This analysis examines Trump’s shift from “President of Peace” to launching Iran war. Despite low approval (27%), second-term legacy ambitions and belief in “peace through strength” drive him. Public opinion is malleable—support often rallies after action. Victory at acceptable cost is the gamble.
So much for the ‘President of PEACE’.
When Donald Trump ran for election in 2024, he repeatedly emphasized the fact that he had been the first president since Jimmy Carter who did not get the US involved in a new armed conflict. ‘I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars,’ he assured the nation in his victory speech on election night.
Just over one year on, the president has now authorized the use of force in seven different countries in his second term.
For years, Trump railed against his predecessors for their costly record of quixotic military misadventures in the Middle East. Now, with the Supreme Leader dead and much of Iran in ruins, Trump appears to have acquired a taste for regime change after all.
With only 27 per cent of Americans approving of the strikes, Democrats calling the attack a ‘war of choice’, and Republicans split, Trump has taken a massive political gamble. Why?
Trump’s political horizons have shifted
In his first term, Trump pulled back from the brink of war on multiple occasions. In 2019, he aborted a military response to the downing of a US drone by Tehran, apparently convinced by Tucker Carlson that he could ‘kiss his chances of re-election goodbye’ if he got into a war with Iran. The US assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the following year was an aggressive act. But Trump sought to de-escalate soon after rather than risk getting embroiled in conflict in an election year.
Today, the president seems much less concerned by these risks. He is now a second term president, who doesn’t have to face voters again. This reduces his sensitivity to political risk overall: he is no longer angling for re-election but thinking about his legacy.
Carlson has described Trump’s strikes as ‘disgusting and evil’. But he no longer has Trump’s ear. And those that do, like Senator Lindsay Graham, understand that the president is now more interested in spending political capital than saving it.
Having advised Trump against targeting Soleimani in 2020, Graham was among the leading voices pushing the president to ignore such warnings last week.
Trump is not the first president to seek fundamental change in Washington’s relationship with Tehran as a means of cementing a foreign policy legacy. Ever since the revolution of 1979, relations have oscillated between bouts of hostility and attempts to broker a rapprochement.
But most presidents have sought to use the political space afforded by a second term to pursue a diplomatic solution. In launching military strikes at such an unprecedented scale, Trump has flipped the script.
The president has always been a peace-loving militarist
To Trump, the use of force is not incompatible with the pursuit of peace. On the contrary, the president has repeatedly expressed a belief in the efficacy of exercising military power as an instrument of peace-making.
At the signing ceremony for the newly established Board of Peace, for example, the president lauded last summer’s strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities as ‘another great victory for the ultimate goal of peace’. He also spoke enthusiastically of ‘annihilating terrorists’ in Nigeria, having ‘wiped out’ ISIS in Syria, and the ‘amazing’ military operation that captured Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.
The president’s affinity for authorizing spasmodic violence is not new. Trump routinely celebrates his first term successes in eliminating individuals, from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria to Soleimani in Iraq. It is one reason why efforts to paint Trump as an isolationist have only ever been half-right.
The president’s position also captures a central contradiction in public attitudes about foreign policy.
On the one hand, voters tend to oppose long, costly conflicts in which the public bears the brunt of the human and financial costs. As such, there are clear disincentives to excessive sabre rattling on the campaign trail. As President George W. Bush once joked to troops in the Middle East: ‘You don’t run for office in a democracy and say, ‘Please vote for me, I promise you war.’
On the other hand, polls consistently find that the US public expresses considerable concern about a whole host of global threats, and support for the use of force as an appropriate tool to address them. The development of nuclear weapons by Iran routinely features near the top of these lists. 77 per cent perceived it a critical threat when Gallup last asked about it in 2024.
More recently, a CBS poll taken just three days prior to the attacks showed 51 per cent of Americans would favour military action against Iran to stop them from producing nuclear weapons. Research also indicates that voters systematically favour candidates who take policy positions which project an image of toughness.
Trump’s strikes on Iran can be understood as the logical culmination of the president’s efforts to cater to an inherent ‘cakeism’ in public opinion about foreign policy: voters want leaders to be able to whack the bad guys and influence outcomes they care about, without bearing the costs of doing so.
Public attitudes towards foreign policy are malleable
President Trump’s appetite for risk may also have been buoyed by confidence in his own ability to lead public opinion. Foreign policy is a distant issue for most voters, who rely on political leaders for cues about what to make of events overseas. And the president is a particularly powerful opinion leader, especially among co-partisans.
Take Venezuela. According to a YouGov poll in late December, just 21 per cent of Americans supported the use of military force to overthrow Nicolas Maduro. Yet just three weeks later, after the president did precisely that, support almost doubled to 40 per cent. More importantly, perhaps, Trump’s base rallied to his side, with support from Republicans rising from 43 to 78 per cent in the same period.
Trump’s actions may have his advisers engaging in rhetorical gymnastics to square his frequent use of force overseas with his ‘America First’ vision. But vocal opposition from hardcore elements of the MAGA wing of the Republican party seems to be the exception to the rule – for now.
It is also not unusual for the public to ‘rally around the flag’ in the immediate aftermath of a major use of force abroad. The jury is still out on whether incumbents can manipulate public opinion as easily as implied in the ‘Wag the Dog’ scenario. But Trump is at least aware of the dynamic, having repeatedly predicted that Barack Obama would start a war with Iran to boost sagging poll numbers during the 2012 campaign.
What comes next?
History suggests that, politically speaking, the only thing worse than getting involved in a war is failing to win at an acceptable cost. The fluidity of US objectives offered by the administration may give Trump some room to simply declare victory if costs begin to mount.