Why Trump is embracing US military power after years of caution

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq offered a stark lesson in the limits of military force. The Iran attacks suggest an era of postwar wariness is over

By Greg Jaffe

 

In his three runs for the presidency, Donald J. Trump, more than any other candidate, spoke of the limits of US military power, especially in the Middle East. 

In 2016, he blasted the Iraq invasion as a “big, fat mistake.” In 2023, he kicked off his third run for the White House by boasting, “I am proud to be the only president in decades who did not start a new war.” 

Mr. Trump was channeling a deep and widespread pessimism that dominated the Pentagon and the foreign policy establishment in the years after the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. 

 

The hopelessness ran through both political parties. 

“In Iraq, the US intervened and occupied, and the result was a costly disaster,” Philip Gordon, a top foreign policy adviser in the Obama White House, famously wrote in 2015. “In Libya, the US intervened and did not occupy, and the result was a costly disaster. In Syria, the US neither intervened nor occupied, and the result is a costly disaster.” 

But it was Mr. Trump who transformed the frustrations into a popular political movement. 

One year into his second term, Mr. Trump seems to have shed his earlier skepticism and turned repeatedly to the US military as a low-cost, high-payoff means of solving problems that have bedeviled American presidents for decades.

In June, he dispatched B-2 bombers on a mission to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. 

So far this year, he has given the green light to a high-stakes raid that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. “No nation in the world could achieve what America achieved,” Mr. Trump said hours after the operation.

Then he signed off on a major US-Israeli attack that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. Mr. Trump said on social media that the attacks would continue “throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” 

The president’s sudden embrace of US military power is a stunning reversal. Democrats warned over the weekend that he was ignoring the lessons of the long and bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The American people have seen this playbook before — claims of urgency, misrepresented intelligence and military action that pulls the United States into regime change and prolonged, costly nation-building,” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. 

The attacks on Iran have also come at a cost to the United States. Retaliatory strikes have so far killed six US troops, the military’s Central Command announced on Sunday.

During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, senior military officials repeatedly emphasized that the United States could not bomb or kill its way to victory. America’s enemies would rearm and replace leaders lost to airstrikes and raids. Civilian casualties, an inevitability in war, would feed the enemy’s ranks. 

Mr. Trump appears convinced that he and his top advisers, including Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have found a more effective way of wielding military might. 

In the days leading up to the Iran attack, General Caine emphasized that an operation aimed at toppling the government or debilitating the military would be much more difficult than the capture of Mr. Maduro or the strikes on Iran last summer.

Publicly, Mr. Trump played down the risks and insisted that General Caine believed any military incursion into Iran would be “something easily won.” 

The president’s string of relatively low-cost military successes in his second term seemed to have shifted his views on American military interventions.

“He has accepted that the US military is very good,” said Daniel L. Byman, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “He seems to believe that if you avoid major ground operations and keep it limited, it’s probably going to work.” 

In the aftermath of military defeats, senior uniformed leaders have often acted as a check on presidential ambitions. Gen. Colin Powell, who was wounded in Vietnam and went on to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisted that the US military should be deployed only when vital American interests were at stake, the objectives were clear and an exit strategy had been defined. 

His dictum became known as the Powell Doctrine.

A decade later, Mr. Powell set aside his skepticism and made the case in a presentation to the U.N. Security Council for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a decision he later came to regret. 

In Mr. Trump’s first term, senior Pentagon leaders like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the Joint Chiefs chairman, Mark A. Milley, who led troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, sought to temper his military instincts. The president came to loathe and distrust both of them. 

In Mr. Trump’s second term, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired or sidelined more than two dozen generals whom he viewed as out of step with the president’s policies and instincts regarding the employment of military force.

The dismissals, which are without precedent in recent decades, have had a chilling effect on those who remain, military officials said. 

Mr. Trump’s view of military force is not totally unconstrained. In both Iran and Venezuela, he has repeatedly ruled out the large-scale deployment of ground forces that characterized the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. 

His approach to military powers, such as Russia and China, has been far more conciliatory than confrontational. 

Mr. Trump has also shown a willingness to pull the plug on military interventions, such as his campaign to reopen shipping in the Red Sea by bombing Houthi militants in Yemen into submission. He wanted to see results in 30 days of the initial strikes.

When senior military leaders suggested it would take as long as 10 months to debilitate the Houthis’ air defenses, Mr. Trump cut a deal with the militants rather than continuing the operations. The United States would halt the bombing campaign, and the militia would no longer target American ships. The Houthis did not commit to ending attacks on other vessels. 

“He basically seemed to conclude that the costs, including the financial costs, of continuing the operation were too high,” said Richard Fontaine, the chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security. 

Other presidents contemplating military action often leaned heavily on advisers to craft strategies that balanced ends, ways and means to achieve a clearly defined conclusion. Today, Mr. Trump seems to be operating by instinct rather than any strict ideology or planning process. 

“He has been explicit that he will not allow American power — or his own credibility — to be undermined,” said Anne Dreazen, a former Middle East analyst at the Pentagon who is now with the American Jewish Committee, which supports Jewish causes around the world. “When Iran continued using the nuclear negotiations to stall and play games, that was a serious miscalculation.” 

The big question is whether Mr. Trump’s approach, with its emphasis on continued coercion through air and missile strikes, will produce a more sustainable peace than previous strategies did.

His tactics are well suited to narrowly defined objectives. In Iran, Mr. Trump’s goals are far more ambitious.