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June 24, 2025, 10:06 AM View Comments ()

Washington’s June 21 strikes on Iran should finally put an end to one of the more tedious debates about U.S. President Donald Trump and his foreign policy: Is he an interventionist or not? The debate has endured for the last decade, ever since Trump carved out a lane for himself in the Republican Party by denouncing the Iraq War. Nearly 10 years later, his position still sparked curiosity from across the political spectrum and fueled attacks on Democrats for not being anti-war enough. As recently as early June, you could read serious commentators circumspectly applauding Trump for renouncing nation-building during his latest trip to the Middle East. Finally, they hoped, the forever wars would end and an American administration would focus on rebuilding the region through trade and investment.

A lot has changed in a few weeks. By backing Israel’s air war on Iran, and then joining it, Trump has made clear that he is most certainly an interventionist, just not a liberal one.

Admittedly, this should have been clear already. After all, when Trump denounced the occupation of Iraq, his precise complaint was that the U.S. didn’t “take the oil.” When there was a hot debate in the first administration over whether to withdraw U.S. troops fighting the Islamic State in northern Syria, the winning argument with the president wound up being that the U.S. would keep the oil. In his first term he also increased, not reduced, the pace of American drone strikes in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and the Horn of Africa—something you would never know from discussions of his supposed restraint.

Part of the problem is that, in American foreign-policy debates, “intervention” is assumed to be “liberal” and thus closely associated with “nation-building.” As a result, there’s been a category error in looking at Trump. The president really does oppose liberal interventionism. He just prefers his interventionism self-interested and explicitly illiberal. His mercantilist view of the world holds that the U.S. should be reimbursed by allies for deploying its massive military power. His disinterest in the lives of others means he doesn’t care who dies or what kind of situation is left when the fighting stops. As many have noted, he appears genuinely afraid of nuclear war, but in all other circumstances, his calculation appears to be whether the use of force will be profitable. Sovereignty, international law, or even norms of diplomacy are all concerns he has openly dismissed throughout his many years of public life.

It’s safe to say Trump doesn’t care what foreign-policy school he fits in, or what kind of interventionist he is. He will judge the Iran strikes based on what they do for his image and his popularity. He likes to win, and if he thinks intervention produces a win, he’ll do it.

Beyond that, what specifically does Trump want out of his intervention in Iran? As with much of the president’s behavior, there are multiple contradictory but also valid interpretations available. Trump often appears driven by impulses, with interpretations coming afterward, often put forward by columnists and cabinet members trying to further shape his behavior. When U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance says the president doesn’t want regime change, and then a few hours later the president says it might not be such a bad thing, Trump isn’t necessarily chiding his second-in-command. More likely, someone else got the right talking point into the president’s head and onto the president’s Truth Social account.

If, despite the ceasefire he just announced, Trump eventually embraces Israel’s goal of regime change, it will be very different from Afghanistan or Iraq. There’s no sign that Israel or Trump is interested in even trying to rebuild a democratic, free Iran, much less in investing the trillions of dollars that would require. Instead, they would be content to simply impoverish Iran, cripple its economy and military, and allow a new strongman to take charge. Rather than serving as a cautionary tale, the outcome of the revolution in Syria could well be a model. After toppling dictator Bashar al-Assad, Ahmed al-Sharaa is now presiding over a fragmented state that remains vulnerable to continued Israeli airstrikes and occupation.

Iran is much larger and richer than Syria, and it hasn’t just emerged from 14 years of civil war. But Israel’s military dominance of the region is so pronounced now, and Iran’s allies so weakened, that Israel is capable of shattering the country with U.S. support and letting it decay into a failed state. That, too, would be regime change. The ensuing crisis could lead to civil war along sectarian and ethnic lines, and would push millions of Iranians to flee the country. This should terrify the United States and Western allies. The problem with thinking about foreign policy purely as something to “win” is that winning is seldom final, and a reckless victory can carry its own dangers.