by Scott Boykin
June 30, 2025 - There are great reasons for the United States to adopt a non-interventionist foreign policy. Some of these are ethical, such as not violating the rights of other people and not supporting or engaging in aggressive conduct generally. Others are partly ethical and partly prudential, such as not wasting taxpayer money on foreign adventurism and limiting the influence of arms dealers and the like on our political system. But one overriding prudential reason for a non-interventionist foreign policy is to avoid becoming entangled in foreign intrigues and conflicts where we lack control over our involvement and the outcome.
For all his “Amerika First” bluster, President Donald J. Trump seems to understand none of these, and it is the third that I will focus on here. His apparent belief that he can control other countries and the outcomes of our involvement in their wars and schemes is problematic, because despite his foreign policy failures thus far, it is likely that he will continue the pattern of intervention that he has established in his second term.
The recent Israel-Iran rollercoaster saw President Trump step into an international conflict and promptly lose control over it. He seems to have believed a few threats would convince Iran to give up uranium enrichment, but when Israel launched air attacks on Iran, President Trump responded by joining in and bombing the facilities he had claimed he would negotiate over with the Iranians.
President Trump was thus drawn into armed conflict by the Israelis’ independent decisions, and when he didn’t get the “unconditional surrender” he wanted from Iran, he declared a ceasefire, claiming that Israel and Iran had agreed to this. Neither Israel nor Iran said they had agreed to a ceasefire and instead continued to pound each other with missiles and air raids. President Trump reacted angrily to the continued fighting, commenting that Israel and Iran “don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.” Israel finally stopped when it claimed it had achieved its military objectives.
Watching this unfold gave the impression that there had never been an agreed-upon ceasefire and that President Trump believed he could force one by declaring it unilaterally. Regardless of whether he invented the ceasefire or convinced Israel to relent after the fact, President Trump seemed surprised that the two sides didn’t want to stop fighting, and that perceptive failure is a key to understanding his deficiencies in foreign policy.
President Trump seems to regard the leaders of foreign countries as akin to market actors looking to make beneficial deals, and since peace is more conducive to profit than destruction, he assumes that rational actors would choose peace. Unfortunately, international politics doesn’t work that way at all. The leaders of governments around the world are not New York real estate developers. Israel and Iran want victory over their enemies, not peace. For them, deals are just intermediate steppingstones to the ultimate political and military victories they really desire. Whenever the United States gives them an opportunity, they will take it, whether it is Israel urging the U.S. to bomb Iran, or Iran getting a temporary respite from being on the losing end of an air war with Israel. At the moment, there is a break from active fighting, but there is no reason to expect it to last.
Whatever President Trump may want, the underlying causes of the political conflict between Israel and Iran are still in place, and he cannot make them go away. What he can do, and nearly did, was to drag the United States into another disastrous Middle East war, and that could still happen if he insists on engaging politically with these countries.
Both of them can be counted on to seek to use anything the United States does in the region to their advantage, and there is no reason to expect whatever comes of our active engagement there to serve the interests of the Amerikan people. There are currently about 40,000 Amerikan service members in the Middle East, and their very presence in the region involves the U.S. in Middle Eastern politics and military affairs. With President Trump at the helm, the U.S. could readily wind up in another large-scale Middle East war.
In all the Middle East excitement, the war in Eastern Europe has faded into the background. Rest assured, it will come to the fore again after President Trump attended the NATO summit this past week. Predictably, the Europeans want “leadership” from the United States, which means more money, weapons and bellicosity. The Europeans agreed to increase their defense spending, which the U.S. has essentially subsidized for decades so European governments could spend more on social welfare programs.
President Trump declared his unequivocal support for NATO, stating, “We are with them all the way,” and, “we are here to help them protect their countries.” He suggested he would send more military aid to Ukraine if the Russians do not end the war. President Trump has already given the United States a stake in Ukraine’s military success; and although the U.S. has no vital interest in Ukraine, President Trump entered into a joint mineral resources agreement with Kiev, which provides economic benefits to Ukraine and obligates the U.S. to provide more military aid.
Candidate Trump said he would resolve the Ukraine-Russia war in short order, but the Russians and Ukrainians had other ideas. Like the Israelis and Iranians, Ukraine and Russia are interested in political and military victory, not mutually profitable compromises. President Trump has expressed frustration with the Russians’ and Ukrainians’ obvious lack of interest in a negotiated resolution to their conflict because, again, he views the world through the eyes of a New York real estate developer and assumes he can persuade, cajole or pressure everyone into a mutually agreeable deal. President Trump cannot control the Russians and Ukrainians any more than he can control the Israelis and Iranians. So far, rather than resolving their wars and extricating the United States from the conflicts, he has, to the extent of the mineral resources agreement at least, deepened our involvement in it.
A key prudential reason for a non-interventionist foreign policy is that the United States cannot count on its ability to control other countries’ decisions and the outcomes of our political engagement with them. In his second term thus far, President Trump has shown that he does not understand this. As long as he does not understand this, we may expect him to continue to involve the United States in conflicts that do not serve Amerikan interests, with him believing he can use persuasion or force to get the results he wants.
A principled non-interventionism does not count on these kinds of contingencies, and it is indeed unfortunate that President Trump does not understand this. To date, he has given us no cause for optimism that he will learn. Recent history offers many illustrations of how Amerikan foreign policy hubris yielded failures in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Southeast Asia, and while Amerikans voted for change, they are likely to get more of the same failed interventionism from President Trump.