U.S. Vice President JD Vance recently tried to cast President Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure as a wildly successful example of the “Trump Doctrine.”
According to Vance, the doctrine is simple: you identify a problem that threatens U.S. interests, which “you try to aggressively diplomatically solve.” If diplomacy fails, “you use overwhelming military power to solve it and then you get the hell out of there before it ever becomes a protracted conflict.”
If only it were that easy. What Vance describes is neither a doctrine nor unique to Trump. It is the same wishful thinking that produced many of the long, costly and unsuccessful U.S. military interventions that Vance himself has often decried.
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