America Is Used to Hiding Its Wars. Trump Is Doing the Opposite.
“President Trump, in his second term, has embraced a more aggressive foreign policy, launching airstrikes on Iran and engaging in other military actions. This marks a departure from his first term, where he largely inherited and maintained existing military engagements. Trump’s approach, characterized by a focus on content over conflict and a reliance on autonomous technologies, challenges the traditional understanding of war and its impact on American society.
On April 1, 32 days after abruptly launching a wave of airstrikes on Iran, President Trump made his first formal White House address to the American people about the war. He offered no new information or clarity on his strategy or goals. It was mostly just Trump, talking. But amid the familiar superlatives and tangents, there was a curiously specific digression.
“It’s very important that we keep this conflict in perspective,” Trump said. “American involvement in World War I lasted one year, seven months and five days. World War II lasted for three years, eight months and 25 days. The Korean War lasted for three years, one month and two days. The Vietnam War lasted for 19 years, five months and 29 days! Iraq went on for eight years, eight months and 28 days.” All of this was to say that 32 days was really not very long at all.
What was most surprising about Trump’s history lesson was its inference that wars were linear events with beginnings, middles and endings. This was not the impression that a reasonable person would have gotten from the past several months of increasingly disjointed foreign adventures: the capture of Venezuela’s president, an oil blockade and intimations of regime change in Cuba, weeks of open deliberation over invading Greenland and finally the Iran war.
These episodes followed the logic of content more than conflict, not so much ending as just kind of receding down the feed, replaced by bigger and better explosions. The White House social media team leaned trollishly into the idea, posting videos to X that spliced airstrike footage with movie and video game clips and a reference to the unofficial Proud Boys motto, “[expletive] around and find out.”
By the time Trump addressed the nation, however, America seemed to be settling into its own finding-out phase, and even the president’s allies were getting nervous. Memes had given way to maps of the Strait of Hormuz; gas was clearing $4 a gallon. Scapegoats were being sought: “As this thing goes south,” the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly said, “we need to know exactly who talked him” — Trump — “into it and what representations were made to convince the president that this was a good idea.”
One Trump national security official, the National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent, had already resigned over the war. “In your first administration, you understood better than any modern President how to decisively apply military power without getting us drawn into never-ending wars,” Kent admonished Trump in his resignation letter, blaming “Israel and its powerful American lobby” for luring him into an open-ended conflict.
The “never-ending wars” that Kent bemoaned have been the dominant condition of American foreign policy throughout the 21st century, a once-dystopian-seeming possibility that, somewhere in the long shadow of Sept. 11, became a quietly accepted reality. Americans don’t particularly like endless wars, but it’s been years since they opposed them all that actively, a fact that surely has to do with how little the wars — fought under thickening layers of classification by a professional military drawn from a sliver of the population, and with a rapidly expanding suite of autonomous technologies — cost them personally.
Trump has benefited from this jaded complacency as much as anybody. He railed against the entanglements of the Bush and Obama years in his 2016 campaign and declared in a first-term State of the Union address that “great nations do not fight endless wars.” But in that term, he mostly served as a distracted custodian of the occupations and covert operations he inherited, and voters did not seem inclined to punish him for it. Though he lost the 2020 election, in Gallup polling published early that year only about a quarter of Democrats and independents, and even fewer Republicans, considered foreign affairs an “extremely important” issue.
In his second term, Trump seems hellbent on changing that. “Trump 47 is almost a different president from Trump 45,” says Michael O’Hanlon, the director of research for the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution.
A leader who was once ambivalent at best about far-flung conflicts has, in the space of a few months, tried on several centuries’ worth of American imperialist costumes: the unapologetic empire-building of James Polk and James Monroe, the petro-political intrigues and Latin American chess games of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s spooks, Donald Rumsfeld’s fantasies about frictionless air wars. Trump’s April 1 speech, with its scattered musings about triumphs both real and imaginary, did not suggest he planned to change course anytime soon.
This president is, eternally, a break from American history and a logical culmination of it at the same time. On the one hand, his newfound adventurism would seem to run counter to the unspoken pact that Americans and their government have arrived at in the 21st century, in which the country’s citizens agree to mostly ignore the open-ended and opaque military operations conducted in their name as long as the government agrees not to ask them to sacrifice anything for them. On the other hand, the weightless vision of war-making that the Trump White House is presenting to the American people is an obvious product of this same recent history.
The Rise of the Endless War
“This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger,” George W. Bush said in his speech at the National Cathedral three days after the Sept. 11 attacks. American history would beg to differ: The United States was actively involved in military conflicts at home or abroad for most years of the 19th and 20th centuries, and has remained so in the quarter-century since Bush’s speech.
Public opinion of these wars has reflected less resolve than suggestibility. In his 2009 book “In Time of War,” Adam J. Berinsky, an M.I.T. political scientist, surveying seven decades of public opinion data, found that while Americans’ support for wars was affected by major attacks on the country — Pearl Harbor, Sept. 11 — it mostly followed the domestic “ebb and flow of partisan and group-based political conflict”: That is, it tracked politicians’ fights about the wars more than the events of the wars themselves.
This is understandable. Wars are complicated and, for Americans, almost always fought far away. The sacrifices they entail, even when they are painfully felt, are open to interpretation. But the fickleness of public opinion has provided obvious incentive for presidents — who, since Franklin D. Roosevelt, have closely studied polling on their wars — to withhold or shape information.
This project proceeded steadily through America’s postwar hegemony. Congress hasn’t formally declared war since World War II. Heeding the lessons of Korea and Vietnam, presidents have gradually shifted the financing of wars toward borrowing and printing money and away from a direct “war tax,” making it harder for voters to assess their cost. Richard Nixon ended the draft, corralling wars’ human losses within a small and, increasingly, demographically and culturally specific segment of the population.
The War Powers Act of 1973, informed by Vietnam, was supposed to reassert Congress’s authority to openly debate wars before beginning them. But with the arguable exception of George W. Bush, every president since Ronald Reagan has invaded or bombed a country without congressional approval.
Sarah Kreps, a professor at Cornell University who has studied military financing, argues that these innovations have gradually undermined one of the most famous ideas in democratic theory, advanced by Immanuel Kant in his 1795 essay “Toward Perpetual Peace.” Kant argued that democratic states behave differently, and more judiciously, in their war-making than monarchies and oligarchies. Their governments are responsive to their citizens, Kant reasoned, and their citizens are responsive to the costs of war, because they bear them. But what if the cost is hidden from them?
From Drone Strikes to TikTok Spartanism
And what if the gravest costs are not borne by them at all? This question has become particularly urgent since the advent of armed drones, which, in their capacity to inflict death without risking it, have changed the elemental moral calculus assumed in warfare. A country that does not incur much human cost from its wars is a country that does not think much about them at all. “The absence of casualties isn’t a bad thing,” Kreps said, “but what it does is make Americans not think twice about how they are spending their resources.”
This became evident during Obama’s presidency, as his administration attempted to shift the war on terror away from the Bush-era counterinsurgencies and into a more amorphous, drone-centric program of counterterrorism. Critics have long contended that this was a perverse consequence of mounting concern over the civil liberties violations of the Bush years: a replacement of black sites and Guantánamo detentions with ghostly assassinations by increasingly autonomous airborne machines, the particulars of which would remain far from the view, and consciences, of the president’s supporters.
It was a bargain that many of those supporters were tacitly willing to accept. Polls during Obama’s presidency found that even as large majorities of Americans opposed staying in Afghanistan, most also approved of the administration’s drone strikes — even when a plurality of respondents couldn’t name the countries being targeted.
The professional-class liberalism of the Obama years, happy to whistle past its moral and ideological contradictions, is one of the main targets of Alexander Karp’s 2025 book “The Technological Republic.” Karp is the chief executive of the data analytics firm Palantir, which used Obama-era Afghanistan operations as a laboratory to develop battlefield software it now provides to Trump’s Pentagon; its programs have been used to target airstrikes in Iran.
In “The Technological Republic,” he describes a fast-arriving future in which wars with beginnings and ends are replaced by constant tactical engagement with elusive, artificial-intelligence-enabled threats. In this new reality, Karp argues, one of the most pernicious threats to national security is the estrangement of American elites from the battlefield: Silicon Valley executives and programmers who angrily protest the military use of the tools they create, a political class that has “never flown halfway around the world to risk one’s life.” He argues for a return to the values of the early Cold War, when technology, culture and national defense were united in common purpose, and has suggested resuming the draft — that America “only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.”
Now that we are fighting the next war, however, it’s not hard to see the contradiction between Karp’s civic vision and his products. Advances in military technology, and especially the transformative technologies currently poking into view, aim to reduce the risk and cost of warfighting, not to share them as widely as possible. In the Palantir-assisted Iran airstrikes, we are getting a glimpse of a new reality in which human deliberation is considered a tactical liability. This is a recipe for a country in which citizen participation in war, where it exists, takes on a different and shallower meaning — “engagement” in the digital audience analytics sense, not the civic one.
You can see this contradiction on particularly garish display in Trump’s second-term bellicosity. The administration’s TikTok Spartanism, on a surface level, affirms Karp’s vision: The White House’s Iran content is an unapologetic brief for American hard power in a zero-sum world full of enemies. But it is a burlesque of the technologized warrior republic rather than a real enactment of it. The videos are possible only in a country that asks little from its people beyond their YouTube clicks, where the intellectual and moral muscles necessary to work through questions of war and peace disappeared into the couch a long time ago.
It is another variation on a familiar decadence rather than a repudiation of it, another reminder of how malleable the narrative of a nation is when it comes unmoored from reality. Once the links between citizen and conflict have been severed, you can tell yourself whatever story you want about who you are and what you are doing in the world.
Charles Homans is a reporter for The Times and The Times Magazine, covering national politics.“
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