Hegseth says on Iran: ‘This is not Iraq. This is not endless.
Army Secretary Pete Hegseth said the operation against Iran is not “open-ended” like it is in Iraq.
WASHINGTON – On the night he was elected to a second term, President Donald Trump sought to allay concerns from his critics that he would lead the United States into war.
“I’m not going to start a war,” he said in a victory speech to a crowd of supporters at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in Florida. “I will stop the war.”
But during his first year back in the White House, Trump unleashed U.S. military power on seven other countries. He ordered U.S. troops in Venezuela to detain the country’s leader, Nicolas Maduro. And in the most extensive military operation of the president’s term, the United States and Israel launched a joint strike against Iran over the weekend, targeting missile capabilities and its leadership in the region.
The attack killed six U.S. military personnel and more than 700 Iranians, including the country’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei.
Mr. Maduro’s capture and war in Iran are significant not only because of the scale of their operations but also because they appear to signal a new approach to foreign policy under the Trump administration. Both sought to not only eliminate what President Trump claimed was a threat to the United States, but also to decapitate those countries’ governments and remove their heads of state.
“We are in uncharted territory,” said Alexander Downs, director of the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at George Washington University.
White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt said in a statement to USA TODAY that President Trump’s decision to launch a military attack on Iran “is based on a truth that presidents have been talking about for nearly 50 years, but no president has had the courage to stand up to.” That is, Iran poses a direct and immediate threat to the United States and its military in the Middle East.
“The rogue Iranian regime, under the evil hands of the Ayatollahs, has killed and seriously injured thousands of American citizens and soldiers over the years, and that will end with President Trump,” she said.
From John F. Kennedy’s invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba to Ronald Reagan’s bombing of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s mansion to George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, the United States has a long and largely unsuccessful history of trying to bring about regime change or unleash domestic forces that incite the peoples of other countries to overthrow their leaders.
But what happened in Venezuela, where American troops raid another country to capture an elected leader, has never happened before outside of war. U.S. forces captured Panama’s Manuel Noriega during the 1990 invasion, but Noriega never officially served as president of the Central American country. He was a military dictator, an unelected leader who ruled behind the scenes.
Similarly, the attack on Iran was unprecedented and marked the first time a sitting head of state was killed by a U.S. airstrike, Downs said.
The United States has targeted other foreign leaders in the past.
The U.S. government attempted to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro several times, primarily through covert operations led by the CIA. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan ordered an airstrike on Gaddafi’s compound in Tripoli, accusing Libyan agents of involvement in the Berlin nightclub bombing that killed two U.S. servicemen and injured dozens. Gaddafi survived the attack on his home, but claimed his adopted young daughter had been killed, although later reports suggested this was false.
But President Trump’s decision to use military force to go after foreign leaders is a turnaround that has infuriated many of his MAGA supporters.
“‘Make America Great Again’ was supposed to be about the American people first, not Israel first, not any foreign country first, not any foreigners first,” Trump supporter-turned-critic and former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said on former Fox News host Megyn Kelly’s podcast on Monday, March 2.
“What’s happening to the people I supported, the people you supported, the people who condemned what happened in Iraq, the people who promised on the campaign trail that there would be no more foreign wars, no more regime change?” Greene asked.
Longtime Trump supporter and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson denounced the Iran operation as “absolutely disgusting and evil.”
Before entering politics, Trump repeatedly criticized then-President Barack Obama, claiming he was not a good negotiator and would go to war with Iran to improve his public image.
During his first term and while campaigning for re-election, Trump repeatedly denounced “forever wars” and regime change. In his second inaugural address, he said the country would measure his administration’s success “not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars we end and, perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”
But just eight months after taking office, he appeared to have a change of heart.
Last September, President Trump changed the name of the Department of Defense, which the government had abolished more than 70 years ago, to the Department of the Army.
To some, this rebranding seemed to signal a shift from a defensive stance to a more aggressive and dangerous image. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has argued that the military should move toward a “warrior mentality,” said the name change would convey “peace through strength.”
President Trump has publicly vowed to keep the United States out of costly and destructive wars and lobbied for the Nobel Peace Prize, but he has also been active in directing American military power against foreign adversaries.
In his first year as president, he attacked seven countries: Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
For example, Syria was hit with large-scale airstrikes in December last year and again in January of the following year in operations targeting Islamic State. Somalia has been repeatedly targeted in operations against Islamic State operatives, being attacked 168 times, according to New America, a nonprofit organization that tracks military operations.
President Trump has ordered attacks on ships in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean that his administration says are transporting drugs such as fentanyl and cocaine to the United States.
In January, U.S. forces raided President Maduro’s mansion in Caracas, captured the Venezuelan president and his wife, and took them to New York to stand trial on drug conspiracy charges. President Trump allowed Venezuela to maintain its leadership. Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez has been elevated to interim president, but President Trump has said he will run the country under the supervision of a U.S. team that includes Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Tim Natfari, a presidential historian and scholar at Columbia University’s Institute of World Politics, said the regime’s successful campaign in Venezuela may have encouraged Trump to take even greater risks in Iran, where the United States and Israel bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities last summer, claiming the regime was developing nuclear weapons. These attacks were a precursor to the current war that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and other senior leaders.
The Trump administration has offered various justifications for war, saying Iran is close to producing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that can reach the United States. But President Trump called on Iranians to rise up and overthrow the ruling regime.
Naftali said that by carrying out airstrikes targeting Iranian leaders, the United States has entered a new era.
“The removal of Ayatollah Khamenei, and I will not shed any tears for him, is a new chapter in U.S. foreign relations and one that raises the possibility of unintended consequences,” Naftali said.
For decades, U.S. policy has prohibited the government or its officials from targeting foreign leaders. Gerald Ford signed an executive order to establish the policy in 1976, and Reagan expanded it five years later. Although the government has targeted and killed terrorist leaders such as Osama bin Laden, the ban on political assassinations remains in effect.
The United States has a mixed record when it comes to forcing regime change in other countries.
During the Cold War, the United States attempted to change the leadership of foreign governments 72 times, according to Lindsay O’Rourke, a political scientist at Boston University who has studied international relations and regime change. Of those, 66 were covert operations. According to O’Rourke’s report, only 26 companies succeeded in bringing the U.S.-backed government to power.
Downs, director of the George Washington University Institute, said that despite Khamenei’s death, regime change in Iran remains a distant prospect.
“The United States and Israel are not going to do it themselves,” he said. “We are trying to create the conditions for the Iranian people to do so.”
But Iran’s ruling regime has been in place for nearly 50 years, is firmly entrenched, and has a long history of suppressing dissent. Iranian security forces massacred thousands of demonstrators in a crackdown on street protests in January.
With President Trump’s call for regime change, “we’re basically expecting them to stand up unarmed and fight a regime that killed thousands of people just a few months ago,” Downs said.
Meanwhile, President Trump predicted the Iraq war would last another four to five weeks, or longer if necessary. The United States has enough weapons stockpiled to continue the war “forever,” he wrote in Truth Social.
Michael Collins writes about the intersection of politics and culture. He is a veteran reporter who has covered the White House and Congress. Follow him on X: @mcollinsNEWS
