Time and again, Donald Trump has crowed about the failures and humiliation of US presidents who got bogged down in foreign misadventures, from Joe Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan to George W Bush’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq.
On Iran, too, Trump has a long memory, musing in recent months about how Jimmy Carter’s 1980 re-election bid was doomed by a botched attempt to rescue 52 American hostages held in Tehran.
“Think about Jimmy Carter, the great Jimmy Carter, with the helicopters crashing, the hostages all over the place. Remember that one?” he said in January. “Think about Sleepy Joe Biden with Afghanistan. What a disaster, the most embarrassing day in the history of our country.”
Yet whatever reticence Trump — who on the campaign trail repeatedly vowed to put “America first” and keep out of foreign entanglements — may have had towards overseas intervention now appears distant.
Trump’s newly rebranded Department of War has been busier during the past 12 months than his entire first presidency, intervening in new regions and taking greater risks than before.
“We’ve done more than any other administration has done, by far, in terms of military,” Trump told reporters on the first anniversary of his second presidency.
Much of this has been driven by a philosophy of rapid, surgical interventions that can be wrapped up with a quick declaration of victory, exemplified most spectacularly by the operation to pluck Nicolás Maduro from among his Cuban bodyguards in Venezuela in January.
But Trump has now launched what appears to be his most consequential intervention yet: Operation Epic Fury, a sprawling, open-ended campaign to topple Iran’s regime.
On Saturday, when Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed on day one of joint US and Israeli air attacks, Trump acknowledged that he might be entering a much longer campaign. The attacks would continue through the week or “as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” he wrote on Truth Social.
“He was very reluctant to use force” during his first presidency, said a former senior defence official. “He’s gotten very comfortable with it now.”
Trump came slowly to this newfound appetite for deploying the might of the US military abroad, with his first term marked by distaste for anything more than air strikes in support of a specific mission.
It was against Iran that Trump carried out one of the defining military interventions of his first term, when he responded to the near storming of the US embassy in Baghdad by Shia protesters suspected of ties with Iran by ordering the assassination of Revolutionary Guards commander Qassem Soleimani.
His boldness was rewarded by Iran’s relatively muted response, in which it fired a telegraphed barrage of missiles at US bases that caused structural damage but no casualties.
The Soleimani operation taught Trump that he could use military force to his benefit, said Elliott Abrams, who was special representative for Iran and Venezuela during the first Trump administration.
Trump voters “don’t want defeat, or American deaths or wars that take years, but they are happy to see power used well”, said Abrams.
This time, Iran has responded more forcefully, firing hundreds of drones and missiles at US and Israeli targets across the region, including military bases.
While most have been intercepted, the US military said on Sunday that three soldiers were killed and five seriously wounded, an outcome Trump had acknowledged was possible when he said American troops “may be lost”.
However, Tom Cotton, the Republican lawmaker who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, told CBS News on Sunday morning that barring targeted missions, Trump had “no plan for any kind of large-scale ground force inside of Iran”.
Speaking before the US and Israeli attacks, retired General Stanley McChrystal, a former commander of US Joint Special Operations Command, said Trump had “fallen into the trap” of thinking covert or surgical operations, air strikes and amassing warships off coasts are effective.
“I think he’s being seduced by something which, historically, doesn’t produce long-term outcomes,” he said.
Since retaking office, Trump has ordered strikes on Isis targets in Iraq, Syria and Nigeria, started a campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats in Latin America and, in the months before Maduro’s capture, built up the largest US naval presence in the region in decades.
This is a marked contrast with the Pentagon’s new national defence strategy that, while making clear it is prepared to take “decisive action unilaterally”, says the US will no longer be distracted by “interventionism” and “regime change”.
His administration has even threatened to use military force to take Greenland from US ally Denmark, putting the future of Nato in doubt. Writing to the Norwegian prime minister after failing to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump said he no longer felt “an obligation to think purely of Peace”.
In the build-up to his attack on Iran, Trump’s objectives appeared to shift repeatedly — swinging from protecting anti-regime protesters and ending Iran’s nuclear programme to curbing its ballistic missile arsenal and forcing it to end support for regional proxies.
Trump appeared almost until the last minute to be reluctant to use the “armada” he had deployed to within striking distance of Iran, musing out loud that he had not yet made up his mind.
Yet, despite indirect negotiations with Iran on Thursday at which both Tehran and the mediator Oman reported making progress, by Saturday morning it was clear Trump was no longer interested in a diplomatic solution.
“In his first term, he became more cautious with time,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a defence and strategy expert at the Brookings Institution think-tank. “In his second term, so far, all bets seem off.”
Additional reporting by Abigail Hauslohner, James Politi and Lauren Fedor in Washington
