When he was a candidate for president, Donald Trump tended to rail about the stupidity and wastefulness of U.S. interventions in the Middle East. He blasted his predecessors as men who didn’t know what they were doing, naively believing that the U.S. military could will the region to bend to its preferences. These remarks earned him a lot of applause on the campaign trail, in large part because they happened to be true.
Yet Trump isn’t exactly consistent in his thinking. During his first term, he had numerous opportunities to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and Syria but ultimately took the advice of his more hawkish advisers by keeping them in place. Rhetoric notwithstanding, Trump actually increased the U.S. force posture in the region, ordered additional ships into the Persian Gulf and boosted U.S. troop deployment in Saudi Arabia by 3,000 personnel.
The trend is continuing in his second term. Last weekend, Trump authorized large-scale U.S. airstrikes against dozens of Houthi positions throughout Yemen, the Arab country on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula that is technically still in a state of civil war. Another round of U.S. strikes reportedly occurred on Monday, although the White House had not confirmed it at the time of writing.
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