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** CFTNI Policy Brief
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** The Ghosts of Neocons Past: Stabilization and Reconstruction in the Trump Era
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In our latest Policy Focus, "The Ghosts of Neocons Past: Stabilization and Reconciliation in the Trump Era," CFTNI Senior Fellow Joshua Yaphe examines the foreign policy challenges that lie ahead. The White House would prefer to avoid anything that remotely resembles the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it has dismantled a large part of the bureaucracy that had accumulated from those conflicts. However, in many parts of the world, the Administration is going to find that conflicts it thought were resolved are not.

Particularly in the Middle East (Gaza, Iran, Syria, Lebanon), Washington will discover that some level of ongoing commitment is necessary, and the Administration will have to reinvent the wheel on stabilization and reconstruction operations — not to justify a heavy U.S. footprint in ongoing conflicts, but rather as a way to support our allies quietly and subtly. In this paper, Dr. Yaphe revisits some of the most fundamental lessons learned from Iraq and Afghanistan to show how the Administration, to its credit, is clearly aware of the problems but is unprepared to deal with them. It is in the Middle East that the ghosts of neoconservatives past will come to haunt the White House.

Read the report ([link removed]) .

For more CFTNI publications, please see our website ([link removed]) .

Paul J. Saunders

President

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The Ghosts of Neocons Past: Stabilization and Reconstruction in the Trump Era

In Gaza, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, the Trump Administration is going to find out that some level of ongoing commitment is necessary – more than what Washington wants or is prepared to offer. Stabilization and reconstruction will be necessary for ensuring that the victories we declare actually result in the outcomes we desire, while avoiding the embarrassment that will ensue for the President if his determined efforts to broker peace end up in failed states.

Read it here ([link removed]) .

About the Author:

Joshua Yaphe ([link removed]) is a Senior Fellow at the Center for the National Interest, host of the Key Judgments ([link removed]) podcast on Intelligence Studies, and author of Time and Narrative in Intelligence Analysis: A New Framework for the Production of Meaning ([link removed]) (Routledge, 2025), which is available for free in an Open Access edition online. He was Senior Analyst for the Arabian Peninsula at the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) and visiting professor at the National Intelligence University (NIU). He received a PhD in History from American University in Washington, DC, and authored the book Saudi Arabia and Iraq as Friends and Enemies: Borders, Tribes and a History Shared ([link removed]) (University of Liverpool Press,
2022).

The opinions and characterizations in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Government.

Copyright (C) 2026 Center for the National Interest. All rights reserved.

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