One of the more alarming things about US president Donald Trump’s destructive war against Iran is how little planning seems to have gone into it. Trump’s team seemed unable to predict the terribly destabilising effects on the region or the world economy or that it would be difficult to replace Iran’s regime. Yet he is hardly the first American president to be tempted into a disastrous war by the bloated size of the American military.

As the old adage goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And the United States has an enormous hammer. It spends nearly a trillion dollars a year on its military, which incredibly is more than the combined military budgets of the next seven largest spenders. China, which ranks second in military spending, spends less than one-third of what the US does.

This elevated level of military spending began during the 1940s. The US has always been a violent country, but before the second World War, it was far less militarised than Europe. When the Nazis invaded France, the US had only the 19th largest military in the world. It ranked below even the Netherlands. Fighting that war required that the US become an “arsenal of democracy”, as President Franklin Roosevelt declared.

And yet after the second World War ended, America never demilitarised. The cold war against the Soviet Union and its desire for global dominance saw American military spending balloon and its military bases spread to dozens of countries. In his famous 1961 farewell address, president Dwight Eisenhower warned of the new power of the American “military-industrial complex”. The former second World War general worried that “we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions”. He prophesied, “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist”.

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Yet no American president heeded Eisenhower’s warnings. A sense of military superiority bred a false confidence that has time and again led the US into disaster. “North Vietnam can never defeat us,” pronounced secretary of defence Robert McNamara in 1961, “they can’t even make ice cubes.” In 2002, secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld announced that the US military could “do the job and finish it fast” in Iraq. As we know, in both cases it was dragged down in decade-long wars that it could not win.

The US has continually sought military solutions to problems when it should have relied on other tools in its box. No matter how big your hammer, it doesn’t work very well if you bang in a screw instead of a nail. It is easy for the US (in practical if not moral terms) to bomb another country to smithereens. It is much more difficult for it to reconstruct another nation’s polity and society according to its preferences.

Far from being an arsenal for democracy, permanent military build-up concentrated power in the office of the president. There are few limits on a president making war. Though that power is reserved in the US constitution for Congress, the last time the US formally declared war was during the second World War. A president can, as Trump has done, wage war without Congressional approval or public debate.

Trump’s war fits the pattern of Vietnam and Iraq, even if it is unlikely to last nearly as long. His bellicose secretary of war (as Trump retitled his secretary of defence) Pete Hegseth delivered on his promise to unleash “death and destruction from the sky all day long” in Iran. And yet the US has once again failed in its goal of regime change. Trump thought he could do in Iran what he had in Venezuela: remove the country’s leadership and replace it with one friendly to US domestic interests. Except, Trump admitted, some of the leaders he hoped might take over were killed by Israel. Iran’s new supreme leader Motjaba Khameni, son of its previous leader, is – if anything – less friendly to American interests than his father.

If Iran becomes a failed state, that would be an even worse consequence of this war. Civil war in Iran would be a breeding ground for terrorism, would displace millions of people and could mean continued disruption of the world’s oil supplies. That might necessitate further American military intervention.

For decades, there has been a bipartisan consensus in the US on the excessive military spending that has enabled Trump’s war. The only major party candidate to challenge it since the cold war was George McGovern, who ran in 1972 as an anti-Vietnam-war candidate. He lost in a landslide to Richard Nixon. However, there are now signs that the American public is turning against militarism.

The American politician who most seemed to understand that the American public was souring on war was Trump himself. Trump distinguished himself in the 2016 Republican primaries by clearly labelling the Iraq War a “mistake”. And he won the 2024 presidential election partly because he presented himself as a peace candidate. US vice-president JD Vance praised Trump for having “started no wars” during his first term in office. And yet, like many presidents before him, Trump could not resist the temptation to deploy America’s military machine.

Still, Trump’s war has been the most unpopular at its outset in American history with only 39 per cent supporting it and 54 per cent opposed. Unlike Vietnam and Iraq, of which a large majority initially approved, there has been no rallying around the flag. And history shows that wars tend to become less popular the longer they go on. Even prominent leaders of Trump’s Maga base such as Tucker Carlson have broken with him. There are also challenges to militarism on the other side of the political spectrum. Biden’s support for Israel’s war against Gaza helped provoke a profound sea change among many Democrats in their attitudes toward American foreign and military policy.

The present is bleak. Trump has taken the US into yet another war with disastrous consequences for human life, the region and the world. And he might not stop with Iran. Yet there is hope that in the near future American leaders might finally put down their hammer.

© The Irish Times