How Trump has failed to learn the lessons of the wars that followed 9/11

Friday marks the 25th anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Since 9/11, US presidents have expanded their power, step by step, to wage war anywhere, anytime, as they please.

With Operation Epic Fury in Iran, President Donald Trump reached a new peak in the war-making powers claimed by the US commander in chief. Trump launched his war of choice on Iran — in his words, “the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terror” — without any congressional authorization, the support of NATO allies or a UN resolution. There was also scant buy-in from the American public for what was at its outset the least popular war of the modern era, nor was there anything resembling an imminent threat to the United States. Nor had Trump bothered to learn anything from past American wars, and he did not have a real plan for the “day after” hostilities commenced. The US military has long been adept at breaking things and killing people, but when its tactics were not aligned with a clear strategy, the United States ended up in the quagmire of Vietnam, or the sectarian civil war in Iraq that eventually birthed ISIS, or precipitating a possible global economic recession caused by the Iran war.Trump’s predecessors also laid the groundwork for the Iran war. The “war on terror” morphed over time in the months after 9/11, beyond the war in Afghanistan against the Taliban and al Qaeda that was backed by the UN and NATO allies. It then grew to encompass President George W. Bush’s doctrine of “preventive war” that justified the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That invasion led to a civil war during which an estimated 200,000 Iraqi civilians died. The war on terror expanded to include President Barack Obama’s prolific use of armed drones in countries such as Pakistan and Yemen that were not at war with the United States; attacks that killed thousands of suspected terrorists and a sizeble number of civilians.With UN and NATO support, Obama also ordered the campaign to remove the Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi from power in 2011, but Obama didn’t seek approval from Congress. The overthrow of Gadhafi precipitated a civil war in Libya that lasted a decade, and the country continues to be divided, ruled today by two governments. Obama later said that not planning for the “day after” Gadhafi’s fall was his greatest failure as president. During the “global war on terror,” the United States cycled through a variety of strategies and tactics, some of which backfired spectacularly. Those include Bush’s Iraq invasion and the bipartisan fiasco of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan more than a decade and a half later, an agreement negotiated under Trump and executed under President Joe Biden.The US pullout from Afghanistan predictably resulted in the Taliban taking over the country. The debacles of the Iraq War and the Afghanistan withdrawal signaled that the US superpower had little idea what it was doing when it came to foreign policy, which undercut its position around the world. There were some real American operational successes during the war on terror: The CIA became an effective paramilitary agency hunting and killing terrorists; Joint Special Operations Command transformed from a barely used counterterrorism force to an industrial-level killing machine; US Special Forces partnered adeptly with Afghan and Iraqi ground forces; and the National Security Agency skillfully penetrated enemy communications. All these developments played important roles in eventually decimating the leadership of al Qaeda and ending the geographical “caliphate” of ISIS. As a result, there were no large-scale lethal attacks by foreign terrorist groups in the United States following 9/11, which was a major national security goal of the four post-9/11 presidents. Last fall, Trump dramatically expanded the ambit of the war on terror when he claimed that he could kill suspected Latin American drug cartel members at will on the grounds that they were “narcoterrorists.” This resulted in dozens of American strikes on boats transporting drugs in the Caribbean, and when US Joint Special Operations Command captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in early 2026, Trump asserted he was a narcoterrorist.