Here Are 5 Wars Trump Started or Expanded in 2025 |
Foreign Policy
Matthew Petti | 12.26.2025 1:00 PM
President Donald Trump came into office presenting himself as a peace president. "We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into," he said in his inaugural address.
By those standards, his presidency has been a failure. Trump launched nearly as many airstrikes in five months as former President Joe Biden did in his entire term, according to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a nonprofit that monitors wars around the world. And those airstrikes have hit places where the U.S. military was not fighting during Biden's term, from the Caribbean to Iran.
Of course, Biden himself was guilty of the same sort of double-talk. He bragged that "the United States is not at war anywhere in the world" less than an hour after U.S. Central Command announced a new air raid on Yemen. Like death and taxes, it seems a certainty of life that American presidents will talk peace while continuing—and expanding—war.
Here are four countries where Trump has done that:
On the campaign trail, Trump signalled that he wanted a full-on war against drug cartels in Latin America. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Steven Miller originally wanted to target Mexican cartels, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio steered Trump toward a regime change campaign in Venezuela, arguing that the Venezuelan government was itself a drug smuggling gang.
The campaign began by bombing alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean. At least 104 people have been killed in these attacks so far. In one instance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the military to bomb survivors clinging to a........