What Trump Groks About Foreign Policy

That Washington still doesn't get

Mar 03, 2026

Donald Trump understands something fundamental about foreign policy that most politicians don’t — including ones who have been active in this space for a very long time.
In the run-up to Operation Epic Fury, the critique circling on Capitol Hill wasn’t quiet. Republicans were concerned that, given the risk factors involved in a major regime change war — even one that was undertaken overwhelmingly by air and sea, not Army boots on the ground — the president had done little or nothing to warn the American people of the potential losses inherent in any attack.
Unlike the precision strikes Trump has used in the past — amazing feats of military technological capability, yes, but with lower potential loss of American lives — going after the Iranians meant inevitably setting off a barrage of missiles and drones that could attack all America’s forces in the Middle East, as well as our allies and regional partners.
Exfiltrating Nicolás Maduro and his wife without the loss of a single American life was an incredible achievement, one that was only possible thanks to the bravery and commitment of a terribly wounded helicopter pilot. Things could’ve gone sideways very quickly. Instead, the American forces under Trump pulled it off without one death. Assign it to good fortune, good planning, or the grace of God, but this is not the way such missions are expected to go.
The line from one old military hand to me in the run-up to the Iran strike was simple: How long can the old man keep going back to the table and coming up aces?
That risk, for a normal politician, would require advance mitigation. Think back to the lengthy effort George W. Bush and his associates put into making the case for war in Iraq. The many briefings, public speeches, presentations before the United Nations, and an open effort on television and in op-ed pages to make the case for war were meant to warn people of the potential loss of life and materiel. The message was clear: Steel yourselves for the worst, but understand we’re doing this because we think it needs doing. Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction require it.
Of course, after the WMD turned out to be a pittance of what was expected, and Hussein’s threats turned out to be the actions of a blowhard maintaining his hold on power, the Bush administration was forced into an uncomfortable pivot toward a war built on positive vibes and spreading democracy. The whole prewar case turned out to be built on falsehoods, albeit falsehoods every intelligence service in the West purportedly believed.
Trump became, like so many Americans, an outspoken critic of this war after the fact, as it dragged on interminably and descended into chaos that cost American lives and resources. He took the lesson, as did many politicians in the rising generation, that boots-on-the-ground regime-change wars without clear goals in mind are a pointless and expensive exercise.
But Trump seems to have taken another lesson from it, too: that the messaging build up to such action is unwise and unnecessary.
So, if the political critique of President Trump’s approach in Iran is that he didn’t make the case to the American people, it’s true — he didn’t. He understands that he doesn’t need to.
Americans assess foreign policy and national security not as ever-running aspects of their daily lives, but as a binary: success, or failure. We like to win. We hate to lose.
What Trump has done is show that he knows more about the reality of these issues politically than any longstanding politician, consultant, or commentator. He understands the importance of unpredictability. He makes his decisions in his own time and believes Americans will judge him only if his effort is unsuccessful. And if it is a failure, no amount of prior argument — readying the ground with an awareness of risk, detailing the potential benefits to energy markets or a destabilized China — will make a difference anyway.
It’s a fundamental change in the way an administration conducts foreign policy. It’s in keeping with Trump’s roll the dice approach. And it’s also based on enormous confidence in what the United States military is capable of when you ask them to blow something up instead of changing hearts and minds.
Donald Trump understands the old Vince Lombardi dictum applies here: Winning isn’t everything — it’s the only thing.

Rubio: Congress Can Vote On Whatever They Want

Daily Wire:

“Why not notify Congress ahead of this —?” the reporter asked.
“Well, we did,” Rubio pushed back immediately. “We notified Congress, well, we notified the Gang of Eight, we notified congressional leadership. There’s no law that says we have to do that. The law says that we have to notify them 48 hours after beginning hostilities. We’ve done that. I think the notification went today.”
“But we did notify members of Congress in advance,” he continued. “We can’t notify 535 members of Congress.”
When one reporter interrupted, arguing that Congress had to vote on a resolution declaring war, Rubio shot back, “Congress can vote on whatever they want, but there’s NO law saying we have to do that. And I’m going to say something because I see people on TV — look, that’s fine, if they want to take a War Powers vote, they can do that, they’ve done that. They’ve done that a bunch of times.”
Rubio repeated that there was no law requiring a president to take any action to notify Congress about strikes before engaging, adding, “To begin with, no presidential administration has ever accepted the War Powers Act as constitutional, not Republican presidents, not Democratic presidents. That said, we have followed the notification at 48 hours, and we’re here today.”
“I’ve done more Gang of Eight briefings than I got in four years of Biden! I was in the Gang of 8. We complied with the law and we will continue to comply with it,” he concluded.
According to the War Powers Resolution of 1973, the president must inform Congress within 48 hours after taking military action or sending troops into combat or imminent combat. A president can then continue such military action for only 60 days — with an additional 30 days for troop drawdown — without a vote from Congress authorizing the continued operations.

Buckle Up For Bumpier Skies

The New Yorker:

In 2002, a team of researchers from NASA, the F.A.A., and six commercial airlines ran a series of experiments in Oklahoma City, in a decommissioned Boeing 747. They wanted to see how quickly a commercial jet could be secured in case of turbulence. They recruited a group of volunteer passengers, gave them all fake boarding passes and luggage, and had three of them carry around life-size baby dolls. Some of the volunteers were told to stay in their seats and act as if they were sleeping, reading, or working on a laptop. Others were told to stand in the aisles or sit in the lavatories. A crew of experienced flight attendants, drawn from the airlines participating in the study, made their way up and down the plane, serving fake food.
The research team ran nineteen drills in three days. Some began with a mild warning over the intercom: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We will be encountering a line of thunderstorms in about ten minutes.” The rest began more urgently: “All passengers and flight attendants, please be seated immediately.” The more emphatic announcement prompted a quicker reaction. Still, at best, only two-thirds of the occupants were buckled up after seventy seconds. On average, the passengers needed a minute and a half to take their seats; the flight attendants, who had to stow their gear first, needed at least four minutes. Fully a third of the occupants were still out of their seats after seventy seconds.
To the people on Flight SQ321, that would have seemed an eternity. Eight seconds after the captain’s warning, the plane plummeted. Within five seconds, it had dropped a hundred and seventy-eight feet—about the height of a nineteen-story building. There was no time to react, Azmir later told reporters. “Whoever wasn’t buckled down, they were just launched into the air within the cabin,” he said. Azmir had a window seat near the back. When a plane hits turbulence, it tends to seesaw from front to back, so the first and last rows rise and fall the most. “I saw people from across the aisle just going completely horizontal, hitting the ceiling,” Azmir said. “People getting massive gashes in the head.” Some passengers were vaulted up so violently that they dented the luggage bins, or thrust their heads through the panels where the oxygen masks were stored. Those who were standing were sent somersaulting down the aisles; those sitting in the lavatories smashed into the ceiling. It was “sheer terror,” one passenger later said. Then, just as abruptly, the plane lurched up, slamming everyone back to the ground. In just four seconds, the gravitational force on their bodies changed from negative 1.5 g’s to positive 1.5 g’s, Singapore’s Ministry of Transport later noted. It was as if their bodies went from being helium balloons to being sandbags.
“I arrived back in the airport and I couldn’t stop vomiting,” another passenger said, after the plane had made an emergency landing in Bangkok. “I couldn’t walk.” A hundred and four passengers had to be treated for injuries. More than forty of them were kept for longer stays at the hospital; six had skull and brain injuries, including a two-year-old boy. Of the seventeen passengers who needed surgery, nine had spinal injuries, including an Australian woman named Kerry Jordan, who was left paralyzed. A year later, she still couldn’t brush her teeth or use a phone.

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