish current that still runs strong.
WHICH BRINGS us to the vice president. JD Vance has tried to square “America First” with a pro-Israel spine. On the National Mall last October 7, he told a mixed crowd of Christians and Jews that Israel must “do what it takes to end the war,” and pledged to “give Israel” the “ability” to do so.
US wants to be an ally to Israel, not a vassal
This week in Jerusalem, standing beside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he put the point in diplomatic terms: “We don’t want in Israel a vassal state… We want a partnership, we want an ally.” It’s the right formula, assertive but not paternalistic, allied without condescension. The question is whether his party will let him hold it.
Because the split is real. On one side is the hawkish Right, personified by Fox News talk show host Mark Levin, who urged preemptive strikes and went so far as to call for making “regime change in Tehran an explicit goal.”
On the other hand is the populist Right, personified by Carlson, warning that any further entanglement is a betrayal of “America First.” In June, confronted with this choice, Donald Trump sided with the hawks, rebuked Carlson publicly, and repeated the one non-negotiable line every serious president has voiced: “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.” He authorized the force accordingly. The choice, however, will recur.
It’s important to remember what the last Republican administration actually did for Israel, beyond slogans. It recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the US Embassy there; it recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights; and it brokered the Abraham Accords, normalizing ties between Israel and several Arab states. Whatever one thinks of the broader Trump record, those were consequential acts of his administration that improved Israel’s strategic position and widened its circle of peace.
The biblical case, and the small-d democratic case, point in the same direction. If you believe Scripture, you know the old promise to Abraham, “I will bless those who bless you,” and the psalmist’s injunction to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem.” If you believe in democracy, you know Israel is the region’s lone liberal democracy, with all the frustrations and self-correcting mechanisms that it entails. A Republican Party that still quotes the Founders and teaches Sunday school should not find it hard to say both things at once.
Evangelical leaders have not been shy about saying them. “Christians have an obligation to support Israel,” Pastor Robert Jeffress argued, invoking Genesis 12:3 and the baseline claim that a people’s right to exist is not up for barter. Franklin Graham put it more simply: “The Jewish people are God’s chosen people… As Christians, we stand with Israel.”
This is not a blueprint for blank checks; it is a reminder that indifference cloaked as prudence can curdle into something older and darker. Rev. Johnnie Moore, who considers himself a Christian Zionist, cannot speak enough about modern-day Israel: “I started going to Israel and going to Israel again and again and again. I found so much of my faith come alive through that experience…
“Israel has impacted me far, far more than almost anything else. I almost can’t think of my life as inseparable from Israel in some ways,” he said.
So, Mr. Vice President, accept the test as providential. No one is asking you to embrace every Israeli policy or deny the human costs of war. We are asking you to separate critics who argue in good faith from those who toy with ancient slanders, and to elevate voices that defend a hard, sober alliance over those who would trade it for dopamine and clicks.
Shut out the demagogues in your own coalition; isolate the antisemitic poseurs and the “let them fight their own wars” fabulists. Keep the partnership, make it more candid, if anything, but keep it. Carlson will keep writing; Owens will keep baiting; the numbers may ebb and flow. Your job is to fix this situation.
Many Americans hope their grandchildren won’t have to fight in the Middle East. Who doesn’t? But statecraft is the art of preventing the wars we would later be forced to fight, with uglier tools and worse odds. The last Republican administration struck that balance more than once; the polling suggests your voters are conflicted but persuadable.
If you mean what you’ve said in the US and in Israel – ally, not vassal; partnership, not protectorate – then do the necessary politics at home. God, as the Scriptures remind us, sets leaders where they are for a purpose. Act like one.