Rethinking Military Intervention In The Age Of America First

I joined the Marine Corps because Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I was young, but not confused. A dictator had crossed a border with tanks, absorbed a weaker neighbor, and dared the world to respond. President George H. W. Bush did respond. He assembled a coalition, liberated Kuwait, and then stopped. At the time, I felt frustration. If Saddam was the problem, why leave him in power? Why halt the advance when the job seemed half done? I believed, as many did, that the first Gulf War should have ended with regime change in Baghdad.

That early conviction shaped my support for later wars. When we went into Afghanistan and then Iraq, I did not recoil. I thought we were finishing unfinished business. I thought we could remove tyrants and midwife stable democracies. I thought American power, applied with moral clarity, could reshape broken regimes. But the decades that followed chastened that confidence. We discovered that removing a regime is easier than replacing it. We discovered that democracy building is not an export commodity. We discovered that intelligence agencies and development bureaucracies cannot engineer legitimacy from abroad. Endless deployments and open-ended missions taught many of us a difficult lesson. The U.S. should not be in the business of remaking other nations in its own image. We are not good at it, and it does not work.

For that reason, it was refreshing to hear Donald Trump commit to stopping forever wars. In his first term, he started no new wars. He pressed to bring troops home. He spoke bluntly about the cost of nation building and the folly of regime change for its own sake. For those of us weary of the bipartisan interventionism that had defined Washington, this was not isolationism. It was sobriety.

That is why Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025 was jarring. President Trump authorized U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities under that codename. Many of us felt a familiar tightening in the chest. We had seen this movie before. A strike becomes a campaign. A campaign becomes a war. A war becomes a decade. Critics from the left and right emerged immediately. Some Republicans demanded denunciations. I declined. When American troops are in harm’s way, public second-guessing can wait. Prudence counsels prayer before punditry. The commander in chief bears a unique burden. In moments of conflict, unity strengthens those asked to execute the mission.

The crucial question was not whether the strike occurred. It was whether it would metastasize. Trump articulated a limited objective. Delay Iran’s timeline for nuclear weapons development. Not regime change. Not occupation. Not democracy promotion. A discrete strategic aim. The evidence that followed suggested that Iran’s program was set back years. The operation concluded quickly. It did not spiral into a regional war. There were no American casualties. The lesson was subtle but significant. Military force can be used with a narrow aperture.

Eight months later came Operation Absolute Resolve. On January 3, 2026, U.S. forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. The entire operation lasted less than four hours. Again, there was unease. Trump had promised no more forever wars. Were we now launching a hemispheric conflict? The answer, again, was no. The objective was precise. Arrest a regime figure tied to criminal conduct and destabilizing activity. The mission was executed, and it ended. No occupation followed. No prolonged deployment ensued. Maduro was removed and brought to justice. The pattern was becoming clearer.

Then came Operation Epic Fury, the coordinated U.S. and Israeli offensive that began on February 28, 2026. This was the most dramatic of the three. Joint air and missile strikes penetrated deep into Iranian territory. Military and regime infrastructure were targeted. The supreme leader was eliminated in the first wave of attacks, and both conventional and nuclear production facilities were destroyed in subsequent sorties. The president had been briefed that Iran had increased ballistic missile production by 100X. If left unchecked, saturation attacks launched in the near future could have overwhelmed Israel’s defenses. The stakes were high. The action was decisive.

When I heard of Epic Fury, I withheld judgment. My prior convictions about intervention urged caution. But there is a difference between regime change as ideology and force as instrument. If the objective is limited, if the timeline is short, if the exit is built into the plan, then the calculus shifts. In this case, the leadership itself was a central component of the threat. By eliminating the Supreme Leader and roughly 40 of his most hardline supporters, the operation did more than degrade hardware; it disrupted the command structure that animated Iran’s aggression. That disruption creates a vacuum. There is perhaps only a 10% chance that such a vacuum will yield saner leadership, but even a 10% probability of strategic moderation in Tehran is not trivial. Still, that was not the primary objective. The principal aim was to destroy Iran’s conventional military manufacturing capacity and cripple its nuclear ambitions. On that score, Trump achieved decisive success. Early indications suggest that Epic Fury achieved substantial degradation of Iran’s capabilities at relatively low cost to American forces. It appears to have been overwhelming in effect yet bounded in scope.

Here is the philosophical tension. One can be anti-war in the sense of opposing open-ended nation building, and yet affirm the legitimacy of targeted military action. The mistake of the last 20 years was not that force was ever used. It was that force became untethered from attainable objectives. We confused the removal of threats with the transformation of societies. We treated every battlefield as a seminar in democratic theory. That was hubris.

I would not have recommended any of these operations. My imagination has been narrowed by past failures. I see quagmires before I see opportunities. I am skeptical by temperament. Yet Trump and his war planners have displayed a kind of ingenuity that I lacked. They have treated military power as a scalpel rather than a bulldozer. They have defined objectives with clarity, executed with speed, and exited without nostalgia for permanence. That record compels reconsideration.

Another feature has become clearer. Traditional coalition building imposes costs beyond the diplomatic. When assembling a broad alliance, one must negotiate terms, timelines, and rules of engagement. Targets sense the gathering storm months in advance. They harden facilities. They disperse assets. They entrench. Moreover, coalition warfare often requires conforming to the most restrictive partner. The mission expands to maintain political unity. The result is delay and dilution.

By contrast, Trump has often acted with a narrower circle. In Epic Fury, coordination with Israel was close and operationally meaningful. But broader European participation was absent. The U.K. declined to allow use of bases in Diego Garcia or on its territory. The US instead secured access to Greek airfields. This mattered. It revealed both the limits of certain traditional alliances and the flexibility of others. It also underscored a strategic fact. The U.S. does not require large European formations to achieve its objectives. What it sometimes requires are staging points and regional intelligence. The difference is not trivial.

Some will object that unilateral or near-unilateral action erodes legitimacy. But legitimacy is not identical with committee approval. The legitimacy of force depends on its justification and its proportionality. If a regime accelerates missile production by 100X and threatens an ally with a saturation attack, preemptive degradation can be morally defensible. If a nuclear program advances toward weaponization, a strike aimed at delay can be justified under traditional doctrines of anticipatory self-defense. These are not exotic claims. They are embedded in longstanding strategic thought.

There is also a deterrent dimension. When adversaries believe that the U.S. must first convene a conference before acting, they gain temporal advantage. When they see that the president is willing to act swiftly, without months of public deliberation, the strategic environment shifts. Deterrence relies on credibility. Credibility rests on demonstrated willingness.

To say this is not to endorse perpetual conflict. On the contrary, it is to refine the meaning of America First. America First does not entail passivity. It entails prioritization. We should never again place American lives at risk in order to install our preferred model of governance abroad. We should not deploy troops to conduct seminars in constitutional design. We should not confuse humanitarian aspiration with strategic necessity. But we should be willing to use force to protect ourselves and our allies when concrete threats emerge.

The contrast with Europe is instructive. As the EU continues to debate Operation Absolute Resolve months after it ended, and as it prepares to deliberate Epic Fury, the U.S. has already acted. European institutions often move slowly by design. Consensus is prized. But in matters of acute security, delay can be dangerous. While others deliberate, capabilities evolve. Trump has signaled that the U.S. will not be paralyzed by extended consultations when core interests are at stake.

This posture will shape enemy calculations. Regimes that previously relied on the inertia of coalition politics must now account for rapid U.S. action. They must weigh the risk that infrastructure built over decades could be neutralized in hours. They must consider that missile stockpiles can become liabilities rather than assets. In strategic theory, uncertainty about response can deter aggression more effectively than predictable proceduralism.

I began as a young Marine frustrated that Saddam remained in power. I then became an advocate of regime change. I later grew disillusioned with democracy building. Today I find myself adjusting again. The lesson is not that war is good. It is that force, when disciplined by limited aims and swift execution, need not become war in the old sense. It can remain an instrument rather than an identity.

Trump’s second term has forced many of us to rethink settled categories. The choice is not between endless occupation and isolation. There exists a middle path, one that rejects color revolutions and bureaucratic nation building while affirming decisive action against tangible threats. Whether this model will endure remains to be seen. But it has already demonstrated that American power can be applied without recreating the quagmires of the past.

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