A Current and Not-So-Short List of America’s Global Conflicts

2026-03-05 · The Atlantic

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Donald Trump campaigned on the idea that electing him was the best way to avoid wars. He has referred to himself as the “peace president,” going so far as to complain that he hadn’t won a Nobel Peace Prize.

Yet Trump has governed as a hawkish interventionist whose approach better aligns with his neoconservative secretary of state, Marco Rubio, than with the anti-interventionists in his administration, such as J. D. Vance and Tulsi Gabbard. The United States is now enmeshed in so many conflicts that its foreign policy is closer to “world police” than “America First.”

The newly launched war against Iran is the most significant. Operation Epic Fury begins less than a year after the United States and Israel partnered to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. At the time, Trump declared that operation a success, and Vance defended it by stating, “I certainly empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements … But the difference is that back then, we had dumb presidents and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national-security objectives. So this is not gonna be some long, drawn-out thing.”

The Trump administration has now launched a “long, drawn-out thing” in Iran with no end in sight. U.S. military personnel have already been imperiled at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, Ali Al-Salem Air Base in Kuwait, Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, a U.S. Navy headquarters in Bahrain, and facilities in Iraq. American interests around the world are at risk of Iranian retaliation.

All alone, this war would make a mockery of MAGA claims that Trump is an anti-interventionist. But it is one in an extensive list of Trump-era entanglements.

Even as America’s military expands its focus in Iran, it launched a new operation this week against drug cartels in Ecuador. “Together, we are taking decisive action to confront narco-terrorists who have long inflicted terror, violence, and corruption on citizens throughout the hemisphere,” U.S. Southern Command announced in a press release.

U.S. forces in Africa have been carrying out air strikes over Somalia against the Sunni Islamist terrorist organization al-Shabaab. As recently as last month, U.S. forces carried out multiple strikes against Islamic State fighters in Syria, according to U.S. Central Command.

Earlier this year, the United States launched Operation Absolute Resolve, a military campaign that successfully removed the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro from power. After the operation, Trump said that the U.S. would run Venezuela at least temporarily. This week, Reuters reported that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum traveled to Venezuela and met with its acting president, Delcy Rodríguez.The United States is both negotiating contracts with Rodríguez and threatening to indict her.

The Trump administration concluded last year with a Christmas Day attack on Islamist militants in Nigeria. Earlier in 2025, the United States carried out air strikes in Iraq, waged a roughly seven-week offensive against Houthi rebels in Yemen, and carried out the aforementioned attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. This year and last, the Trump administration has been blowing up boats in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, many off the coast of Venezuela, that it suspects of drug smuggling. The boat strikes have killed at least 150 people.

Ukraine is the one place where the Trump administration appears to be trying to draw down U.S. involvement, though the United States has supplied the country with intelligence as it resists Russian aggression.

During the run-up to the 2016 election, I wrote that “if you’re a voter who believes that Donald Trump is against foreign wars and regime change, unlike the globalist elites in Washington, D.C., you have been misled.” At the time, I noted that Trump released a video in 2011 that sought to pressure President Obama to invade Libya. Trump also argued that George H. W. Bush should have ousted Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and wrote in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve, “We still don’t know what Iraq is up to or whether it has the material to build nuclear weapons.” He added, “Am I being contradictory here, by presenting myself as a deal-maker and then recommending preemptive strikes? I don’t think so.” In 2011, he urged the Navy to wage war on Somali pirates.

Now Trump has proved his proclivity for interventionism, without congressional approval or the support of the public. And there’s no evidence to suggest that he will stop here. If Congress continues allowing him to deploy force unilaterally, he may pursue land strikes on drug cartels in Mexico, a prospect that he raised early this year in an interview with Fox News; regime change in Cuba, a longtime dream of Rubio’s; and God knows what else. He is an impulsive man who gambles, especially when the most significant risks are borne by others. There is no way to know how exactly he will surprise Americans next.

Trump could even make the United States a pariah among its Western allies by revisiting his on-again, off-again threats to take Greenland by force, a move that parts of his base have been urging ever since Trump first raised the possibility, or by seizing the Panama Canal, as he has also threatened to do.

Had Americans known that Trump was going to undertake wars of choice and assorted military strikes all around the world, they may not have elected him. At this point, with a majority of voters opposed to Trump’s interventions, congressional action is the only way to disentangle the country from these conflicts. Until then, the list is likely to only grow longer.

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Don’t Call It ‘Intelligence’

By Charles Yu

I am occasionally asked by colleges to give a version of a talk on how I became a writer. The easy thing to do is to give a sort of guided tour through the woods of literary self-formation: a string of anecdotes designed to elicit a few chuckles, a moment or two of reflection about the inevitable bends in the road, things that felt momentous but turned out not to matter, or things that didn’t seem significant at the time but with hindsight turned out to be the most important of all.

Typically, these tours end in the same place: The author has found a path through the wilderness, and discovered a voice along the way. Voice is what leads us out of the woods.

The trouble, at least for me, is that this kind of speech is mostly fiction; the path is only a path in retrospect.

Read the full article.