Why America Can't Stop Fighting: The Structural Trap of Endless Wars

Donald Trump came back to the White House promising to end America's wars, not start new ones. For roughly a year, he seemed to mean it. He pressed European allies to spend more on defense. He opened talks between Russia and Ukraine. He eased tensions with China over Taiwan. Then, eighteen months into his second term, the United States found itself fighting Iran.

It was not supposed to happen this way. The American public had spent two decades concluding that Middle East wars were mistakes. Obama had promised the same thing Trump did—extraction from pointless quagmires—and failed. Trump's own 2025 National Security Strategy explicitly stated that the days of the Middle East dominating American foreign policy were over, that not every worthy cause deserved American attention. Yet by the time Operation Epic Fury began, the administration was bombing Iranian military infrastructure, killing senior regime leaders, and openly discussing regime change. Six months later, Iran remained in power, the United States had burned through much of its precision munitions stockpile, and the Islamic Republic had expanded its ability to threaten shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. The war had not achieved meaningful strategic victory, but the administration had abandoned diplomacy anyway.

What keeps pulling Washington back into these conflicts is not the will of individual leaders but the structure of American power itself. A president can initiate military force with remarkable ease. Since 1991, American leaders have grown accustomed to deploying troops to protect even minor interests. Congress has not declared war since World War II and has not issued an authorization to use military force since 2002. The president, as commander in chief, decides when and how to use the military. There are few real checks. The United States maintains bases across the globe and can project force anywhere within days. Cable news leans hawkish. Regional allies have every incentive to drag Washington into their conflicts. When Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued in March that the United States had to join Israeli strikes because American service members were already stationed in the Middle East, he was describing a trap that had been set long before.

Getting out of these wars is far harder than starting them. American leaders set maximalist goals even for marginal conflicts and balk at accepting partial success. Before Operation Epic Fury began, Iran had offered serious concessions: halting domestic uranium enrichment, removing existing enriched uranium, allowing international inspectors back in. The administration rejected the compromise and gambled on absolute victory instead. The same pattern played out with Ukraine. Many in Washington's foreign-policy establishment insisted there could never be a negotiated solution, even though American aid had helped Ukraine create a stalemate—a genuine achievement that might have been built upon. But accepting anything less than total victory felt like weakness.

The deepest structural problem is that most Americans barely feel these wars at all. The all-volunteer military means the direct cost falls on a small, self-contained population—increasingly the relatives of veterans themselves, not a broad cross-section of the country. Technological advancement means fewer soldiers are needed. The roughly 7,000 American military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, while devastating to those families, pale beside the casualty counts from Korea or Vietnam. For the average American, the Iran war's sharpest impact was a two-point rise in inflation to 4.8 percent in May, which has since fallen back to 3.5 percent. A Washington Post-IPSOS poll found the war now as unpopular as Vietnam was in its sixth year, yet Americans are unlikely to march in the streets about it. The costs are diffuse, hidden, deferred to future generations as additions to the national debt.

But the costs are not small. They are merely invisible. The United States is running critically short on precision munitions. Every interceptor used to defend a base or ally against Iranian rockets is one that cannot be used elsewhere. If American troops in East Asia or the Baltics do not have sufficient munitions, they cannot deter China or Russia. The troops deployed to the Middle East cannot be sent to other regions. The money spent on these wars cannot be invested in new capabilities or cutting-edge technology. The cost of rebuilding bases in the Gulf limits the ability to harden infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific. Regime-change wars require a different force structure—more land forces than naval—which undermines the Pentagon's ability to prepare for other contingencies. Even raising the defense budget to 1.5 trillion dollars, almost five percent of GDP, would not solve these opportunity costs. Military spending produces fewer jobs per dollar than other government spending and does not drive innovation as effectively as other economic activity.

The broader damage to American power is harder to quantify but no less real. The United States has long claimed to be a guarantor of global shipping and free energy flow. By destabilizing international energy markets in its conflict with Iran, it undermined that claim. Only about a third of people worldwide now view the United States as contributing significantly to global peace and stability. The administration burned diplomatic capital on the Iran war, reducing its influence elsewhere—Ukraine's peace efforts have been largely abandoned since the conflict began. In twenty years, as a result of these choices, the United States may well have a less effective military, less global influence, and a weaker economy. The question is whether Washington will proactively decide where to use its resources, or whether it will find its hands tied by an endless parade of conflicts it cannot afford.