Donald Trump has acquired a taste for ordering the most lethal and effective military in the world into action. He’s admitted that he gets a kick from watching the live footage through the cameras on soldiers’ helmets during raids. After the magically efficient raid on Caracas which resulted in zero American deaths, the temptation must be to roll the dice one more time. Giving the order must now almost feel habitual. Asked in an interview with The New York Times last week if there were any limits on his power, Trump said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
All eyes in Washington have turned to Iran, where the regime has brutally suppressed widespread anti-government protests since the beginning of January. Trump has repeatedly threatened to intervene in some form if the regime does not stop killing protesters. American troops have been evacuated from Al Udeid Airbase in Qatar, which is a favourite target for retaliatory Iranian bombing, suggesting the Americans expect a retaliation for something.
While his staffers, conscious of the upcoming midterms, try to get him to talk about the cost of living, Trump seems bewitched by the exercise of military might. His announcement last week that he will get Congress to hike the Pentagon’s budget by 50 per cent to $1.5 trillion showed that he intends to put the military to work for a long time to come. In other words, Caracas probably wasn’t a one-off.
The last time Trump struck Iran in June, the reaction within Maga was divided. The isolationists lined up against the hawks. Steve Bannon rushed to the White House to lunch with the president. There was a sense the meaning of Maga – no new foreign wars, no forever wars – was at stake.
Well, that debate now feels settled. His base’s intoxication with the ruthless display of American power in Caracas has overwhelmed its scepticism towards foreign engagements. The purported success of that operation as well as the strikes on Iran last year has fed the idea within Maga that Trump’s instincts – ie whatever he decides to do – are correct.
Meanwhile, isolationists such as Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, who count JD Vance as their man on the inside, recognise that they have lost the battle, if not the war, for control over what America First means. “This is the new world that we live in, for good or for bad,” Carlson recently said on his podcast, “so, it is a waste of time and breath to complain about it”. The one saving grace Carlson could find was the pretence that foreign adventurism was about anything other than resources and national interest had finally been dropped. Instead, he admitted that what we are witnessing now is the unveiling of the Trumpian empire.
Opposition to the Iranian regime has long percolated in top Maga circles. The famous blueprint for the second term, Project 2025, which was written before Trump entered office, states that the “time may be right to press harder on the Iranian theocracy, support the Iranian people, and take other steps to draw Iran into the community of free and modern nations.”
For now at least, Trump seems to be backing off from the strikes, claiming in the Oval Office yesterday that he had had assurances the regime had stopped killing citizens. His favourite allies, the Gulf states, are reportedly urging him to avoid getting involved in order to prevent the region descending into chaos. But the fact that many people in Washington feel that some action in the future is inevitable speaks to Trump’s new penchant for adventurism. Unshackled by checks and balances, as well as the establishment figures who restrained him in his first term, Trump feels emboldened to exercise military power at will.
In doing so, Trump has transcended the old binaries that split American foreign debates, whether that was the doves versus the hawks or the isolationists versus neocons. He has replaced those hoary concepts with brute imperialism. Protectorates are established. Colonies formed. Tributes extracted. And airstrikes pondered. All at a whim.
[Further reading: Donald Trump is remaking a hemisphere in his image]
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