The Temptation Of Donald Trump Is About To Begin

Donald Trump spent the last 10 years campaigning against “stupid wars” in the Middle East and returned to the White House in January endorsed by a retinue of so-called restrainers — advocates of scaling back America’s role as globo-cop — who took him at his word. Many were appointed to key positions in his administration.

But then, like so many presidents before him, Trump seemed to succumb to the temptations of American power, jumping into a new war of choice in the Middle East by launching air strikes against Iran.

The question many restrainers and hawks alike are asking now is this: Was the U.S. attack a one-off, or was Trump fooling us all along?

It’s difficult — perhaps impossible — to pin down Trump on any particular point of view, especially the second-term Trump who in his inaugural address pledged to be a “peacemaker” but who promptly made threatening moves toward Greenland, Panama and even Canada. In the weeks preceding the June 21 strike on Iran, the administration swung wildly from pursuing diplomacy and denying any U.S. involvement in Israel’s attacks on Iran’s nuclear sites to Trump demanding “unconditional surrender” from Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Yet it is becoming more possible to flesh out what Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, arguably the administration’s highest-ranking restrainer, this week called the “Trump Doctrine.” That is: “Articulate a clear American interest” and achieve it with aggressive diplomacy backed up by “overwhelming” military power, according to Vance. And “then you get the hell out of there before it ever becomes a protracted conflict.”

Indeed, Trump and his senior officials are all quite eager to emphasize the in-and-out nature of what the president is triumphantly calling “the 12-day war” (despite new intelligence indicating Iran’s nuclear program may not be “obliterated” after all).

Advocates of U.S. restraint are also happily pointing to a dramatic new pledge by NATO members to raise their defense spending from 2 percent of GDP to 5 percent, which would take some of the defense burden for Europe off the United States. At a news conference Wednesday at the NATO summit in the Hague, Trump indicated a new willingness to work with the alliance — which he’s often kept at arm’s length — and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte was quick to credit him, saying “Without President Trump this would not have happened.”

But Trump, like other presidents, is confronting a deeper problem that undercuts whatever restrainer impulses he might have: There is a strong structural bias toward the exercise of American power around the world.

With more than 50 security alliances with other countries, and U.S. military bases from Europe to the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific serving as a guarantor of peace and stability, a policy of restraint is going to be threatened at every turn. A variety of ever-erupting crises from Iran’s nuclear threat to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to China’s threat to Taiwan can pull Washington in at any moment — and often have.

Many restrainers worry that Trump, by putting forward a trillion-dollar defense budget that reinforces this global role, hasn’t pushed nearly hard enough to unwind U.S. commitments, especially in the Middle East. The U.S. spends more than the next nine biggest-spending countries combined on defense and more than three times that of its biggest rival, China, which allocated $314 billion to military expenditures in 2024. And the dilemma Trump faces is that it’s this very global presence that projects American power and “greatness” around the world.

“So long as the United States stations its military in the Middle East, it will keep bombing the Middle East and it will keep getting attacked in the Middle East,” said Stephen Wertheim, whose influential 2020 book argued that U.S. internationalism since World War II has become hopelessly intertwined with the idea of maintaining global military dominance.

America’s 40,000 or so troops in the region, combined with close security partnerships with some regional states like Qatar and Kuwait — where the U.S. bases most of its troops — “causes the United States to inherit the Mideast’s problems as its own,” said Wertheim. Or as another prominent restrainer, Reid Smith of the Koch-funded libertarian group Stand Together, puts it: “If you’re treaty-bound to defend one third of humanity, you’re going to get pulled into some really unpleasant places at times of your adversaries’ choosing.”

Trump is hardly the first president to seek to scale back U.S. commitments only to find himself engulfed in new crises abroad. His predecessor, Joe Biden, went from seeking to disentangle himself from the Middle East and pull out of Afghanistan —which he called an end to the “era of major military operations to remake other countries" — to supplying the lion’s share of aid to Ukraine, arming up Israel and edging into a new cold war with China.

The new restrainers — some call them neo-isolationists or conservative realists — who helped usher Trump into power find hope in the argument that Trump’s decision to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities may reflect a unique moment: his determination to prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb combined with an opportunistic desire to capitalize on Israel’s dramatic success in its own bombing raids, which in the preceding days had virtually wiped out Iran’s military leadership and nuclear science elite.

And that moment may never come again.

“Nobody is pining for a return to Iraq and Afghanistan. I think Trump gets that. The sort of precision strikes he ordered on what was deemed the ‘Iranian nuclear weapons project’ was seen as a pretty safe bet,” said Smith, who is in touch with like-minded officials inside the Trump administration.

But it may not have been a good bet — and that is likely to give more ammunition to restrainers in the future. Preliminary intelligence reports out of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, as well as Israeli assessments, suggested that the U.S. bombing of three nuclear sites may have delayed Iran’s nuclear program by only months. This has given credence to the restrainer argument inside the administration — joined by prominent outside MAGA voices like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson — that Trump’s decision to strike was ill-conceived. (On Wednesday, Trump angrily repudiated the DIA assessment, saying, “I believe it was total obliteration.”)

And despite the acclaim for the Iran strike from many Republicans — polls showed better than 80 percent support from GOP voters — some sources say the restrainers retain the upper hand, at least for now. “I can’t overemphasize this enough: There are not a lot of very hawkish voices inside the administration,” said another defense expert familiar with the thinking inside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon as well as the White House, who was granted anonymity to avoid retribution.

“It’s not an evenly matched fight. Ever since the departure of [former National Security Adviser] Mike Waltz, there hasn’t been a large faction of more hawkish voices concentrated in one place in the administration. There are people here and there, but not at the level you think,” he said. “Even [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio is a lot different than he was six-seven years ago, when he was very hawkish.”

Waltz, arguably the most prominent representative of the older neocon wing of the party, was ousted from the White House on May 1 and nominated to be U.N. ambassador. On June 12, after Israel began strikes on Iran, Rubio at first fought to distance the administration, saying, “We are not involved.”

Among the administration’s leading advocates of restraint is Defense Undersecretary for Policy Elbridge Colby, who remains influential despite losing an internal fight with the strongly pro-Israel Centcom commander, Gen. Erik Kurilla, over redeploying the USS Nimitz carrier and other resources to the Middle East in the runup to the Iran strike. (Colby did not respond to a request for comment.) And these restrainers still have friends in high places — not least of whom is Vance, a friend of Colby’s who, like him, advocates for a lower U.S. profile in Europe and the Middle East while prioritizing the strategic competition with China. Vance became notorious for opposing U.S. intervention against the Iranian-aligned Houthis in Yemen while denouncing “European free-loading” during the infamous Signal chat debacle in March.

Moreover, Vance’s former national security adviser, Andy Baker — who is believed to have encouraged Vance’s opposition to U.S. aid to Ukraine — is now the deputy to Rubio, the interim national security adviser. Trump’s son Don Jr., another friend of Colby’s, is also viewed as “definitely more friendly to restraint arguments,” as the defense expert puts it.

This defense expert suggested that Trump’s strikes against Iran will likely amount to little more than a “dead cat bounce” for Republican neoconservative hawks who were “desperate to make this happen because they knew the window was closing for intervention in favor of Israel. You look at the younger Republicans coming up. They don’t have the same affinity for Israel that the older Republicans do, and they’re much more anti-interventionist.” Among the old-school hawks urging Trump on were Sen. Lindsay Graham, who has called the Iran strikes “brilliant,” and former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.

So it is hardly a surprise that in the weeks before striking Iran, Trump appeared to whipsaw wildly between diplomacy and aggression. This seemed to reflect the intense debate going on inside his administration between these new restrainers and the older, pro-interventionist neocon wing of the party.

And for the Trump administration, the future test of willpower and influence between these factions will likely depend in large part on what happens in the aftermath of the Iran attack.

In Europe, Trump is again emphasizing his peacemaker persona, talking up the ceasefire he orchestrated after Iran retaliated on Monday by launching a token strike against Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. (Tehran signaled its intentions ahead of time, and there were no U.S. casualties.) If the Iranian threat subsides, Trump’s gamble could be viewed positively, and he might be open to asserting U.S. military power again. But if hostilities re-erupt or Iran swiftly resumes its pursuit of a nuclear weapon — as many experts believe it will — the restrainers could regain a big advantage in policy debates.

“I think restrainers lost this round but are hardly out,” said Wertheim, who is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “In the second Trump administration, the best prospect for restraint always lay in Europe,” meaning getting the allies to assume more of their own defense. “That possibility is still very much alive after the NATO pledges.”

The fundamental question that Trump has yet to answer is whether he’s willing to actually cede influence to anyone else, even allies, Wertheim added.

"I worry that Trump is more interested in burden sharing than burden shifting. If Europe spends more but the United States remains equally committed to leading the NATO alliance, this may leave the United States no less overstretched globally."