With the War in Iran, Trump Has Launched His Own Brand of Forever War
Trump’s harsh criticism of the Iraq War in 2016 led many to conclude that he was an isolationist. Nothing could be further from the truth. Trump loves using American military power, and he has few qualms about using it. During his six years in power, he bombed more than a dozen countries, assassinated and kidnapped foreign military and political leaders, and risked war with grandiose and reckless actions on several occasions. He has particularly embraced missile and drone strikes, but has sometimes resorted to stealth bombers (as he did against a suspected Iranian nuclear site last June) and U.S. special forces (as he did to kidnap Maduro). It appears he has only one red line: He is extremely reluctant to deploy thousands of American troops abroad.
The absence of a massive deployment is, however, misleading on two counts. On the one hand, Trump is waging his own forever war. The US military, under his command, has been constantly active around the world during his second term: airstrikes in Yemen last year were followed by those in Somalia and then Syria; the raid in Caracas was followed less than two months later by the bombing of Iran. While the War on Terror under Bush and, to a lesser extent, Obama was driven by an unattainable end goal (riding the world of “terrorism”), Trump’s Forever War is even less well defined: there is no stated or apparent policy uniting these military operations.
The second path follows from the first. Recent reports suggest that Trump expects the war in Iran to continue for another month, but his public statements suggest it could either end imminently (he said earlier this week that it was “very complete, pretty much”) or never (he warned the Iranian regime that he was prepared for it to continue “forever”). His only stated criterion for the conclusion of the war is something that seems very unlikely in the near future: the Iranian regime must “surrender unconditionally.” Trump expressed his dissatisfaction with the country’s new leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, without providing any indication of what a more acceptable alternative would look like. In other words, it’s unclear what Trump wants from this war, which means it’s unclear how it will actually end.
