Despite the anger of the MAGA base, President Donald Trump has not acquiesced to their demands. Despite the repeated claim that Trump does nothing without the approval of his base, he has shown that he does not always comply with the wishes of this powerful constituency. He showed in Gaza, Venezuela, and now Iran that he is capable of defying some of its core principles and prevailing in the end. Why does Trump do this?
He does not want to merely want to rule the United States; he wants to change the course of history, and he has already done so. He does not want to be another Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama. History may remember them as good leaders for America, but they will go down as poor leaders for the world. Yet the question remains: is Trump actually contradicting his "America First" doctrine with his interventionist foreign policy?
The opposite is true. It is in the United States’ interest to maintain international stability, particularly in vital regions such as the Gulf and the Middle East at large. We should not forget that the US had ignored Nazism until it declared war on it, and that it had ignored terrorism until it struck its towers. It also ignored the Iranian regime until it rigged the region with militias and hijacked its maritime straits. Its hesitation has, on many occasions, led to a more chaotic world.
This is the first fallacy. The second fallacy holds that Trump is a man of war, not a man of peace. Let us not forget that partisan politicians and the press, who are hostile to Trump for their own various reasons, repeat and propagate these accusations.
Trump leads on the principle that strength brings peace, while weakness and containment allow for more violence. He now confronts Iran after long policies of containment and weakness that had gone so far as to hand it the keys to regional hegemony until Trump tore up the nuclear agreement.
Trump argues rightly that, over the past 47 years, American presidents have done nothing meaningful to impede the Iranian regime despite its constant aggression. Defeating rogue regimes by force may be the path to peace, not the reverse, and the evidence is clear to see: decades of Western and American rapprochement with Tehran have led only to more chaos.
Entering a war and using military force is a last resort and an ugly option, but leaders can be compelled to take it. European history teaches us that the military defeat of Nazi Germany was the turning point that ended a dangerous expansionist project, paving the way for a stable and prosperous Europe, in which the European Common Market and later the European Union were formed. Now major wars in Europe broke out after than until Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
In Asia, Japan's military defeat in the Second World War ended an era of military expansion and opened the door to an unprecedented economic growth. Japan eventually emerged as a major economic power, and it was later followed by the Asian Tigers.
The same scene is repeating itself today in the Middle East, which had, for decades, been caught in a spiral of unrest and proxy wars driven by the Iranian regime's project. Diplomacy was deployed, economic incentives were offered, and channels of communication were opened in an attempt to dissuade it from its destructive project, but these attempts changed nothing. As you read this, Iranian missiles and drones are raining down on Gulf capitals and cities, killing innocents and destroying civilian infrastructure. It attacks the Gulf states despite these countries' continued efforts to avoid war, seeking to drag the region into a cycle of violence and undermine its development, though it has not succeeded in doing so.
History teaches us that some expansionist ideological projects cannot be stopped by pledges or agreements. They must be dealt a decisive defeat that ends their capacity to wreak havoc in the region. This is how Nazism ended in Europe, and it is how Japanese militarism ended in Asia; after their demise, both regions witnessed long chapters of stability and prosperity.
The Middle East stands before a similar historical moment today: either the project of chaos led by Tehran continues to engulf it, or this project is stopped in its tracks as other expansionist projects had been before. Only then can the region emerge from the cycle of chronic conflict and finally enter an era of durable stability and development that its peoples deserve.
