War is the use of arms to settle differences — tribal, political, religious, cultural, and material — between organized groups.
The general laws of armed conflict stay immutable, given the constancy of human nature.
However, the manner in which war is conducted remains fluid.
New weapons, tactics and strategies elicit counterresponses in an endless cycle of tensions between defensive and offensive superiority.
That said, has President Donald Trump introduced a novel way of waging Western war against America’s foreign enemies?
We saw glimpses of it during his first term, when he eliminated Iranian general and terrorist kingpin Qassem Soleimani and ISIS terrorist grandee Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
In the former case, he preferred hitting the cause rather than the effects of Iranian terrorism in Syria and Iraq, while making it clear that he had no intention of striking the Iranian mainland and entering into a tit-for-tat “forever war.”
In large part, he was successful — Iran never quite replaced the venomous Soleimani.
And despite tired threats, its performative responses did not kill any Americans; they were seen by Trump as venting and not worth a counterresponse.
In the case of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Trump likewise went after the catalyst of ISIS terrorism.
But he also bombed ISIS into near-nonexistence in Iraq, since, unlike Iran, it lacked the financial and material resources of a state sponsor of terror, and it had no independent ability to make weapons or finance its terrorism.
In 2018, Trump probably killed more Russian ground troops than America had during the entire Cold War, with his furious response to the Wagner Group assault on a US Special Operations base near Khasham, Syria.
Yet the defeat of the Russian mercenaries also led to no wider conflict.
In these three cases, Trump successfully portrayed his antagonists as the unprovoked aggressors, employed overwhelming force to eliminate them, and declared them one-off occurrences with no need to punish the ultimate source or sponsor of the aggression with further force.
In Trump’s second term, he has widened his doctrine of “preventative deterrence” with operations to remove Venezuelan communist strongman Nicolas Maduro, along with two separate bombing campaigns against Iran.
While the second Iran operation is now in progress, it may resemble the earlier two in a number of facets.
Trump again portrayed Venezuela and Iran as unpunished past and present psychopathic aggressors.
He went after Maduro for his past of exporting gang-bangers and criminals across the Biden-era open border, and for using Venezuela’s cartel connections to profit from American deaths.
As for attacking Iran, Trump cited the theocracy’s past terrorist attacks on Americans and US allies, its effort to assassinate Westerners and its unwillingness to abandon plans to create a nuclear weapon.
What, then, are Trump’s new ways of conducting war?
Geostrategy: Always behind these seemingly unconnected events — and other nonkinetic moves like warning Panama about Chinese intrusions — strategic concerns loom.
The common denominator is usually isolating China from strategic spaces, allies and oil — and Russia in a lesser sense.
Loud and terrorist but ultimately impotent proxies of strategic enemies — Cuba, Iran, Venezuela — are preferable targets.
They are not just easily identified enemies given their past anti-American violence; their demise offers a global display of the weakness of their distant patrons and underwriters.
Wars of reckoning: Trump always frames his interventionism as reactive and long overdue, a sort of “reckoning war” for previously overlooked crimes that his predecessors had ignored but are often seared in the American mind.
“Preemptive” or “preventative” wars, these strikes may be. But Trump himself avoids the baggage that those adjectives of aggression convey in the collective American memory.
War amid negotiation: Trump’s way of warmaking is usually an extension of ongoing negotiations (as over Iran’s nuclear weapons, or Maduro’s subsidies to drug trafficking).
During discussions, he offers various exit ramps to his adversaries and publicly laments the possibility of violence.
Meanwhile, American naval and expeditionary assets show up and amass to ramp up the pressure.
Trump does not wait for negotiations to fail, but usually offers a deadline to his adversaries.
Then he simply informs his advisers of the point at which the enemy has no intention of seeking a peaceful settlement. A strike follows.
The culpable apparat: Trump prefers top-down war — that is, he starts his attacks by targeting the enemy apparat, not its lesser henchman.
The aim is both to disrupt its command and control and to separate an enemy leader from a population deemed not necessarily culpable.
His enemy counterparts — al-Baghdadi, Khamenei, Maduro, Soleimani, the Wagner Group — are widely regarded as odious, which strengthens his prophylactic or reactive action.
Trump’s enemies do not gain empathy since their antiwar activism becomes inseparable from the de facto defense of a rogues’ gallery of deposed and hated killers and thugs.
No to nation-building: Trump sees the United States as responsible only for lighting the fuse of revolution, then giving the oppressed the chance of something better if they do not miss their chance at regime change and American cooperation.
No boots on the ground: He involves few ground troops — so no chance for an Abu Ghraib misadventure, or a humiliating skedaddle from Kabul, or for maimed Americans from shaped-charge IEDs.
It’s much harder for targets to kill Americans in the air and on the seas.
With zero investment in occupying a country and hands-on rebuilding its institutions, casualties are kept to a minimum.
The weapons of choice of Middle East Islamists and terrorists — IEDs, sniper rifles, suicide vests, sudden rocket salvos — are far less effective when America is fighting with overwhelming firepower, technological advantage and mobility in the air and on the oceans.
Still, visuals are important. The point is not just to demolish the opposition but to do it with overwhelming redundancy as a global revelation of America’s assets.
Exit strategy: There is an exit strategy of sorts, partly rhetorical and partly real — but usually arbitrarily declared by Trump himself.
He alone starts the shooting and stops it, according to his own definition of when the war begins and ends.
The enemy has a vote, of course, but Trump frames the conflict in ways that lessen his say.
Because the transactional, ideology-free Trump holds few grudges, he can announce after an attack that he wishes to “Make Iran great again!”
Or he praises the Venezuelan people and professes eagerness to restore their oil industry to its proper profitability and transparency — even as he storms their presidential palace.
If the enemy refuses to give up, Trump assumes it eventually will. He has endless patience, both to pound it by air and sea and then, at any moment, to praise the defeated and declare the hostilities over.
No to internationalism: Trump cares nothing for United Nations condemnations, given the organization’s moral bankruptcy and lack of credibility.
For action outside Europe, he does not really consult NATO, much less the European Union.
He assumes all three will follow a predictable script: initially critical, then tentatively supportive as the tide of battle turns, and finally either praising Trump’s success or angling to get in on the action.
Nor does he worry much about veiled threats from Russia or China.
He is careful to consult a key few in Congress, but cares even less that the American Left opposes anything he does.
Or rather, he expects their Pavlovian resistance and considers their shrill outbursts and street theater as the stuff of future campaign ads.
Deterrent displays: Trump uses his strikes as global reminders of American prowess.
He showcases the mammoth USS Gerald R. Ford carrier, the largest warship in the history of conflict.
Media maps of American naval assets cover four disparate seas surrounding the Iranian theater — the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean — derived from Pentagon press releases.
New weaponry is spotlighted — whether a mystery sonic-boom weapon at Maduro’s presidential palace or a new fleet of kamikaze drones in flight to Iran.
American self-interest: Trump will not act unless the public can be apprised of American self-interest, and unless a cost-benefit calculation indicates a good chance of success.
He has no interest in liberating and rebooting another Iraq or Afghanistan, since their oppressed populations may hate the infidel Americans as much as they do their own oppressors.
It’s no accident that both his 2026 targets, Venezuela and Iran, have oil, offering the wherewithal for the liberated without the US having to fund their restoration.
Flipping petro-dictatorships that were proxies under the aegis of China and Russia weaken both.
What Trump says and does are sometimes divergent.
Funding Ukraine weakens Russia, which is in the US interest — so Trump finds ways to keep the arms coming, mostly without commentary.
Letting Israel take care of business and jumping into the war to humiliate Iran last summer unleashed forces that destroyed the Assad regime in Syria — and finally got Russia out of the Middle East.
The present conflict over Iran is the greatest challenge that Trump has faced in either of his two terms.
But given his past record, there’s a good chance that he will eventually rid Iran of its theocracy — the fleeting hope of our past seven presidents.
For five decades, the Iranian street and its unhinged theocracy scared the Middle East silly with its “Death to America” chants, its promise to destroy the Zionist entity, its brag of going nuclear, and its often overt warnings to rip apart the Sunni-dominated Gulf.
Trump, with help from Israel, finally revealed the theocracy to be a Keystone Kop kleptocracy.
The mullahs screamed “Death to America!” — but it was Trump’s America that finally brought death to them.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.
