Via the New Yorker: Two decades ago, Bush and the Republicans were nearly united in their embrace of a brash militarism that sought to topple Saddam and transform Iraq and the broader Middle East in the process. Iraq, after paying a terrible price in the death of hundreds of thousands and disruption of millions of lives, was indeed transformed. But so, too, was American politics, where the backlash to the conflict arguably gave rise to the Presidencies of both Barack Obama—who first rose to fame as an antiwar state legislator—and Donald Trump. Trump is a Bush-basher of long standing, and he often framed his takeover of the Republican Party as an explicit repudiation of the extended Bush family and its internationalist legacy. Trump has said Bush “lied” to start the war, that he should have been impeached for how badly it was conducted, and that, over all, Bush had a “failed and uninspiring Presidency.” Seven years after Trump won the White House by attacking the last Republican to hold the office, his views of foreign policy are now ascendant, if not yet dominant, in the G.O.P. Indeed, I cannot imagine the Party’s present state of inward-looking populism without the twin Bush shocks of the 2008 government bailout of Wall Street and the global overreach of the invasion of Iraq. Much as the Vietnam War did for a previous generation, the failures in Iraq shattered American confidence, shaped future debates over the use of military force, made the concept of democracy promotion itself…