Victor Davis Hanson
War is the use of arms to settle differences–tribal, political, religious, cultural, and material–between organized groups. It is unchanging. The general laws of armed conflict stays immutable, given the constancy of human nature.
However, the manner in which war is conducted remains fluid. New weapons, tactics, and strategies elicit counterresponses in an endless cycle of tensions between defensive and offensive superiority.
That said, has President Donald Trump introduced a novel way of waging Western war against America’s foreign enemies?
We saw glimpses of it during his first term, when he eliminated Iranian general and terrorist kingpin Qassem Soleimani and ISIS terrorist grandee Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In the former case, he preferred hitting the cause rather than the effects of Iranian terrorism in Syria and Iraq, while making it clear that he had no intention of striking the Iranian mainland and entering into a tit-for-tat “forever war.”
In large part, he was successful. Iran never quite replaced the venomous Soleimani. And despite tired threats, its performative art responses did not kill any Americans, and they were seen by Trump as venting and not worth a counterresponse.
In the case of the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Trump likewise went after the catalyst of ISIS terrorism. But he also bombed ISIS into near nonexistence in Iraq, since, unlike Iran, it lacked the financial and material resources of a state sponsor of terror, and it had no independent ability to make weapons or finance its terrorism.
In 2018, 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 led to no wider conflict.
In these three cases, 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.
In Trump’s second term, he widened his doctrine of “preventative deterrence” with operations to remove Venezuelan communist strongman Nicolas Maduro, along with two separate bombing campaigns against Iran.
While the second Iran operation is now in progress, it may resemble the earlier two in a number of facets.
Trump again portrayed Venezuela and Iran as unpunished past and present psychopathic aggressors. He 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.
As for 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.
What, then, are Trump’s new ways of conducting war?
1. 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.
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, 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. 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.
His enemy counterparts–al-Baghdadi, Khamenei, Maduro, Soleimani, the Wagner Group–are 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
There is no 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.
(Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.)
