“Trump has learned his lessons, in a way. I think they’re the wrong lessons,” said Rosemary Kelanic, the director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a think tank that advocates a more limited military footprint. “After Trump went into Venezuela and snatched [President Nicolás] Maduro with no casualties, no American deaths, in this amazing, spectacular military operation, I think he’s like the guy at the casino who’s winning, and he’s going to keep winning. I think that psychology is mistaken.”
Trump has often been quick to threaten military action over the past year, and he has attacked the Houthi militia group in the Red Sea, Iran’s nuclear program and a militant group in Nigeria, in addition to the raid on Venezuela’s leader.
But those operations have all been limited in scope, with clear and quick endpoints, and have posed relatively little threat to U.S. troops. A large-scale attack on Iran would be significantly different from everything Trump has done until now.
“It’s a much larger operation that he’s threatening. The objectives are very broad, ” Kelanic said. “If the goal is really regime change, which many of us worry it could be, that is a long-term-horizon kind of outcome, which does seem different from what Trump wants. Overall, Trump has been very critical of these open-ended wars in the Middle East that were fought for no imminent reason. There’s no imminent security threat to the United States from Iran.”
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