It’s the perhaps tired refrain of foreign policy and defense professionals that wars are easy to start (if you’re still, mostly, the preeminent global military power) but much harder to finish. They are unpredictable. They quickly spread in directions you don’t anticipate. As the still preeminent global military power, you tend to be on the line for other sorts of instability that your war of choice creates. And yet Donald Trump has mainly been able to engage in what we might call impulsive unilateralism without generating too many problems for himself in the short run. He decapitated the Venezuelan regime through what amounted to a dramatic raid and is now, improbably, running the country as a kind of American presidential subsidiary through the mechanisms of the Chavista regime itself. He assassinated Qasem Soleimani in 2020. He launched a massive but brief bombing raid against Iranian nuclear facilities last year. In each case the U.S. was mostly able to end things quickly and on its own terms.

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