President Donald Trump’s doctrine seems straightforward and almost easy: strike at the guilty, strike hard from afar, and end the war on American terms.
Use war to settle conflicts – tribal, political, religious, cultural, and material—between organized groups, writes Victor Davis Hanson in American Greatness.
During Trump’s first term, he eliminated the terrorist kingpin Qassem Soleimani and ISIS terrorist grandee Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In large part, notes VDH, Trump was successful, since Iran never replaced the venomous Soleimani nor the terrorist kingpin Abu Bakr al-Baghadi.
In the case of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Trump went after the catalyst of ISIS terrorism. Trump also bombed ISIS into near nonexistence. Unlike Iran, ISIS lacked the financial and material resources of a state sponsor of terror. ISIS had no ability to make weapons or finance its terrorism.
VDH believes that Trump probably killed more Russian ground troops (more than 200?) than America had during the entire Cold War, with his furious response to the Wagner Group assault on a U.S. Special Operations base near Khasham, Syria. Yet the defeat of Russian mercenaries also prevented a wider conflict.
President Trump successfully portrayed his antagonists as the unprovoked aggressors, employed overwhelming force to eliminate them, and declared them one-off occurrences with no need to punish the ultimate source or sponsor of the aggression with further force, and he was largely successful in limiting subsequent attacks on American installations.
Trump, during his second term, widened his doctrine of “preventative deterrence” with operations to remove Venezuelan communist strongman Nicolás Maduro, along with two separate bombing campaigns against Iran.
Trump went after Maduro, whom Biden had largely ignored, for his past of exporting gang-bangers and criminals across the Biden-era open border and for using Venezuela’s cartel connections to profit from American deaths.
By attacking Iran, Trump cited the theocracy’s past terrorist attacks on Americans and U.S. allies, its effort to assassinate Westerners, and its unwillingness to abandon plans to create a nuclear weapon.
VDH lists Trump’s new ways of conducting war:
- Geostrategy
Always behind these seemingly unconnected events—and other nonkinetic moves like warning Panama about Chinese intrusions—strategic concerns loom. The common denominator is usually isolating China from strategic spaces, allies, and oil—and Russia in a lesser sense.
Cuba, Iran, Venezuela are easily identified enemies given their past anti-American violence.
Loud and terrorist, but ultimately impotent, proxies of strategic enemies—Cuba, Iran, Venezuela—are preferable targets. They are not just easily identified enemies given their past anti-American violence; they are also targeted because their demise offers a global display of the weakness of their distant patrons and underwriters.
2. Wars of Reckoning
Trump always frames his interventionism as reactive and long overdue. It is a sort of “reckoning war” for previously overlooked crimes that his predecessors had ignored but are often seared in the American mind. “Preemptive” or “preventative” wars, these strikes may be. But Trump himself avoids the baggage that those adjectives of aggression convey in the collective American memory.
3. War among Negotiations
Trump’s way of warmaking is usually an extension of ongoing negotiations (e.g., over Iran’s nuclear weapons or Maduro’s subsidies to terrorists and drug trafficking). So, during discussions, he offers various. exit ramps to his adversaries and publicly laments the possibility of violence.
Meanwhile, continues VDH, American naval and expeditionary assets show up and amass to ramp up the pressure. Trump does not wait for negotiations to fail, but usually offers a deadline to his adversaries. And then he simply informs his advisors of the point at which the enemy has no intention of seeking a peaceful settlement. A strike follows.
4. The Culpable Apparat
Trump prefers top-down war, VDH reminds readers.
That is, he starts his attacks by targeting the enemy apparat, not its lesser henchman. The aim is both to disrupt its command and control and to separate an enemy leader from a population deemed not necessarily culpable.
Khamenei, al-Baghdadi, Maduro, Soleimani, the Wagner Group, widely regarded as odious, which strengthens his prophylactic or reactive action. For all the boilerplate, even Trump’s enemies do not gain empathy since their antiwar activism becomes inseparable from the de facto defense of a rogues’ gallery of deposed and hated killers and thugs.
5. No to Nation Building
Trump sees the U.S. as responsible only for lighting the fuse of revolution, then giving the oppressed the chance of something better if they do not miss their chance at regime change and working with the Americans.
6. No Boots on the Ground
Few ground troops involved, so no chances for an Abu Ghraib misadventure, or humiliating skedaddles from Kabul, or maimed Americans from shaped-charge IEDs.
It is much harder to kill Americans in the air and on the seas,” and, as VDE writes, “because there is zero investment in occupying a country and hands-on rebuilding of its institutions, casualties are kept to a minimum. Trump equates deploying a larger ground force in the Middle East with imbecility.
