The Peace President's wars and assorted military interventions

I see that the Orange Anomaly in the White House has announced what is at least supposed to sound like a policy statement on the Iraq War, an illegal war of aggression he and Benjamin Netanyahu initiated. He may change his mind several times between now and then. And probably once or twice during his speech, or more if he’s not reading from a teleprompter.

This is worth keeping in mind:

During his two terms in office, Trump has overseen armed interventions and military operations — including drone strikes, ground raids, proxy wars, 127e programs, and full-scale conflicts — in Afghanistan , Central African Republic, Cameroon, Ecuador, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Venezuela, Yemen, and an unspecified country in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as attacks on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. More than 6,500 U.S. Special Operations forces’ “operators and enablers” are currently deployed in more than 80 countries around the world. And during its second term, the Trump administration has also bullied Panama and threatened Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland (perhaps also Iceland), and Mexico. (1)

Of course, not every military intervention of any kind is a war. The sinking of various Venezuelan and Colombian fishing boats wasn’t a war, it was “only” murder. Mass murder, actually, if we applied the common standards used when reporting on murders inside the US. Obviously, the current major war against Iran by the US and Israel is very much a real war with huge risks for all involved.

Turse’s examples also include “military operations,” which one assumes could include things like reconnaissance flights undertaken with the permission of the government over whose countries it is taking place. Or training missions in cooperation with the local government.

There’s nothing inherently wrong about such examples. The United States is one of the three most powerful countries that are currently at the center of the international power system. It does have a global military presence, and it is certainly worth questioning whether it is too broad and worth understanding the real risks involved with it. We see right now the risks involved with US military bases in Middle Eastern nations that are part of the US-Israel anti-Iranian positions. Those bases are a tool of US power projection, just as in the case of US bases in NATO countries. But their existence is not totally free of risk to the United States or to friendly countries willingly hosting them. And by any reasonable standard, there are way too many of them.

Turse’s link in the quote above to the more than 80 countries with US Special Operations forces is to this recent video from the House Armed Services Committee: (2)

Special Operations include forces from the Army and the Navy and are of course being employed during the current Iran War. There’s a very good chance that some of them already have “boots on the ground” in Iran, to use the popular phrase for “Us soldiers participating directly in military action in a foreign country.” By “very good chance” I mean “unthinkable that they are not.” (2)

Turse adds this important reminder:

Due to a lack of government transparency, obscure security cooperation, and carveouts baked into the U.S. Code — like the 127e authority enacted in the wake of the September 11 attacks, and the covert action statute that enables the CIA to conduct secret wars — the actual number could be markedly higher.

He also reminds us that the Peace President started using the opportunity of this massive military presence to conduct secret military missions even early in his first term in 2017:

[T]he bid to keep Trump’s other African wars secret imploded during a May 2017 AAA mission when Navy SEAL Kyle Milliken was killed and two other Americans were wounded in a raid on an al-Shabab camp in Somalia. The Pentagon initially claimed that Somali forces were out ahead of Milliken — U.S. troops are supposed to remain at the last position of cover and concealment where they remain out of sight and protected — but that fiction fell apart, and the truth emerged that he was, in fact, alongside them. [my emphasis]

Trump has recently been explicitly threatening to go to war with Cuba. The US obsession with Cuba since 1960 is a classic case of irrational obsession. Not every foreign policy calculation is based on some kind of rational national-interest calculation. Some of them are political responses to domestic political constituencies or just plain emotional reactions that make no practical sense even in terms of narrowly-conceived national interests.

Notes:

(1) Turse, Nick (2026): Trumps Secret Wars on the World Keep Expanding. The Intercept 03/30/2026. <https://theintercept.com/2026/03/30/trump-secret-wars/> (Accessed: 2026-31-03).

(2) Intelligence & Special Operations Hearing 03/18/2026. <https://www.youtube.com/live/7N1rh7YwMQU?si=TbHrG4RnQbK_mh6J> (Accessed: 2026-31-03).