America Unmoored
Trump’s war in Iran has exposed a superpower with no coherent idea of its role in the world
There is a conventional wisdom, that if you play stupid games you will win stupid prizes. Three weeks into Operation Epic Fury, that aphorism has acquired the weight of prophecy. What began on February 28th as a joint American-Israeli aerial assault, ostensibly to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, has spiralled into the most expensive and strategically incoherent American military operation since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Brent crude has surged past $109 a barrel. The Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes, is effectively closed. Thirteen American service members are dead, over 1,300 Iranians have been killed including Supreme Leader Khamenei, and the Pentagon has spent upwards of $16.5 billion—and is now requesting $200 billion more from Congress.
Yet the gravest cost may not be measured in barrels or billions. It is the revelation that America’s commander-in-chief has no coherent idea of what America’s role in the world should be, and no foreign policy worthy of the name. The Iran war has not created this crisis. It has merely made it impossible to ignore.
The most damning indictment of Mr Trump’s leadership is the simplest, that nobody—including, it appears, the president himself—can say what the war is for. Officials have variously stated the objective is to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme, eliminate its missiles, degrade its proxies, secure its resources, punish the regime for killing protesters, and bring about regime change. Vice-President Vance told reporters “we are not at war with Iran; we’re at war with Iran’s nuclear programme.” Hours later, Mr Trump posted on Truth Social calling for regime change. Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment captured it well: the president has been “all over the place” on his aims, and that lack of clarity has put the military and America’s partners in impossible positions. Asked on March 16th whether he was ready to declare victory, Mr Trump said no. He has separately said the war will end when he “feels it in his bones.”
The incoherence is dangerous. A war begun as what Mr Sadjadpour calls a “war of choice”—no imminent nuclear threat, no impending attack on American assets—has morphed into a “war of necessity” now that Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz. American intelligence assessments contradict the administration’s claims of an immediate Iranian missile threat, placing such capabilities as far off as 2035. The IAEA confirmed it had no evidence of a structured weapons programme at the time of the strikes. The casus belli rests on presidential intuition, which the White House press secretary has defended as a “feeling based on fact.”
Mr Trump’s failure is rooted in a deeper intellectual deficiency. He has never grasped that foreign policy involves more than leverage and deal-making. He treats alliances as protection rackets, trade agreements as zero-sum contests, and diplomacy as the art of extraction. This framework has a brutal logic in tariff negotiations. Applied to the Middle East, it is catastrophic. Iran is a nation of 88 million people with a theological state, a 3,000-year civilisational identity, and a resistance to foreign domination forged by decades of Western interference—from the CIA’s coup against Mosaddegh in 1953 to American backing of Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran in the 1980s. Mr Trump appears genuinely baffled that Iran has not capitulated. On March 17th he claimed “nobody” expected Iran to retaliate against Gulf states, even though Iranian officials had publicly vowed to do precisely that.
If Mr Trump’s war aims are confused, his alliance management has been farcical. Having spent years insulting NATO partners, threatening to seize Greenland, and imposing tariffs on allies, he turned in mid-March to those same countries and demanded they send warships to the Strait of Hormuz. The response was devastating. Germany’s defence minister asked what Mr Trump expected “a handful of European frigates to do that the powerful US Navy cannot,” adding: “This is not our war; we have not started it.” France said it would “never take part” in operations to reopen the strait. Spain, Italy, Australia, Japan, Poland, Sweden, and Greece all declined. The EU’s foreign-policy chief said there was “no appetite” to expand naval operations. Estonia’s foreign minister posed the question haunting every European capital: “What will be the plan?”
Mr Trump’s reaction followed a familiar script. On Monday he claimed “numerous countries” were on their way to help, but refused to name any. By Tuesday, after virtually every invited nation had publicly refused, he reversed course: “We don’t need any help, actually.” The volte-face would be comic were its consequences not so severe. The United States is prosecuting a major war in near-total diplomatic isolation, a state of affairs unprecedented since at least the Second World War.
The financial toll is unforgiving. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies estimated costs at $891 million per day during the opening phase. Each Patriot interceptor costs roughly $4 million; Iran launched over 2,000 drones and 500 ballistic missiles, producing a cost ratio of 106-to-1 between interceptor and drone. Petrol prices have surged to $3.88 per gallon, nearly a dollar more than a month ago. Mr Trump has waived the Jones Act and tapped the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but analysts say the impact on prices will be negligible. Senator Elizabeth Warren summarised the political problem, that while there is no money for the 15 million Americans who lost health coverage, there is a billion dollars a day for bombing Iran.
Beneath the chaos lies a question Mr Trump has made urgently pressing: what is American foreign policy for? For eight decades the answer was reasonably clear—a liberal international order underpinned by free trade, collective security, and multilateral institutions. Mr Trump has dismantled that framework without erecting anything in its place. He withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris accord, and the Iran nuclear deal. He imposed tariffs indiscriminately and publicly mused about not defending Taiwan. His “America First” slogan implies retrenchment and restraint. But an America First president does not launch a war of choice in the Middle East without consulting allies, without an exit strategy, and without stable war aims. The contradiction at the heart of Trumpian foreign policy is that it is simultaneously isolationist and aggressive, parsimonious and profligate, contemptuous of allies and desperate for their help. It is, as one analyst put it, “instinct, not strategy.”
History offers ample warning. Every American president who has taken the country into a protracted conflict without clear objectives has paid a devastating political price—Truman in Korea, Johnson in Vietnam, Bush in Iraq. Mr Trump’s net approval has fallen to -15.3, a second-term low. A Quinnipiac poll found just 37 per cent approving of his performance. Among true independents, only 24 per cent approve. There has been no rally-round-the-flag effect; there is only exhaustion, the accumulated residue of two decades in Afghanistan and Iraq. Joe Kent, a former counterterrorism director in Mr Trump’s own administration, has resigned, arguing Iran poses no imminent threat.
Mr Trump has always loved chaos and thrived in it. But this is not a tariff that can be imposed and withdrawn at whim. It is a war, with all the irreversibility that wars entail. The Strait is closed. Thirteen Americans are dead. The bill approaches $200 billion. The allies are gone. And the president still cannot say what he is fighting for. A superpower that does not know what it wants is more hazardous than one that wants the wrong things. At least the latter can be negotiated with and contained. The former is simply unpredictable, and in a world of nuclear weapons and interconnected economies, unpredictability is the gravest threat of all.