Republican senator from Kentucky Rand Paul has praised President Trump for calling off an airstrike on Iran, saying that "it really takes a statesman to show restraint amidst a chorus of voices for war."

The White House was considering the strikes in retaliation to Iran shooting down a US surveillance drone, which may have been intruding on Iranian airspace. This incident came shortly on the heels of a fire on a Japanese oil tanker blamed on Iran, though inconsistencies and curiosities about the affair gave it a strong appearance of a Gulf of Tonkin-style false flag.

President Trump, who campaigned on a nationalist/populist platform of disentangling from endless, destructive foreign wars and draining the Washington swamp, has worked hard to deliver on those promises to the American people, despite the intransigence of the political establishment and the powerful war lobby. Unfortunately, some of Trump's recent top appointments, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Gina Haspel, head of the CIA, have continually revealed themselves as globalist warmongers intent on subverting the president's agenda.

However, Trump appears to have found a friend and supporter in his former primary opponent, the libertarian-leaning senator Rand Paul, who, along with popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, appears to have been instrumental in resisting the influence of the hawks and helping the President to stick to his mandate and resist the false flag propaganda of the deep state, which seeks another destructive Middle Eastern war. The personal connection between the two statesmen should give the American people encouragement with every successive Bush/Clinton-style foreign disaster averted.