Trump’s Hit-and-Run Presidency

Trump’s Hit-and-Run Presidency

Newyorker

March 17, 2026

Within the past eighty days, Donald Trump has ordered military missions that have resulted in the capture and arrest of the President of Venezuela and, in coöperation with the Israelis, the decimation of the Iranian regime’s upper echelon, including its Supreme Leader.

It would be tempting to call Trump’s recent foreign-policy efforts acts of imperialism. But, as the historian and New Yorker contributor Daniel Immerwahr points out, these latest American acts of aggression represent something quite different. This is not an attempt to annex and govern new territories, to bring these countries under the United States flag by force, or to launch a years-long campaign to install a new form of government. This is a bomb-first-strategize-later mentality. “What’s striking about Trump is his shrugging indifference to overseas outcomes,” Immerwahr argues. “You could call this regime-change nihilism; you can’t call it imperialism.”

In this week’s issue, Immerwahr traces how American Presidents since the late seventies have handled Iran, starting with Jimmy Carter, who believed that the 1979 hostage crisis cost him a second-term, through Barack Obama, whose Iran nuclear deal Trump tore up in 2018. (Joe Biden promised to reverse this decision, but nothing came of it.) Trump, Immerwahr reminds us, was once a critic of George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, and campaigned against further “forever wars.”

“For all the Bush-style recklessness that U.S. hegemony engendered,” Immerwahr writes, “it also imposed limits. Past Presidents held back on attacking Iran for fear of damaging America’s legitimacy or its interests, broadly construed. Trump, caring little for either, has entered a major conflict with astonishing blitheness; the White House press secretary explained that Trump acted on a ‘feeling’ that Iran would attack. His minimal commitments, rather than yielding a constrained foreign policy, have lowered the barrier to war.”

Immerwahr’s analysis serves as both a provocation about the future of the world order and a helpful primer for anyone hoping to better understand how exactly we got here—though don’t expect too many easy answers. This President does not appear to have much of a plan for what comes next. Or, as Immerwahr writes, “the world’s most powerful military exists in his hands not to impose order but to lash out. This isn’t hegemony; it’s a hit-and-run.”