In Praise of Trump's Leader-Decapitation Strategy
Killing minus nation building kind of makes sense
In the Boston Globe, I have a new article arguing that what I call Trump’s “leader-decapitation strategy” is working. Killing bad people is an achievable goal that the US is good at and probably has positive effects on the world. We should do it more often, and do much less of many other aspects of foreign policy. I also discuss how all this might go terribly wrong. As always, you can read it over there or below.
Every time the United States uses force abroad or looks as if it is about to, opponents of intervention bring up Afghanistan and Iraq. Both wars started out with narrowly defined objectives as part of the war on terror but ended up causing chaos on the ground and costing thousands of American lives.
Yet if the approximately decade and a half after 9/11 seemed to discredit interventionism, the period that began with the first Trump administration has shown the degree to which many of the assumptions of anti-interventionists have been misguided. What we need going forward is a synthesis, which takes the real lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan while also appreciating that there are instances where American power can be used for good by removing certain leaders. So far, it appears that the president has arrived at such an approach, and there are initial indications that what we might call Trump’s leader-decapitation strategy is working.
Consider the arguments that have in recent years been used to caution against striking Iran. After Trump assassinated Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020, Bernie Sanders warned that the president was on the brink of starting a conflict that could cause thousands of deaths and cost trillions of dollars. Joe Biden said that Trump had “just tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox.” On Twitter and TikTok, talk of “World War III” went viral. In actuality, the Iranians fired a few missiles at American bases and did little else in response. A few years later, Iran’s main foreign proxy, Hezbollah, was knocked out of commission as the Israelis assassinated one after another of its leaders in Lebanon. Israel’s northern border has remained relatively stable since.
