Every time the United States gets involved in an intervention in a foreign nation, especially with a military component, there are denunciations, some of them extraordinarily passionate. This has hit fever pitch with a President that has been all over the globe in his first year of his second term. Iran, Venezuela, and talk about Greenland, all of these are in play and that’s just this week. It would be preposterous for a layman to adequately address these and all the underlying rules of engagement in a short essay, but what I can provide is a snapshot of my own history of observations and compare them to what’s transpiring now. These are the limited glimpses all of us must process of the news projected down to the level of Joe Q Public. I hasten to add, its important; these issues are critical to anyone that must vote for the leadership that will govern this country. If that leadership over-extends us and our national resources and gets little, nothing, or loses what we had, we suffer as a minimum or we collectively could be in big trouble. If they do nothing and allow great or small events to proceed without posture and intervention we could be in equal or in some cases, greater danger. Consequently, we and our opinion must matter too.
My entire childhood and youth coincided with the Vietnam war. It concluded shortly before I graduated from high school. A whole generation around me cut their teeth on opposition to that war while I was trying to figure out my own bearings on global things. I, of course hoped it would go away and was fortunate to see it wind down before I might have been sucked into it. Reagan used limited powers to achieve extraordinary results culminating with the fall of the Soviet Union and was vehemently hated by his domestic opposition the whole way. Fifteen years later we launched the Gulf war, ostensibly for ‘evil’ oil. We won, but did we really win? Clinton sent us on small skirmishes around the globe, Bush launched what should definitely be considered two overlapping wars, one to punish the perps of 9/11 and the other, a big mess of ambiguous ‘nation building’, bringing ‘democracy’ and ‘our values’ to nations that coddled a few of our enemies, and in the process, killed millions of them, blew well over a trillion dollars, and accomplished I’m not even sure what in the process. That war which even now is still inspiring a thousand indirect offshoots, was where and how I learned and observed the influence of the neocons. For many years, I believed them to be essentially conservatives that just wanted to export our best ideology and freedoms to the perennially untamed (mostly) Islamic nations. What I eventually learned, practically, after many years, was that they were establishment Republicans with a lot of mixed motives that believed keeping wars in progress forever was a great way to keep themselves in permanent influence, power, and wealth, often due to their endless ties to the military industrial complex, aka the Deep State. Obama was swept into power in their aftermath and ultimately did and expanded their bidding, just with his own embellishments of agenda and power which may explain why years later, George Bush and Barak Obama seem even now to have an enduring man crush on each other. Obama exercised ‘color revolutions’ in various nations around the globe, using covert power to effect regime changes and project his priorities which favored Islamic dictators and war lords as a hegemon to degrade Israel and his own America, in keeping with his own core values. Four years later, Biden continued that program, as he was told to do, but with catastrophic damage to our military standing, especially in regard to Afghanistan. As President 45 and 47, Trump has favored trade agreements and braggadocio threats to accomplish his policies in lieu of military engagement, but he has now used it with surgical efficiency to take out the Iranian nuclear threats and Maduro in Venezuela.
The entirety of Trump’s Democrat opposition is in axiomatic and spasmodic opposition to any and all interventions that Trump would exercise. Unfortunately, they have to be written off lacking any serious coherent basis that isn’t based in 1) they personally hate Trump 2) they hate Israel and or Jews and any ‘strategery’ that would benefit them even indirectly 3) they ultimately hate traditional America and either purposely or passively support world socialism, communism, and any form of globalism that would supersede constitutional America.
Apart from those of us that trust Trump’s instincts about global engagement and appreciate his already proven track record of military restraint, as well as his focus on an overwhelming efficient and competent military, this leaves a small but vocal minority in between the hateful Democrats and trusting Trump supporters; this group would include most libertarians, all habitual pacifists, and some academic theorist. The primary position of this group is that only congress should authorize any military action, aka war. The end.
Back to my own testimonial context here, because I am not a constitutional scholar, I cannot argue for or against the argument made by the ‘third group’. While I am a constitutionalist in personal orientation, I rely on the interpretations made by those whose entire life is given to promoting constitutionalist ideas and I don’t know of any of them that are sitting around waiting for congress to declare war before we shoot a rocket into an adversarial antiaircraft defense installation. My primary testament to this approach is that we’ve had now 250 years or at least a few generations in a modern context, for someone to test it out in front of the nine black robes, the Supreme Court. In all probability, some have tried and I’m just not aware of that history. Lord knows there are plenty of constituents that would try if there was a path to success by this means. Lacking that action, all other considerations are pragmatic:
What is war? This would seem like the obvious first step to decide if launching a sortie into an adversarial nation meets that definition. As per our now ubiquitous AI Google-meister, here are the only five instances that’s occurred:
- War of 1812: Great Britain (1812)
- Mexican-American War: Mexico (1846)
- Spanish-American War: Spain (1898)
- World War I: Germany (1917) & Austria-Hungary (1917)
- World War II: Japan (1941), Germany (1941), Italy (1941), Bulgaria (1942), Hungary (1942), & Romania (1942)
In contrast, Trump will probably send kinetic hardware and or boots into five countries in January 2026. The takeaway point here is that modern extension of force and diplomacy (and yes, these are two sides to the same thing) to address our national interests, are something short of war.
The second consideration is to address whether the opposition to forceful intervention is based in principle or does it only apply to Donald Trump. This test is simple. None of us like war, none of us enjoy even distant abstract damage done to our national status abroad, but if your first real objection to foreign intervention, great or small, is Donald Trump, you don’t get to claim your sentiments are principled. They aren’t, they’re rooted in personal bias. Biden did not start any big wars but he did order numerous strikes around the globe, and yet his and this nation’s greatest modern national military disgrace was his order (even against the advice of his own compromised military leadership) to surrender and run out of Afghanistan. Sometimes war is preferable. Obama and both the Bushes were of course both profligate interventionists. The point here is that any measure of present-day intervention is relative to the precedents and the success or failure of previous contemporary Presidents.
While there are hard lines that would define gross foolish national risk, everything else in between is discretionary. Within those parameters, a President is constrained really by only two things: First, will the decision to intervene or to avoid intervention result in a successful outcome that favors the election or continuance of that executive and his party? Remember Lyndon Johnson? Second: How will history judge their decisions? These are the two things that matter at the end of the day.
President Trump was elected only in some small part, by his track record of limited military engagement. Throughout most of 2025, he’s kept that low profile except for taking out Iran’s nuclear program and then now, shutting down the Maduro narco-regime; two highly successful unprecedented ventures with zero loss of life and hardware thanks to a newly competent military under Hegseth’s leadership. The success quotient is part of the matrix to determine if it should have been done in the first place. I should hardly have to remind the seasoned reader to contrast those successes with the records of Biden, Obama, Bush, and dare I go back as far as Carter? A military failure is more than damage to a President’s feelings and reputation, it drastically changes both domestic and foreign perception, allies and enemies which in turn changes substantive actions.
Given Trump’s track record, I do not have an impulse to second guess his decisions in Iran and Venezuela. What I can say is that the strategic value of those successful ventures was off the charts extraordinary and historic. If Trump sat on his hands for the remainder of term, those two events (each worthy of a dedicated entire book) would make those missions worthy of historical esteem and future study; but there will be more. The reader here will need to do their own deep dive into the domino effect of these two operations. Iran was obvious but Venezuela was far far more than drugs, dramatically affecting Cuba, Iran, Russia, and China.
Trump’s overtures toward Greenland sounds troubling at face value, but a large component of his negotiating method is diversionary rhetoric, bluff, and threats. It ain’t my style but it’s worked pretty damn well for him and his presidency so far. He cannot be judged for a military decision that he never has to make. Trump is invariably judged by his rhetoric, for which he’s totally comfortable with. In essence, yours and everyone’s judgement is already a part of his equation. I would never favor a seizure of Greenland much less military action but everything in Trump’s track record suggests that he won’t have to. Ask yourself, how comfortable would Europe be if Greenland was seized by Russia or China? Or, is the EU ready to garrison a force there to stymie Russian expansion? At a certain point, Europe will beg Trump to take Greenland.
Past performance is not a guarantee of future conduct. Trump is thus far, judiciously restrained until military force is the last option and when he uses it, it is with deadly effectiveness, hit and departure. If that changes, and he attempts the incompetence of Carter, nation-building of Bush, regime changes of Obama, or the naked retreat of Biden, then I’ll be the first to say so.
As for the fantasy of Congress declaring war, does anyone think its practical that Congressman Billy-Bob, who can be bought off with corn subsidies, a lobster dinner in Georgetown, and hookers, is a good and reasonable check on executive power? I think we all know the answer.
If you’d like to comment on this post, feel free to do so on Twitter/X. Follow me: @leestanNEreader
A helpful introduction to the author in my ABOUT