In his three runs for the presidency, Donald J. Trump, more than any other candidate, spoke of the limits of U.S. military power, especially in the Middle East.<\/p>\n
In 2016, he blasted the Iraq invasion as a \u201cbig, fat mistake<\/a>.\u201d In 2023, he kicked off his third run for the White House by boasting<\/a>, \u201cI am proud to be the only president in decades who did not start a new war.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Trump was channeling a deep and widespread pessimism that dominated the Pentagon and the foreign policy establishment in the years after the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.<\/p>\n The hopelessness ran through both political parties.<\/p>\n \u201cIn Iraq, the U.S. intervened and occupied, and the result was a costly disaster,\u201d Philip Gordon, a top foreign policy adviser in the Obama White House, famously wrote in 2015<\/a>. \u201cIn Libya, the U.S. intervened and did not occupy, and the result was a costly disaster. In Syria, the U.S. neither intervened nor occupied, and the result is a costly disaster.\u201d<\/p>\n But it was Mr. Trump who transformed the frustrations into a popular political movement.<\/p>\n One year into his second term, Mr. Trump seems to have shed his earlier skepticism and turned repeatedly to the U.S. military as a low-cost, high-payoff means of solving problems that have bedeviled American presidents for decades.<\/p>\n In June, he dispatched B-2 bombers on a mission to strike Iran\u2019s nuclear facilities.<\/p>\n So far this year, he has given the green light to a high-stakes raid that resulted in the capture of President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro<\/a> of Venezuela. \u201cNo nation in the world could achieve what America achieved,\u201d Mr. Trump said<\/a> hours after the operation.<\/p>\n Then he signed off on a major U.S.-Israeli attack that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei<\/a>, Iran\u2019s supreme leader. Mr. Trump said on social media that the attacks would continue \u201cthroughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!\u201d<\/p>\n The president\u2019s sudden embrace of U.S. military power is a stunning reversal. Democrats warned over the weekend that he was ignoring the lessons of the long and bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n Senator Mark Warner of Virginia was among the Democrats who warned over the weekend that Mr. Trump was ignoring the lessons of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.Credit…Tierney L. Cross\/The New York Times<\/p>\n \u201cThe American people have seen this playbook before \u2014 claims of urgency, misrepresented intelligence and military action that pulls the United States into regime change and prolonged, costly nation-building,\u201d Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said in a statement.<\/p>\n The attacks on Iran have also come at a cost to the United States. Retaliatory strikes have so far killed six U.S. troops<\/a>, the military\u2019s Central Command announced<\/a> on Sunday.<\/p>\n During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, senior military officials repeatedly emphasized that the United States could not bomb or kill its way to victory. America\u2019s enemies would rearm and replace leaders lost to airstrikes and raids. Civilian casualties, an inevitability in war, would feed the enemy\u2019s ranks.<\/p>\n Mr. Trump appears convinced that he and his top advisers, including Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have found a more effective way of wielding military might.<\/p>\n In the days leading up to the Iran attack, General Caine emphasized that an operation aimed at toppling the government or debilitating the military would be much more difficult than the capture of Mr. Maduro or the strikes on Iran last summer.<\/p>\n Publicly, Mr. Trump played down the risks and insisted that General Caine believed any military incursion into Iran would be \u201csomething easily won<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n The president\u2019s string of relatively low-cost military successes in his second term seemed to have shifted his views on American military interventions.<\/p>\n \u201cHe has accepted that the U.S. military is very good,\u201d said Daniel L. Byman, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. \u201cHe seems to believe that if you avoid major ground operations and keep it limited, it\u2019s probably going to work.\u201d<\/p>\n In the aftermath of military defeats, senior uniformed leaders have often acted as a check on presidential ambitions. Gen. Colin Powell, who was wounded in Vietnam and went on to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisted that the U.S. military should be deployed only when vital American interests were at stake, the objectives were clear and an exit strategy had been defined.<\/p>\n His dictum became known as the Powell Doctrine<\/a>.<\/p>\n A decade later, Mr. Powell set aside his skepticism and made the case in a presentation to the U.N. Security Council for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a decision he later came to regret.<\/p>\n In Mr. Trump\u2019s first term, senior Pentagon leaders like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the Joint Chiefs chairman, Mark A. Milley, who led troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, sought to temper his military instincts. The president came to loathe and distrust both of them.<\/p>\n Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired or sidelined more than two dozen generals whom he views as out of step with the president\u2019s policies and instincts regarding the employment of military force.Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times<\/p>\n