Foreign Affairs
America keeps promising to step away from endless wars, yet repeatedly finds itself pulled back into them.
America’s Fatal Attraction to War
Author: Emma Ashford
Donald Trump campaigned for a second U.S. presidential term on a promise to end wars, not start them. And for the first year after his return, there were indications that he might make a real break with the status quo that has led Washington to overextend itself. He pushed the United States’ European allies to spend more on defense, promoted peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, and pursued a cautious détente with China that has dialed down tensions over Taiwan.
Eighteen months later, however, the United States is bogged down in a new war in the Middle East. Although the U.S. military has enjoyed tactical successes, Washington has not achieved any kind of meaningful strategic victory; in certain respects, Iran exerts more power now than it did in February. Nonetheless, Trump has shied away from making diplomatic compromises. Just like his nemesis, U.S. President Barack Obama, Trump promised Americans that he would extract the country from pointless “forever wars” in the Middle East and then proved unable to do so. But the fact that the United States again became mired in a Middle East conflict is even more surprising today, because over the past two decades, the American public as well as many U.S. leaders have firmly concluded that such wars are mistakes.
At heart, structures and incentives pull Washington back, repeatedly, to avoidable quagmires. For starters, military action is easy for U.S. presidents to initiate. Since 1991, U.S. leaders have gotten in the habit of deploying force to secure even the most minor U.S. interests. The short-term costs and risks of using force against a smaller, distant state or nonstate actor often appear small—most Americans can go about their day-to-day lives without even realizing their country is at war—and Congress has largely become willing to cede its constitutional oversight. But getting out of these kinds of conflicts is far harder. Washington is accustomed to setting maximalist goals for even marginal wars, and U.S. leaders balk at halting an intervention without meeting promised objectives. Particularly if the ongoing costs of a conflict are relatively diffuse, there are few incentives for presidents to face accusations of weakness.
Yet the costs of these interventions are not small. They are merely hidden. Repeated wars add to a growing national debt, overstretch the U.S. military, and generate opportunity costs, drawing spending away from needed military investments and domestic priorities. Simply desiring to change the United States’ habit of waging war has not been enough to change it. If U.S. foreign-policy makers want to break the cycle, they need to think of ways to make using force a harder and less attractive option.
PERVERSE INCENTIVES
The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy broke with precedent. Most national security strategies populate laundry lists of so-called vital U.S. interests through an interagency process that ensures that no issue goes unmentioned. Last year’s document, by contrast, admitted that the United States has a set of discrete, circumscribed interests that policymakers “must evaluate, sort, and prioritize.” It argued that “not every country, region, issue, or cause—however worthy—can be the focus of American strategy.” And it went on to emphasize the importance of the Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific while concluding that “the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.”
For much of the first year of his second term, Trump loosely adhered to this stated approach. The White House did use military force abroad, engaging in campaigns to strike Iranian nuclear sites and boats in the Caribbean that were allegedly involved in drug trafficking. But Trump also aggressively pushed allies in Europe and Asia to share the burden of defending their regions and moved to facilitate peace talks in both Gaza and Ukraine. The June 2025 U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, the so-called 12-day war, was at least brief and its objective specific. Similarly, the January seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by U.S. Special Forces did not attempt full regime change. Instead, the White House struck a deal with Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, to take over.
But the successes in Venezuela and during the 12-day war strengthened the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party and made it easier to argue for subsequent interventions. A mere month after the Venezuela operation, U.S. forces launched Operation Epic Fury, targeting Iranian military infrastructure and killing senior regime leaders; the administration’s early rhetoric openly promised regime change in Tehran. Six months on, the damage to Iran’s military capabilities has been significant. But the United States has expended much of its stockpile of precision munitions and suffered substantial damage to its regional bases. The Islamic Republic remains in power and has expanded its ability to threaten shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
In part, the Trump administration’s abandonment of the principles in his own National Security Strategy reflected a split in Republican policy circles. Younger, “America first” conservatives are skeptical of regime-change wars and of Washington’s duty to aid Israel above other allies. But traditionalists who still subscribe to a George W. Bush–era vision of the United States as a purveyor of democratization worldwide continue to wield influence. The Iran war has been widely portrayed as evidence that hawks (such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the now deceased Senator Lindsey Graham) won an internal battle within the administration against restrainers such as Vice President JD Vance.
But the Iran war cannot be blamed entirely on the influence of individual personalities. Broader structural conditions keep pulling the United States back into marginal conflicts. First is the sheer ease with which U.S. presidents can turn to force. The U.S. Constitution grants the power to declare war only to Congress. But legislators have not done so since World War II, partly because subsequent wars were smaller and partly to avoid the political risk of registering votes for unpopular conflicts. Congress has not issued an “authorization to use military force” since 2002. The United States maintains a large active-duty military, with a network of bases spread across the globe and assets that it can deploy worldwide in a relatively short period. And as its commander in chief, the president decides when and how to deploy it. With no real checks on the president’s ability to do so as he sees fits, it is all too easy to start a war.
The U.S. media and the United States’ broad networks of allies make it even easier. Cable TV commentators lean hawkish, as do many of the United States’ major newspapers. Outlets such as Fox News, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal are often enthusiastic about the start of a new conflict and the accompanying dramatic visuals but criticize any U.S. pullback. Regional allies, meanwhile, often have an incentive to encourage U.S. involvement in their conflicts and the political connections to drag Washington in. The fact that the United States often has bases in or near these countries exacerbates the dynamic. In March, for instance, Rubio argued that because an impending Israeli attack would expose U.S. service members already stationed in the Middle East to retaliation, Washington had to join the country in its strikes.
WHEN WAR IS A GAME
Persistent myths about past conflicts add to the problem, particularly the notion that the U.S. military failed not because it should not have started a war or because its goals were unattainable, but because it did not pursue the right tactics or commit enough resources. In the mid-2010s, for example, Republicans blamed President Barack Obama’s withdrawal of troops from Iraq for the subsequent rise of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), not the 2003 invasion of Iraq itself. In the opening days of the recent Iran conflict, Vance told reporters that he remains skeptical of foreign military entanglements, but he trusts Trump to “get the job done” because he is “smarter” than past presidents.
The same forward bases and alliances that incentivize U.S. presidents to start wars make getting out of them harder. The United States’ triumph in the Cold War also helped shape a strategic culture in Washington that presumes setting expansive goals such as nation building and regime change is both possible and desirable. Yet even overwhelming military victories are not easy to convert into enduring social and political transformations. U.S. leaders too often refuse to accept partial success, making the perfect the enemy of the good.
Debates about sending aid to Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 invasion are a prime example. Many members of Washington’s foreign-policy establishment argue that even though U.S. military and economic aid helped Ukraine repel Russia’s initial onslaught and create a stalemate, there can never be a negotiated solution. (In fact, although Russia may be a reluctant interlocutor at best, the peace process has been handicapped by poor management and lack of expertise on the American side.)
The run-up to Operation Epic Fury suffered from similar black-and-white thinking. The administration had, in fact, been able to leverage the economic pressure and the threat of military force into serious negotiations with Iran on containing its nuclear ambitions. Shortly before the war started, Iran had offered to halt domestic enrichment, remove its existing enriched uranium, and allow for the return of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors. But the administration was unsatisfied with such a compromise, choosing to gamble on absolute victory.
Perhaps the most important structural factor encouraging presidents to repeatedly engage in unnecessary wars is that U.S. citizens remain unusually insulated from these interventions’ consequences. So far, blowback from the Iran war has fallen primarily on the Gulf states. The establishment of an all-volunteer force in the United States means that the direct cost of war is felt by a much smaller and self-contained segment of the U.S. population; those who choose to enlist are increasingly the relatives of veterans themselves rather than a broad cross-section of the U.S. public. Technological advancement means that fewer soldiers are needed to wage long-distance wars. The casualties incurred in Iraq and Afghanistan—roughly 7,000 U.S. military deaths—are low compared with wars such as Korea or Vietnam. U.S. service members and their families undoubtedly feel dread and anxiety, but for most Americans, the only visible price tag on the now protracted Iran conflict is creeping inflation driven by disruption in energy markets.
This cost is real: the United States’ 2026 GDP growth is expected to be smaller than 2025 estimates, and the war has made it more difficult for many Americans to afford daily staples. A cost-of-living increase is the main reason Trump is trying to negotiate a resolution. Yet it remains remarkable that the United States launched a war against a country of 93 million, killed its leadership, bombed military and civilian infrastructure, and contributed to the throttling of the world’s key energy-shipping waterway, and the sharpest impact for the average American was a two-point rise in inflation, to 4.8 percent in May. (It has since fallen back to 3.5 percent.) Americans’ very insulation from the wars Washington wages, and the diffuse nature of those wars’ costs, serves to defuse political opposition. According to a July Washington Post–IPSOS poll, the Iran war is now as unpopular among Americans as the Vietnam war was in its sixth year, but Americans are unlikely to be marching in the streets about it anytime soon.
TIP OF THE ICEBERG
The fact that U.S. wars’ costs remain hidden might lead some to conclude that even a war as ill conceived as Operation Epic Fury is not a big deal. After all, the economic and human toll, for ordinary Americans, of the previous 20 years of war in the Middle East were also relatively moderate. The numbers of Americans killed and wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq were far smaller than in earlier U.S. wars; in Vietnam, more than seven times as many people died as in both those conflicts combined. The economic costs were diffuse and passed off to future generations as additions to the national debt.
But this conclusion is a mistake. The United States’ wars in the Middle East—both past and present—carry long-term strategic costs that have already damaged the country’s position in the world and its ability to compete against other great powers. History is clear: great powers that overextend themselves in minor conflicts often end up unable to handle core strategic interests. Most visibly, the United States is running critically short on munitions. Despite discussion about dialing up production, the Pentagon cannot easily replace these systems soon, setting up a tradeoff: every interceptor used to defend a U.S. base or ally against Iranian rockets is one that cannot be used elsewhere. Effective deterrence requires both credibility and military capability. If U.S. troops in East Asia, the Baltics, or elsewhere do not have sufficient munitions, they cannot deter China, Russia, or anyone else.
The broader opportunity costs of the United States’ Middle Eastern follies are even more insidious. The troops deployed for Middle East campaigns cannot be sent to other regions, the money spent on these wars cannot be invested in new capabilities or cutting-edge technology, and the cost of rebuilding bases in the Gulf limits the United States’ ability to harden its basing infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific. Regime-change wars even require a different force structure—far more land forces than naval, for instance. If Washington’s primary goal is protecting the hemisphere or stopping a Chinese assault in the South China Sea, for example, the consistent demand for regime-change wars undermines those goals by preventing the Pentagon from restructuring its forces or planning for other contingencies.
These opportunity costs cannot be solved simply by raising the defense budget. Even if the Trump administration’s proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget could be made politically palatable, that level of military spending—almost five percent of U.S. GDP, higher than it has been in decades—will draw investment away from other priorities and act as a long-term drag on U.S. innovation and economic growth. Military Keynesianism sounds good in theory but is rarely an effective way to boost the economy. It produces fewer jobs per dollar outlaid than other forms of government spending and does not drive broad innovation as effectively as other kinds of economic activity.
The notion that the United States ever enforced a truly liberal rules-based order worldwide was always overblown. But it is true that the U.S. military has been a global guarantor of shipping and the free flow of energy for decades. The fact that the United States, in its recent conflict with Iran, directly destabilized international energy markets undermines the country’s claim to be a fair arbiter of the global commons. Polls now suggest that only about a third of people around the world view the United States as contributing significantly to global peace and stability. Meanwhile, the administration burned diplomatic capital on this conflict, reducing its influence and capacity to shape outcomes elsewhere, such as Ukraine, where the administration’s peace efforts have been largely abandoned since the start of the Iran war.
All these costs are diffuse and deferred. But in 20 years, as a result of its choice to pursue these wars, the United States may well have a less effective military force, less global influence, and even a weaker economy. Indeed, the Iran war has shown that the Trump administration’s own original argument was correct: in a competitive world, the United States needs to prioritize the allocation of its scarce resources to meet the most pressing strategic challenges. That Trump, like his predecessors, proved unable to resist the use of force only strengthens the case for reform.
BITE THE BULLET
The United States’ militarism now is constricting its future choices. There is no consensus in Washington about whether the United States should defend Taiwan in the case of a Chinese attack; many thousands of pages of debate on the issue have been published. Yet the expenditure of munitions in the Middle East is increasingly making the question moot. If the United States cannot come to Taiwan’s aid, then it’s no longer a choice. Over time, restrictions created by excessive military adventurism will increasingly shape policy choices elsewhere, too.
It will require radical change to break the incentive structure that leads the United States too easily into far-flung military conflicts, not just electing leaders who promise to end forever wars. Closing some forward bases, for example, would diminish the United States’ ability to conduct interventions. Congress should also reestablish more authority over the United States’ wars, first by exerting more power over military spending. The Pentagon is already struggling to cover the Iran war from its existing accounts; Congress could refuse to add contingency funding for this or future conflicts. Congressional committees have grilled Trump appointees on the Iran war but have achieved little but soundbites.
Congress could expand this oversight by hitting the administration where it hurts: refusing to authorize discretionary spending on the war. Negative publicity can sometimes be useful, and legislators could easily do more to publicize the abysmal conditions to which the Iran war has subjected U.S. service members. In the future, legislators could refuse to confirm to executive branch positions appointees who have been involved in the decision to start marginal wars. Despite so many past failures, Washington’s foreign policy debates are frequently still dominated by aging officials who made disastrous choices.
It would be difficult, but future policymakers might also seek to break up the cozy relationship between the Pentagon and U.S. defense contractors. The defense acquisition ecosystem is bloated and lacking in accountability. Yet the defense industry’s disbursement of billions of dollars to lobby Congress and influence policy debates helps drive the United States’ mindless militarism. A ban on legislators trading stocks in defense companies would help, as would anticorruption legislation that closes or restricts the revolving door between senior military posts and defense contracting sinecures. Just as U.S. officials encouraged the consolidation of defense contracting after the end of the Cold War, they could now encourage diversification of the industry away from influential corporate behemoths.
The American public long ago turned against military adventurism and regime-change wars, particularly in the Middle East. Yet a full 20 years after Obama was elected on a promise to break free of Bush’s legacy, policymakers keep getting sucked into the region by an incentive structure that makes the use of force attractive and minimizes its short-term costs. However harmless these forever wars might feel to average Americans, they are burning through the country’s military resources and thus eroding Washington’s might. Eventually, the United States will find itself constrained—no longer able to fight everything, everywhere, all at once. The question is whether it wants to proactively decide where it uses its resources, or whether it wants its hands tied by a parade of forever conflicts.
Credits: TCA, LLC.