The last few weeks have been a roller coaster for U.S. policy in the Middle East: from diplomacy to military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities and back. Though the president himself mused briefly about regime change on social media, in practice the strikes threaded the needle between nonintervention and all-out war—surgical strikes against a few targets followed by immediate de-escalation. The result was a policy that pleased neither the hawks nor the doves within Donald Trump’s coalition and left observers even more confused about whether Trump is a traditional Republican hawk or a noninterventionist.
Yet Trump’s actions on Iran are not out of step with how he talks about and has typically pursued foreign policy. Circumscribed but forceful military action to advance U.S. interests—often described as “Jacksonian,” but perhaps better described as a modern kind of punitive expedition—is entirely consistent with this worldview. It’s just out of step with the last few decades of U.S. foreign-policy practice.
The last few weeks have been a roller coaster for U.S. policy in the Middle East: from diplomacy to military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities and back. Though the president himself mused briefly about regime change on social media, in practice the strikes threaded the needle between nonintervention and all-out war—surgical strikes against a few targets followed by immediate de-escalation. The result was a policy that pleased neither the hawks nor the doves within Donald Trump’s coalition and left observers even more confused about whether Trump is a traditional Republican hawk or a noninterventionist.
Yet Trump’s actions on Iran are not out of step with how he talks about and has typically pursued foreign policy. Circumscribed but forceful military action to advance U.S. interests—often described as “Jacksonian,” but perhaps better described as a modern kind of punitive expedition—is entirely consistent with this worldview. It’s just out of step with the last few decades of U.S. foreign-policy practice.
The term “Jacksonianism” comes from the scholar Walter Russell Mead, who argued that there are four broad schools of U.S. foreign-policy thought. Wilsonians—named after the president who gave us the League of Nations—believe in advancing liberal and democratic values around the world. Hamiltonians focus more on commercial affairs, pushing the United States to take an active lead in protecting international commerce, such as when then-President George H.W. Bush sought to protect international oil markets during the Gulf War. Jeffersonians, in Mead’s telling, tend to avoid foreign engagement and focus almost exclusively on domestic affairs; this tendency has been largely unrepresented among recent presidents.
Jacksonians focus inward, taking a profoundly nationalist approach that prioritizes domestic over foreign policy. But they are also perfectly happy to spend on the military and entirely willing to fight over issues that they perceive to be central to U.S. interests. As the historian Hal Brands describes it, “their aim in fighting [is] American victory, not the salvation of the world.”
If Trump is indeed a Jacksonian, it marks a notably nationalist turn in U.S. foreign policy—perhaps, even, the end of the era of almost unchallenged Wilsonianism that saw the United States as the world’s “indispensable nation.” Presidents since George H.W. Bush have sometimes embraced Jacksonian policies but have in the main pushed some larger vision of a U.S.-led world order. If Trump is truly focused first on American interests, then other nations—U.S. allies and adversaries alike—will need to adjust to an era in which the United States may well act rather differently on the world stage.
Protesters attempt to pull down a statue of U.S. President Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square near the White House in Washington, D.C., on June 22, 2020. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
For the last few decades, many in Washington have followed “Pottery Barn” rule. In other words: If you break it, you buy it. When the U.S. starts a war, as former Secretary of State Colin Powell told then-President George W. Bush in 2002, it must be ready to pick up the pieces afterward, no matter how big that commitment. Many critics of the foreign-policy consensus likewise accept the Pottery Barn rule; they just argue that America should not get involved in the first place.
Trump’s strikes don’t fit neatly into the usual binary of U.S. foreign policy, which tends to see isolationism as the only alternative to engagement. Observers have been describing Trump as a Jacksonian since his first term, with no less a figure than Mead arguing in 2017 that the “distinctively American populism Trump espouses is rooted in the thought and culture of the country’s first populist president, Andrew Jackson.” Trump is not scared of using military force; he loves the notion of military strength and clearly dislikes global liberal crusades and alliances. He even branded his own foreign policy “America First,” stealing a slogan from the interwar period and making it his own.
The Iran strikes only reinforce the comparison. In Trump’s own telling, he felt that Iran was stringing the United States along in negotiations and saw a window of opportunity created by Israeli actions. In the lead-up to the strikes, as media personalities and Republican foreign-policy hands engaged in a vicious, public fight over whether the United States should engage in war with Iran or not, voices on both sides seemed to have internalized the notion that there could be no such thing as limited intervention. Tucker Carlson feuded with Sen. Ted Cruz, and Steven Bannon issued strident warnings that striking Iran would bog the United States down in another Middle Eastern war. Iran hawks like Mark Levin, meanwhile, were practically salivating at the thought of toppling the regime in Tehran.
But Jacksonians would instead reject the premise of the rule entirely, arguing that it’s fine to break things and leave. Jacksonians, out of favor since at least the 1930s, have primarily fought when the United States or its citizens are threatened or attacked, as they did after Pearl Harbor or the destruction of the USS Maine in 1898. They are also open to punitive expeditions or surgical strikes that seek to punish or compel other states, such as then-President Ronald Reagan’s decision in 1988 to destroy much of Iran’s surface fleet in retribution for attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
For now, the Jacksonians seem to have been vindicated. The Iran-Israel cease-fire has held, the United States has avoided further strikes, and the worst-case scenario—a United States once again bogged down in a pointless Middle Eastern war while China continues its inexorable rise—has not yet come to pass. Vice President J.D. Vance praised this “new foreign policy doctrine” focused on “clear American interest” and avoiding “protracted conflict.”
Yet although Trump’s balancing act between intervention and restraint seems to be working, we must also understand the limits of a Jacksonian approach to the world. Surgical strikes and limited intervention may well be preferable to decades of nation-building and forever wars, but they carry their own risks.
For one thing, surgical strikes rarely solve the underlying issue in any international dispute. Reagan’s Operation Praying Mantis may have decimated the Iranian navy, but it did nothing to resolve the tensions between the U.S. and Iran. Targeted strikes against terrorist leaders may kill the individual in question but do little to undermine their political or ideological influence.
Israel’s strategy of “mowing the grass” is infamous in this regard, allowing Israel to control threats to its own population from militants without making diplomatic concessions to the Palestinians or to neighboring states. But one must mow the grass regularly if it is not to grow too high, and the Israelis have—as a direct result of this strategic choice—felt compelled to intervene in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza multiple times in the last decade alone. One-and-done strikes are rarely just a one-time affair.
Intelligence already suggests that the damage to Iran’s nuclear program may be less severe than assumed, potentially leaving centrifuges and stockpiles of enriched uranium untouched. Even if the administration’s own rosy assessment is correct, in the absence of follow-on diplomacy to secure Iran’s program, either Trump or his successor will still be back in the same position in a few short years.
A second set of problems with Jacksonian-style surgical strikes revolves around escalation control. Much depends on the reaction of one’s adversary. A humorous meme doing the rounds on X after the bombings took Trump’s social media post and attributed it instead to Emperor Hirohito after Pearl Harbor, complete with a Trumpian “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE.”
The joke perfectly captures the absurdity of following bombs with an immediate appeal for peace; nothing on Earth would have induced Americans to accept diplomacy and peace in the days and weeks immediately following Pearl Harbor.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks in front of a painting of Jackson in the Oval Office of the White House on July 30, 2018. Andrew Harnik/AP
This time around, Iran had been so badly weakened by weeks of Israeli strikes that it was largely unable to hit back at the United States outside of symbolic strikes. Imagine instead that it had been able to respond with overwhelming force—or even that its symbolic retribution had gone wrong, killing U.S. troops. Or suppose the combination of U.S. strikes on nuclear facilities and Israeli actions had unexpectedly succeeded in decapitating or toppling the Iranian government. The wave of refugees and chaos that swamped parts of North Africa and the Middle East after Libya and Iraq might look small in the aftermath of unintentional regime change in Iran, a country of more than 90 million people.
Perhaps the worst problem with Jacksonian surgical strikes of this kind is that victory can breed overconfidence. It’s very easy for policymakers and the public alike to see successful military action and push for more. Trump’s Iran strikes were greeted with adulation on Fox News and elsewhere in conservative media. It can take a truly disciplined policymaker to resist the siren call of further intervention in such an atmosphere. Needless to say, “truly disciplined” is not typically used to describe the 47th president—nor his Jacksonian, populist base.
The risk is real, therefore, that the apparent successes of the last few weeks may make future poor decisions more likely. When urging future action, Congress and the media may simply be able to remind the president of his smashing success against Iran’s nuclear program. Trump’s Jacksonian approach allowed him to defy both hawks and doves to find a middle ground between unfettered intervention and restraint. It is highly unlikely to work out as well every time.
