Washington, DC During the first six months of his second term, Donald Trump pushed the limits of US presidential power while aiming to reorient US foreign policy to “America First”.
His first few months in office also provided a window into the direction of his administration’s strategy for war, which analysts see as a symbiotic border between avowed anti-interventionism and quicksilver military incursions, which is characterized as “peace through strength”.
One thing has been clear in the first four years of Trump’s second four-year term, which has long been Washington’s preferred method since the start of the so-called “war on terror” in the early 2000s, despite questions about whether he has indeed pursued a coherent strategy when it comes to direct US involvement in international conflict.
According to a report released last week by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), since Trump’s re-entry into office on January 20, the US has carried out 529 air attacks in 240 locations across the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa.
The first five months of Trump’s four-year presidency, which includes his first five, are already close to the 555 attacks launched by the administration of US President Joe Biden from 2021 to 2025.
In a statement that came with the report, Clionadh Raleigh, a professor of political geography and conflict and the founder of ACLED, said that the most extreme tool at his disposal, which is targeted airstrikes, is being used as the first action.
“While Trump has repeatedly promised to end America’s ‘forever wars’, he has rarely elaborated on how. These initial months suggest that using overwhelming firepower to end fights before they start or drag on suggests the strategy. ”
A ‘Trump Doctrine’?
Influential sections of the president’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) base have already been stung by Trump’s willingness to launch lethal force abroad and the potential for the brazen approach to drag the US into a drawn-out conflict, culminating in his six-week bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen and, more recently, his decision to bomb three Iranian nuclear facilities in response to Israel’s offensive against its neighbor.
In turn, Trump’s top officials have pushed for coherence, with Vice President JD Vance providing the most explicit description of the strategy since late June.
“What I call the ‘Trump Doctrine’ is quite simple,” Vance said at the Ohio speech. You make it clear that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons, which is number one. ”
“Number two, you try to aggressively diplomatically solve that problem,” he said.
And thirdly, you use overwhelming military force to resolve a conflict before it ever escalates into a drawn-out conflict. ”
But the reality of Trump’s early diplomatic and military adventures has not matched the vision outlined by Vance, according to Michael Wahid Hanna, the US Program Director at Crisis Group. He referred to the statement as an attempt to “retrofit coherence.”
Hanna did offer a cautionary note against putting too much weight on a unified strategy, but he did mention one thing: a diplomatic approach that appears “haphazard, not fully conceived, and characterised by impatience.”
“For all of the talk about being a peacemaker and wanting to see quick deals, Trump has a particularly unrealistic view of the ways in which diplomacy can work,” he told Al Jazeera.
The US president had promised to change the Russia-Ukraine conflict’s efforts, but a previous pressure campaign against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy led to Trump returning to the Biden administration’s hardline approach to Russia, with little progress in the process.
Trump administration officials failed to make significant progress in reining in Israel’s conflict, leaving the threat of conflict with Iran and the Houthis in Yemen unanswered.
Earlier diplomatic overtures to address Iran’s nuclear programme stalled as Trump took a maximalist approach seeking to block any uranium enrichment. The US continues to give the “ironclad ally” billions in military funding despite the failure of the US to stop Israel’s military assault on Tehran.
It is difficult to refute Vance’s claim that the United States has pursued diplomacy with the utmost effort, Hanna told Al Jazeera.
Under Vance’s logic, he added, “that leaves them with no other means than to respond militarily”.
“Avoid questions later” is a phrase.
Trump and his secretary of defense Pete Hegseth have pledged to restore a “warrior ethos” within the US military despite the initial emphasis on air attacks.
Indeed, Trump has appeared to relish the military actions, posting a video of the attack on an ISIL (ISIS) affiliated target in Somalia on February 1, just 10 days after taking office.
He made a point of comparing Biden to Trump, who relaxed the engagement laws he had in place during his first term and pledged to severely limit the use of US strikes.
According to Trump, “Biden and his cronies wouldn’t act quickly enough to complete the task.”
“I did! We will find you, and we will kill you, is the message to ISIS and all other Americans who would attack them. ”
All told since taking office six months ago, Trump has carried out at least 44 air strikes in Somalia, where the US has long targeted both a local ISIL offshoot and al-Shabab, according to ACLED data. During his first four years in office, the Biden administration carried out just over 60 of these strikes.
The US president has also posted hysterical comments about US strikes in Yemen, where his administration carried out a bombing campaign from March to May, which included the vast majority of US strikes during his second term, as well as US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, which Trump claimed were “obliterated like nobody has ever seen before” before any thorough analysis had been done.
Raleigh, who is also a professor of political geography and conflict at the University of Sussex, said the increase could possibly be attributed to Trump’s pivot away from the soft-power policy of Biden, which has included shearing down the US State Department and dismantling the US foreign aid apparatus.
That could also be seen as Trump’s attempt to “place the US as a player in a new internationalized conflict environment,” where state actors’ overall domestic violence has increased steadily in recent years, currently accounted for 30% of all violent events ACLED tracks globally.
However, I would add that even as Vance claims there is, there isn’t, Raleigh told Al Jazeera. “And at the moment, it’s looking a little bit like ‘bomb first and ask questions later. “”
According to Airwars’ director, Emily Tripp, that approach has had potentially fatal consequences. She drew a parallel to Trump’s first term, when he also surged air strikes, outpacing those of his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, who himself oversaw an expansion of drone warfare abroad.
The monitor has accounted for 224 reported civilian casualties from US strikes in Yemen under Trump’s presidency in 2025, nearly equaling the 258 reported civilian casualties from US actions in the country in the previous 23 years. Additionally, the administration has engaged in highly expensive and powerful munitions in its strikes, which Airwars has determined to have been carried out against a wider range of targets than under Biden.
Two of the Trump administration’s strikes on Yemen, one on Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have determined that Ras Isa Port and another migrant detention facility are war crimes.
Tripp told Al Jazeera, “That’s not typical, or at least something you would anticipate in a campaign whose remit is largely on economic targets, as Trump, Hegseth, and [US Central Command] define.
“There’s really no reason for there to be such high levels of civilian harm,” she said.
In the course of Trump’s second term, Tripp continued, noting that she was still awaiting an evaluation of how the Pentagon handles civilian casualty investigations and transparency.
Concerns about efficacy
It remains unclear whether the administration’s reliance on swift and powerful military strikes will actually prove effective in keeping the US troops out of protracted conflict.
The results of the US bombing campaign have been “quite underwhelming,” according to Hanna of the Crisis Group, noting that few fundamental circumstances have changed while a tenuous ceasefire is still in place with the Houthis.
In protest of the Gaza War, the group has continued to launch missiles at Israel and launch missiles into Red Sea vessels. An attack in early July prompted State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce to warn the US “will continue to take necessary action to protect freedom of navigation and commercial shipping”.
As the White House has asserted, the jury is still out on whether Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities will result in a diplomatic breakthrough. Since Tehran launched retaliatory strikes on a US base in Qatar shortly after the ceasefire was reached, very little has changed.
Crisis Group’s Hanna assessed that Trump has relied on air strikes in part because they have become somewhat “antiseptic” in US society, with their toll “shielded from a lot of public scrutiny”.
