Trump Is Waging One Big War Against the Rest of the World

Before Donald Trump’s recent military campaigns, Iran and Venezuela weren’t often spoken of in the same breath. But in fact, the countries share much in common. They’ve both been demonized as evil, as bad guys, formally designated as states that promote terrorism. They’ve both suffered under intensive sanctions that have damaged life for civilians. And influential advocates from both places have been gunning for regime change for decades. Although recently their paths have diverged, with Iran’s battered regime hanging on even after a month of American and Israeli fire, and Venezuela’s government left intact but co-opted, their fates may yet converge again, thanks to a recently rebranded “Department of War” directed by a president who has heedlessly started confrontations around the globe without much of a plan. As the retired career diplomat Chas Freeman put it in January, “The United States now unabashedly presents itself as an untrustworthy expansionist power that substitutes unilateral diktats, intimidation, and the use of force for diplomacy.”

Trump’s foreign policy has long been misunderstood because of its inherent incoherence. He came to power in 2016 by telling Americans what they wanted to hear. He had little interest in laying out a grand strategy or a bigger worldview beyond his promise to “Make America Great Again,” itself a slogan in which voters could hear what they wanted. His forceful criticism of the Iraq War, however, differentiated him from Hillary Clinton, who voted for it when she was in the Senate in 2002. But it was never all too clear whether Trump had opposed George W. Bush’s invasion or just thought his Republican predecessor should have taken the oil.

The president’s more recent turn to militarism has led to immense changes in U.S. statecraft. In the first months of his second term, he enlisted Elon Musk and the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency to dismantle America’s soft-power infrastructure, notably the humanitarian and development arm USAID, but also government-funded think tanks, media organizations, and other Cold War legacy programs. In Trump’s world, soft power apparently has little value. At the same time, Trump has dismantled the global alliance system. He has slowly chipped away at NATO, built a “Board of Peace” to counter the United Nations, and levied tariffs in contradiction of the global economic order.

Trump is known to cut bait on unpopular policies, but his war continues. The risk-averse president who turned away the jets from striking Iran in June 2019, much to the chagrin of John Bolton, the national security adviser at the time, is gone. In his place is a careless, casual warmonger, a leader who thinks that he can recklessly use force whenever and practically wherever he wants—and that his past track record of avoiding quagmires and entanglements means he can do so with few long-term consequences.

Bolton, the perennial hawk, has transformed himself into a critic of Trump’s latest misadventures. One recalls his candid admonition from 2022: “As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat—not here but, you know, other places—it takes a lot of work.” In his second term, Trump has embraced the coup—but not the work.

The president’s tendency to jump from conflict to conflict has made it difficult to understand where one war ends and another begins. But Iran and Venezuela are part of the same war—and that war is at the center of America’s foreign policy under Trump.

The first act of the Iran war, it must be noted, was the strike on a girls’ school in Minab that killed at least 175 people, most of them children. The fact that Trump can launch a war on a whim that has already killed thousands and is sending the global economy into shock is not so much an indictment of him—although it is that, too—but of the security state he presides over. It’s remarkable that decades after the Cold War, it’s still possible to stumble into war without guardrails or stopgap measures to get in the way. The national security infrastructure cobbled together in the paranoid, red-baiting moments at the end of World War II gave the American president the capacity to launch shadow wars; after the September 11 attacks, those powers were further consolidated. There has been no real accountability for war on terrorism part one, and so here we are barreling into part two, with terrorism even more vaguely defined.

Trump is also breaking conventions and laws from the era before that. Political assassinations have technically been banned since 1976, but Executive Order 11905 was not enough to stop Trump (along with Israel) from killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the same day bombs killed the students in Minab.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973, enacted in the midst of Nixon and Kissinger’s endless Vietnam folly to prevent the prospect of secret campaigns, like the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, is no match for Trump either. Congress has long undermined its coequal foreign policy–making powers. Democratic members failed to assert themselves over Venezuela and did little in response to Trump’s strikes on Iran last June. The most Democratic leadership has offered is procedural criticisms of the warpath-president. As Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement released on February 28, the day Trump launched the first airstrikes, “House Democrats remain committed to compelling a vote on this resolution upon our return.”

The multitude of U.S. military bases in the Middle East and environs makes them far too easy to use—and to become targets for adversaries in counterstrikes that lead to Gulf of Tonkin–level flubs. More than a month into the war, 13 American troops have been killed and nearly 400 injured. In late March, Iran showed further capacity to cause havoc by reportedly launching its first intermediate-range ballistic missile toward Diego Garcia, a joint U.S.-U.K. military base in the Indian Ocean. In Washington, however, the policy discussion rarely considers the deeper question of how and why the United States has a base on the island territory and other far-flung places to begin with.

And so a military budget exceeding a trillion dollars for the first time in global history can all too easily be augmented with a supplemental $200 billion for a new war. Republicans who are cautious about government spending can’t curb their appetite for military spending, which only serves as encouragement for the president’s militarism.

And the architecture of the disastrous war on terrorism had never been dismantled, including the potential surveillance mechanisms in place since the Patriot Act, the militarization of the police, and congressional authorizations for the use of force abroad. These all sit ready for new enemies, with an attendant domestic network of law enforcement powers that can be used to threaten critics of the war.

Meanwhile, the functional experts—in this case, apparently, the energy eggheads at the State Department, who may have warned that the Strait of Hormuz was kinda important—have been DOGE’d. And even if they were there, would the president have listened?

Nate Swanson, a career government official who worked on Iran policy in the State Department and most recently on the U.S. negotiating team, warned in essays that Iran would escalate. Since the United States attacked, he has warned that the war would backfire. Sage counsel. Too bad it appeared in Foreign Affairs, not in the Situation Room. Swanson was Loomer-ed last year.

One of the few constraints holding back the president’s war seems to be a shortage of weapons. When the undersecretary of defense (war) for policy, Elbridge Colby, spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations in early March, everyone came armed with their own questions and were listening for different things. Several investors and private-sector leaders I spoke with beforehand said they were there to hear about magazine depth—the stockpiles of munitions and the weapons production capability of the country. Stocks are low. This has major implications for Americans’ ability to fight multiple wars at once, or even this one.

Asked directly by the moderator, CFR president Michael Froman, about how depleted U.S. weapons are, Colby remarked, “Well, I just say up front that our armed forces have the necessary equipment to take on anyone and pursue the president’s goals and objectives. And nobody should have the impression that we’re somehow, you know, behind the curve.” The answer may have calmed some nerves, but the data suggests a more complicated picture. One study shows that the United States fired more than 5,000 munitions in the first four days of its war on Iran, a quantity it could take up to $16 billion and years to replace. What’s even more frightening is that supercharging weapons production, as most of Washington’s defense planners have been pushing for, would further enable more wars of choice. Rebuilding the defense industrial base was a major priority, for example, of Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and now presumably those bombs are a-flying.

Colby, who calls himself a “flexible realist,” is the Pentagon’s number three official and the author of the National Defense Strategy that was released in January. He argued in his widely read 2021 book, The Strategy of Denial, that the United States ought to focus on countering China in Asia and dispense with its Middle East delusions. Yet here he was, a day after being grilled by senators on the Hill, presenting to the Washington establishment his staunch support for Trump’s war of choice. Colby took great caution to not make news or get ahead of the remarks of Secretary of Defense (War) Pete Hegseth; he regularly deferred to the president’s statements.

Critics speculated that he was holding back because of the immense contradiction between Trump’s war and Colby’s worldview. Or as Adam Tooze, the Columbia historian put it, “Resign, man. Have some self-respect. Resign!”

A simpler yet persistent constraint on the president seems to be his attention span. Early in the interview, Froman asked Colby, “Is Cuba next?” The council members in the audience laughed. Colby carefully explained how the president’s actions in Venezuela fit in with the published security strategy. Then he added, “One thing that people should calculate on and should factor is that the president … is not going to be bound by the sort of shibboleths of the past, if those are not consistent with Americans’ interests.”

When President Biden followed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into a ruthless war against Palestinians that many international organizations have documented as a genocide, not enough Democrats spoke up. Now, however, some are drawing a red line about Iran. “The Democrats are way better than they have been in the past,” Matt Duss, the former adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders who’s now at the Center for International Policy, told me on the podcast I host, None of the Above. Duss cited Senator Chris Murphy as “a real standout here”: He has been sharing his (unclassified) takeaways from closed-door briefings, educating voters, and “making public the fact that this war does not make sense. It’s obviously illegal. It’s strategically stupid.”

The “No Kings” protests that involved millions of people in thousands of locations across the United States were motivated in part by opposition to the Iran war—but how much can a peace movement achieve? The students who fought against Gaza were silenced by law enforcement and university administrators, and Duss points out that historic protests in recent years, from Black Lives Matter to Palestine, had little effect on legislation. “Did it manage to move the needle on the policy? No, unfortunately not. And I think this goes to a bigger problem of just Americans having so few opportunities and ways and channels and levers with which to impact foreign policy decisions,” Duss explained.

A large majority of Trump voters (79%), meanwhile, favor declaring the Iran war a victory and getting out, according to a Quincy Institute/American Conservative survey fielded by Ipsos. Although the war is broadly unpopular, there is some reason to believe that little will shift public opinion unless its character changes substantially via the presence of thousands of U.S. ground troops. Until that happens, it is likely that the public will broadly disapprove of it, but that Trump’s base will back it—which is not a recipe for change in this administration, at least.

That has not always been the case. Nixon was much more influenced by pushback from the peace movement, mass protests, and public opinion than was previously understood, Carolyn Woods Eisenberg argues in her authoritative history of the Vietnam War, Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia, which draws on newly unclassified documents.

In the book, Eisenberg revisits an iconic moment at Woodstock, where 400,000 attendees joined Country Joe and the Fish to sing in protest:

And it’s 1, 2, 3
What are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam
And it’s 5, 6, 7
Open up the pearly gates
Ah, ain’t no time to wonder why
Whoopee! We’re all gonna die

In early March, when the United States was already in Iran and Venezuela, Country Joe passed away in Berkeley, California, at the age of 84.

Next stop is Cuba? Whoopee! We’re all gonna die.