Washington, DC – During the first six months of his second term, Donald Trump pushed the limits of American presidential power while aimed at redirecting American foreign policy to “America first”.
His first months in power also offered a window on the future of the approach of his administration towards war, which analysts characterize as a sometimes contradictory tactic which oscillates between admitted anti-interventionism and the military attacks which rapid, justified as “peace by force”.
Although questions remain on the question of whether Trump has indeed pursued a coherent strategy with regard to the participation of the United States in international conflicts, one thing has been clear in the first part of the second term of Trump: US air attacks, the long Washington choice tool since its launch of the so-called “war against terrorism” in the early 2000s.
According to a report published last week by the land conflict site project (ACLED), since Trump’s profitability on January 20, the United States has led 529 air attacks in 240 locations across the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa.
This figure, which represents only the first five months of Trump’s four -year mandate as president, already approaches the 555 attacks launched by the administration of the American president Joe Biden during his entire mandate from 2021 to 2025.
“The most extreme tool at its disposal – targeted air strikes – is not used as a last resort, but as the first decision,” said Clionadh Raleigh, professor of political geography and conflict and founder of ACLED, in a press release accompanying the report.
“While Trump has repeatedly promised to end America’s” Forever Wars “, he rarely explained how. These first months suggest that the plan may be to use an overwhelming firepower to end the fights before starting, or before they drag.”
A “Trump doctrine”?
Trump’s desire to release deadly force abroad-and the risk that the cheeky approach has to drag the United States into the base (Maga), coming to the head of Trump’s bombing campaign against Houthis, Houthis, and, more recently, his June decision to take three nuclear facilities in Iran Amid.
In turn, Trump’s senior officials sought to bring coherence to the strategy, vice-president JD Vance at the end of June offering the clearest vision to date of a Trump plan for foreign intervention.
“What I call the” Trump doctrine “is quite simple,” said Vance during the Ohio speech. “Number, you articulate a clear American interest, and it is in this case that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.”
“Number two, you try to diplomatically solve this problem aggressively,” he said.
“And number three, when you cannot resolve it diplomatically, you use an overwhelming military power to resolve it, then you get out of there before it becomes a prolonged conflict.”
But the reality of Trump’s first diplomatic and military adventures did not match the vision described by Vance, according to Michael Wahid Hanna, director of American program for the Crisis group. He described the declaration of “renovating consistency”.
While Hanna warned against putting too much stock in a unified strategy, he indicated a “coherent thread”: a diplomatic approach which seems “random, not entirely designed and characterized by impatience”.
“For all speeches on being a peacemaker and wanting to see rapid agreements, Trump has a particularly unrealistic vision of ways that diplomacy can work,” he told Tel Aviv Tribune.
The American president had promised to transform peace efforts in the Russian-Ukraine war, but a previous pressure campaign against the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has since seen Trump going back to the hard approach to the Biden administration in Russia, with little progress made between the two.
After an initial cease-fire in Gaza, Trump officials failed to make significant progress in the Ré rét in the War of Israel, leaving the threat of training conflicts, including with Iran and the Houthis in Yemen, without response.
Previous diplomatic openings to contact Iran’s nuclear program have stopped while Trump adopted a maximalist approach seeking to block all enrichment of uranium. The effort was dissolved after the United States did not limit the military campaign of Israel against Tehran, while the United States continues to provide billions of military funds to “the ally with any slam”.
“It is difficult to say, as Vance did, that the United States has really pushed as hard as possible on diplomacy,” Hanna told Tel Aviv Tribune.
According to the logic of Vance, he added: “This leaves them no other means than to respond militarily”.
“Bomb first and ask questions later”?
The emphasis on air attacks was accompanied by the wishes of Trump and his defense secretary Pete Hegseth to restore a “warrior ethics” within the American army.
Indeed, Trump seemed to savor military actions, publishing a video of the attack on a target affiliated with ISIL (ISIS) in Somalia on February 1, only 10 days after their entry into office.
He made a duty to make a comparison with Biden, who tightened the rules of commitment policies that Trump had loosened during his first mandate and came into office to severely limit himself to dependence on American strikes.
Trump wrote that “Biden and his friends would not act quickly enough to do the work”.
“I did it!” The message to Isis and all the others who attack the Americans is that “we will find you, and we will kill you!” »»
All in all since its entry into office six months ago, Trump carried out at least 44 air strikes in Somalia, where the United States has long targeted a local isil offshoot and Al-Shabab, according to ACLED data. The Biden administration carried out just over 60 strikes of this type during its four years in power.
The American president has also published messages of boastful also on strikes in Yemen, where his administration carried out a bombing campaign from March to May, representing the vast majority of global strikes during his second term, as well as American strikes on Iran’s nuclear installations, who declared that Trump had been “obliterated as a person before” before any in -depth evaluation which had been carried out.
Raleigh, who is also a professor of political geography and conflicts at the University of Sussex, said that the increase could possibly be attributed to Trump’s pivot away from Biden’s sweet power policy, which included the shear of the American State Department and the dismantling of the foreign aid apparatus in the United States.
This could also be considered a Trump effort to place the United States as a “actor in a new environment of internationalized conflict”, where the overall violence of state actors on foreign soils has increased regularly in recent years, currently representing 30% of all violent events cornered worldwide.
“But I would say that there is still no doctrine of Trump Claire, as much as Vance wants to say that there are,” Raleigh told Tel Aviv Tribune. “And for the moment, it looks a bit like” bomb first and ask questions later. “”
This approach turned out to have particularly deadly consequences, according to Emily Tripp, director of Wars. She established a parallel with Trump’s first mandate when he also increased air strikes, exceeding those of his predecessor, former president Barack Obama, who himself supervised an expansion of the war of drones abroad.
The instructor followed 224 civilian victims reported in Yemen of American strikes under Trump in 2025, totaling almost the 258 civil victims reported from American actions in the country in the previous 23 years. The administration has also used particularly powerful – and costly – ammunition – in its strikes, which Airwars has assessed as seeming to have been deployed against a wider set of objectives than under Biden.
Two of the Trump administration strikes on Yemen, one on the port of Ras Isa and another in a center for detention of migrants in Saada, were considered as possible war crimes by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
“It is not typical, or necessarily something that you expect in a campaign whose delivery, as defined by Trump, Hegseth and (US Central Command), is on largely economic objectives,” Tripp told Tel Aviv Tribune.
“There is really no reason why there are such high levels of civilian damage,” she said.
Tripp added that she was still waiting to assess how the Pentagon addresses the surveys of civilian victims and transparency under Trump’s second term.
Efficiency questions
It is not yet known whether the dependence on the administration with regard to fast and powerful military strikes will actually prove to be effective in keeping American troops outside the prolonged conflict.
While a tenuous ceasefire continues to hold with the Houthis, the results of the American bombing campaign “were quite disappointing,” said Hanna of the crisis group, noting that few underlying conditions have changed.
The group continued to strike ships in the Red Sea and launch missiles in Israel in opposition to the war in Gaza. An attack in early July prompted the spokesperson for the State Department Tammy Bruce to warn that the United States “will continue to take the necessary measures to protect freedom of navigation and commercial shipping”.
The jury also remains on the question of whether Trump strikes on Iranian nuclear installations will lead to a diplomatic breakthrough on the Iranian nuclear program, as maintained by the White House. Small progress has been made since a ceasefire was reached shortly after the launch of Tehran, the accusation of reprisals on an American basis in Qatar.
Hanna de Crisis Group assessed that Trump relied on the air strikes in part because they have become somewhat “antiseptic” in American society, with their toll “protected from many public exams”.
But, he added: “There are limits in terms of what air power can do alone … It’s just reality.”