Opinion
Updated ,first published
Updated ,first published
It’s been a little more than a week since Donald Trump authorised the most significant military operation of his presidency. And still, Americans don’t quite know what to make of it.
The polling shows that support for the war in Iran essentially matches what people thought of Trump before the war. Most Americans I speak with feel a bit lost.
This war, for all of Trump’s sabre-rattling over the years, doesn’t quite fit with what anyone expected. Even those of us who have long called his actions on the global stage reckless and dangerous, who suggested that his treatment of the world like a box of toys that could be put away after playtime, would end up in calamity, didn’t expect him to drag the US into a prolonged conflict with a well-armed rival.
Trump was for a decade the loudest spokesman for a long-overdue questioning of the justification of American force around the world. That focus would be better spent on affairs at home – wasn’t that the entire point of America First?
After all, it was Donald Trump who, in 2020, kept repeating “we’ve spent $8 trillion in the Middle East, and we’re not fixing our roads in this country? How stupid.”
One of Trump’s arguments in the 2024 election was that, were he in charge, America would not have found itself embroiled in conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, even as mere suppliers of weapons to allies. Trump rallied a political coalition that had grown weary of American involvement in war. The rightward side of that group found it a fiscal catastrophe, spending billions to get nothing in return. The left side of that coalition had grown exhausted and frustrated by the moral failure of American military intervention that has left a generation angry.
Some of Trump’s political fortune in 2024 was due to Muslim voters seeing him as a disrupter in a chain of American presidents who continued to wage war.
George Bush Jr. justified his incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan on the grounds of sniffing out weapons of mass destruction that could threaten the planet – and to find the perpetrators of 9/11. The government spent months laying out a case, using falsified evidence, to build a coalition so that when they finally struck, their actions held the support of close to 90 per cent of the American public.
Obama justified a sweeping drone program on Pakistan and other countries on humanitarian and economic grounds, that it was the obligation of the world’s military superpower to defend free people against tyrants and insurgents. Biden justified limited involvement in both Gaza and Ukraine on the grounds of defending democratic allies.
Those arguments did not always carry water, but they reflected presidents acknowledging that the use of force requires some justification.
Justification and moral right are not the same thing. A war can be justified on economic grounds while morally wrong. Had Trump’s strike against Iran last week gone the same path as his capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, and likewise ended up with expanded access for American oil markets, that is a justification. A poor one, but one all the same.
Without a cogent explanation, we are left to speculate on his reasons. Was it at the behest of Netanyahu and the evangelical coalition that props up Trump’s domestic political operation? Perhaps it is a distraction from the Epstein files? Or is his administration looking to remake our geopolitical order in a battle for Western civilisation – a favourite talking point among right-wing influencers lately.
But the confusion seems to be the point. After oil prices soared to $US115 a barrel, Trump declared the war nearly over, while his Department of War tweeted “We have only just begun to fight” with a photo of a missile.
So now we are in Schrodinger’s War. If we can’t know if it’s over or still happening, or why we’re there at all, then it makes any opposition to the war impossible to coalesce.
If this war has no clear goal, and only seems to be sowing chaos around the world while replacing the elder Khamenei with the younger, then what is the point?
Internationally, and also domestically, the Trump administration is renouncing the idea that force requires justification. If American citizens can be gunned down on the streets of Minneapolis by armed federal agents with no explanation, then why too can’t another country face fire and fury for the same callous concern of “because we can”?
It leaves Americans – a patriotic people – questioning if our nation is still a force for good.
When much of the world gathered in Milan-Cortino last month, American athletes were asked what they thought of their country.
Aerial skier Chris Lillis, moments after winning a gold medal, said he was heartbroken about ICE and the ways the American government is using force against protesters.
But he hoped the world would look at “the America we’re trying to represent” – the nation that opens its arms to the world, that shows its strength by example and innovation. That could be a beacon of freedom, helping to end the Cold War by welcoming scientists and artists.
It’s that America that has earned its role in leading the world. Trump, in his ever-engorging appetite for power, is threatening the very thing that once made America great.
Cory Alpert is a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne looking at the impact of AI on democracy. He served the Biden-Harris Administration for three years.
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Cory Alpert is a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne looking at the impact of AI on democracy. He previously served the Biden-Harris Administration for three years.
