Mapped: Every country Trump has attacked or threatened from Iraq to Greenland in a year of ‘America First’
When US president Donald Trump began his second term in office, it was on the promise of putting “America first”.
For many of his MAGA supporters, that meant rejecting interventionist policies that had overextended the country’s military commitments across the globe.
His National Security Strategy, published last year, promised that “the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests”.
But since his return last January, the US commander-in-chief has pursued an aggressive foreign policy, greenlighting military strikes on multiple countries, seizing oil tankers and overseeing the shock overnight capture of Nicolas Maduro that led to the decapitation of the Venezuelan government.
Other targets have included Iran, Iraq and Somalia, among others. Trump is far from the only US president to launch military action in the Middle East – Biden, Obama, Clinton, both Bushes, and Reagan have all done so over the last 50 years. The US also has a long-running history of intervention in Latin American countries.
However, it is Trump’s ongoing threats to take Greenland, a Nato territory, that is causing particular concern across Europe now.
“The larger picture of Trump’s foreign policy is one of transactional disruption rather than strategic leadership,” Aurélien Colson, academic director at the ESSEC Business School Institute for Geopolitics & Business, told The Independent.
Colson says that Trump’s National Security Strategy exposed his intent to “undermine the EU as a political and strategic actor”. The document claimed that the continent was facing “civilisational erasure”.
“The so-called ‘Donroe Doctrine’ openly revives a logic of spheres of influence,” he explains. Trump joked that the Monroe Doctrine – associated with exerting control over the Western hemisphere and warning about a Europeanisation of America – could now be dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine”, a clear indication of his intentions.
But, while Trump has made some historic statements and carried out unprecedented military action, Colson says that much of his behaviour can be interpreted as bluster.
“Trump’s moves are driven less by coherent geopolitical objectives than by a mix of narcissistic posturing (which even his own administration finds difficulties to cope with), domestic political signalling, and personal financial interests: from his admiration for strongmen to policies that align with opaque business networks, including crypto-financial channels,” he says.
“What he appears to seek is not a stable international order, but a world in which power is personalised, deals are opaque, and loyalty matters more than rules. The consequences are deeply negative, of course, for the world order, and for specific states such as Ukraine, but also for the USA: alliances are weakened, American credibility eroded, and strategic rivals emboldened.”
Colson explains: “Far from ‘America First’, the outcome is increasingly ‘America Isolated’: mistrusted by partners and progressively less able to shape the rules of the international system it once led – to its own benefit.”
Below The Independent looks at the countries where Trump has taken military action in the last 12 months, and where he could strike next.
