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Trump has ordered a new way of warfare — and it’s working

War is the use of arms to settle differences — tribal, political, religious, cultural, and material — between organized groups.

The general laws of armed conflict stay immutable, given the constancy of human nature.

However, the manner in which war is conducted remains fluid.

New weapons, tactics and strategies elicit counterresponses in an endless cycle of tensions between defensive and offensive superiority.

That said, has President Donald Trump introduced a novel way of waging Western war against America’s foreign enemies?

We saw glimpses of it during his first term, when he eliminated Iranian general and terrorist kingpin Qassem Soleimani and ISIS terrorist grandee Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

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In the former case, he preferred hitting the cause rather than the effects of Iranian terrorism in Syria and Iraq, while making it clear that he had no intention of striking the Iranian mainland and entering into a tit-for-tat “forever war.”

In large part, he was successful — Iran never quite replaced the venomous Soleimani.

And despite tired threats, its performative responses did not kill any Americans; they were seen by Trump as venting and not worth a counterresponse.

In the case of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Trump likewise went after the catalyst of ISIS terrorism.

But he also bombed ISIS into near-nonexistence in Iraq, since, unlike Iran, it lacked the financial and material resources of a state sponsor of terror, and it had no independent ability to make weapons or finance its terrorism.

In 2018, Trump probably killed more Russian ground troops than America had during the entire Cold War, with his furious response to the Wagner Group assault on a US Special Operations base near Khasham, Syria.

Yet the defeat of the Russian mercenaries also led to no wider conflict.

In these three cases, Trump successfully portrayed his antagonists as the unprovoked aggressors, employed overwhelming force to eliminate them, and declared them one-off occurrences with no need to punish the ultimate source or sponsor of the aggression with further force.

In Trump’s second term, he has widened his doctrine of “preventative deterrence” with operations to remove Venezuelan communist strongman Nicolas Maduro, along with two separate bombing campaigns against Iran.

While the second Iran operation is now in progress, it may resemble the earlier two in a number of facets.

Trump again portrayed Venezuela and Iran as unpunished........

© New York Post