To many observers, Donald Trump’s open bellicosity – his threats to attack Greenland and Iran, and his recent kidnapping of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro – looks like an ideological reversal. “Donald Trump betrayed his MAGA base today [by] launching a war of choice to bring regime change in Venezuela,” tweeted Democratic congressman Ro Khanna on 3 January. The day before, former Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote: “President Trump threatening war and sending in troops to Iran is everything we voted against in ‘24.” On 20 January, National Public Radio reported that “Trump supporters share confusion and anger over the president’s focus on Greenland”.
To understand how American presidents move from caution to calamity, it is worth starting with the only president since the second world war who never sent troops into combat: Jimmy Carter. The reason has everything to do with timing: Carter was the first president inaugurated after Vietnam, the greatest US military defeat of the 20th century. Asked early in his presidency whether he would send troops to repel an alleged invasion of Zaire by communist Angola, Carter replied: “We have an aversion to military involvement in foreign countries. We are suffering, or benefiting, from the experience that we had in Vietnam.”
For all their ideological differences, Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, shared that aversion. Reagan’s cold war rhetoric was often fierce, and he lavished money on both the Pentagon and on anti-communist regimes and insurgencies overseas. But he was cautious about directly waging war. Like Trump in his first term, Reagan liked brief attacks that he could use as political theater. In 1983, he invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada. The operation took only a few days, after which Reagan’s administration handed out more than 8,000 medals, even though the attack involved only slightly more than 7,000 US troops. Three years later, Reagan bombed Libya. Reagan in the aftermath of Vietnam was like Trump in the aftermath of Iraq. He liked short, dramatic acts of force against adversaries too weak to put up a fight.
Reagan’s successor, George HW Bush, grew bolder. In 1988, a Florida grand jury indicted Panamanian dictator – and longtime CIA employee – Manuel Noriega on charges of drug trafficking. Reagan had called on him to resign but, fearful of another Vietnam, refused to invade. But after Noriega annulled an election, Bush – who was under pressure to appear tough on drugs – did. Bush’s invasion of Panama involved more than three times as many troops as Reagan’s assault on Grenada. Yet politically, the risk paid off. While the invasion killed hundreds of Panamanian civilians, only 23 US servicemembers died, and the US arrested Noriega in less than two weeks. America’s victory in Panama, according to Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker III, contributed to “breaking the mindset of the American people about the use of force in the post-Vietnam era”, and thus “established an emotional predicate” for the Gulf war 13 months later.
