In the span of a few months, President Donald Trump has threatened to seize Greenland, staged a military raid on Venezuela—hauling its president to New York to face trial and claiming its oil fields as the spoils—and has now launched a war with Iran aimed at dismantling its nuclear and missile programs and toppling its government. His defenders call this strength. His critics call it recklessness. Both are missing a more fundamental problem: these moves reflect a worldview built for a world that no longer exists.
President Trump sees power the way some 19th-century geostrategists did, in terms of territory, fossil fuels, corruption, and coercive military dominance over rivals. Control the Arctic routes. Control the oil. Suppress a hostile regime’s most dangerous capabilities. Each of these objectives has a certain logic. The problem is that logic made more sense in a different century, not the current one.
What’s conspicuously absent from the Trumpian strategic posture is anything that will actually determine American power and prosperity over the next 50 years: semiconductor supply chains, artificial intelligence, clean energy manufacturing, American workforce development, and the allied economic architecture and technological ecosystem needed to compete with China. These don’t register in Trump’s worldview because they don’t fit his Phil Leotardo (from The Sopranos) mindset. You can’t bomb your way to chip fab dominance. You can’t coerce your way to a resilient supply chain.
This isn’t an argument against hard power or the moral deficiencies of the regime in Tehran. Military strength matters, and there are circumstances in which force plays an essential role in American strategy. The question is whether force is being used as an instrument within a coherent and integrated national security strategy, or as a substitute for one.
What we’re seeing from this administration looks much more like the latter. Air strikes without a strategic end-goal or theory of victory. Diplomacy without a clear purpose. Coercion without coalition-building. Military action that consumes the fiscal, political, and strategic bandwidth needed for the competition that actually defines this century.
That bandwidth problem is more serious than it appears. Every dollar and decision-cycle consumed by military operations in the Persian Gulf, with no clear measure of success, is not being spent on implementing the CHIPS Act, investing in AI research, or rebuilding the development finance tools that help extend American economic influence around the globe—tools this administration has been systematically dismantling. Meanwhile, Beijing watches and waits. China is playing a long, patient economic and technological game. We are playing episodic gunboat diplomacy.
Worse, this approach isn’t even working on its own terms. In June 2025, Trump declared that American strikes had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. Today, he cites Iran rebuilding that program as justification for striking again. You cannot simultaneously claim total obliteration and use reconstitution as a casus belli—that contradiction lives entirely within Trump’s own statements.
The Defense Intelligence Agency’s initial classified assessment was that the June strikes set the program back “maybe a few months.” The IAEA chief said Iran could resume enrichment “in a matter of months.” And critically, the Omani foreign minister revealed a diplomatic breakthrough just the day before the war began—Iran had agreed to refrain from stockpiling enriched uranium and to full IAEA verification. The bombs fell anyway.
Venezuela tells a similar story: Maduro’s government remains in place, with his vice president serving as acting president; the major oil companies have not committed to investment; and the infrastructure will take 15 years and tens of billions of dollars to restore. The raid happened. We “seized” the oil. But the prize has proved elusive.
Then there is the question of what comes next if the goal of regime change is attained. The fall of the Iranian regime would not be without benefit—this is not a government that has served its people or contributed to regional stability, and no serious person mourns its potential end. But wishing for an outcome is not the same as having a strategy to achieve it, or a plan for what follows. Colin Powell warned George W. Bush before the invasion of Iraq: “If you break it, you own it.” The lesson went unlearned. There is no sign that it has been learned now.
If the Iranian regime falls, the United States will own the reconstruction of a nation of 90 million people, the management of its scattered nuclear program’s remnants, the containment or demobilization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its regional proxy networks, and the stabilization of a Middle East now plunged into crisis.
US intelligence has assessed that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s most likely successors are hardline IRGC commanders—the very people who built and oversaw the nuclear and missile programs in the first place. That doesn’t seem like liberation for average Iranians. The Trump administration’s leadership decapitation strategy may have had the opposite effect of what it intended. And the resources consumed by whatever unfolds in the next weeks or months—the dollars, the diplomatic attention, the military bandwidth—are resources that will not be going toward the competition that will actually define this century.
Moreover, success in the geoeconomic competition that defines the 21st century is fundamentally a coalition problem. No single country—not even the United States—has the semiconductor capacity, rare-earth supply chains, investment capital, and market access to create a sustainable innovation ecosystem and prosperity on its own. Our success requires partnership with Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, and across the Global South. It requires partners who trust American reliability and share American interests and values.
Threatening to absorb a NATO ally’s territory, bullying Canada, conducting unilateral military strikes, and undertaking a war of choice without coherence erode exactly the relationships on which that coalition depends. And despite the administration’s bully-boy mentality, building cooperative international coalitions isn’t soft or a sucker’s game. Allies share technology and coordinate economic policy with partners, not with self-interested “patrons” who treat them as afterthoughts.
There’s also a direct cost to working Americans that too rarely enters these discussions. A conflict in the Persian Gulf or Middle East that spikes oil prices, disrupts shipping lanes, or triggers financial market instability hits ordinary households immediately—at the pump, in grocery prices, in mortgage rates. The constituency Trump claims to champion pays the bill for strategic adventurism in ways that rarely appear in the post-strike commentary.
The alternative isn’t disengagement or naïveté. It’s a strategy calibrated to the world we’re actually in—one that uses hard power purposefully while investing in the technological, industrial, and alliance foundations that will determine long-term outcomes. The CHIPS Act, AI research investment, development finance, energy resilience, trade frameworks that bind allied economies together; these are the instruments of 21st-century competition. Destroying university research in basic sciences, mindlessly tossing diplomatic and development tools out of the national security toolkit, and unwinding alliances and partnerships are not a strategy for winning the race before it has begun.
And here’s the thing about that agenda: it’s worth pursuing regardless of China. A more competitive technological base makes Americans more prosperous. Energy resilience and a transition to a zero-carbon future reduce exposure to exactly the kind of Middle East volatility that Trump’s strikes may have now amplified. Strong alliances make the United States more secure. A thriving middle class makes democracy more durable. The competition with China may be a reason to accelerate these investments, but it is not the only reason to make them. We need to build American strength, not dissipate it on the wrong objectives.
Venezuela, Greenland, Iran. The pattern of bellicosity is a revealed preference. This president understands power the way a 19th-century strongman did—territory seized, resources extracted, rivals crushed—and his actions confirm it at every turn. But the century we’re actually living in demands something different: not less strength, but a smarter strategy that is integrated, forward-looking, and clear-eyed about what actually sustains American power and prosperity. What we have instead is nostalgia with a defense budget, and a growing body of evidence that it isn’t working.