What does “America First” even mean anymore?
Vox
February 28, 2026
Smoke rises over the city center after an Israeli army launches second wave of airstrikes on Iran on February 28, 2026. | Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images
With the decision to once again launch major airstrikes on Iran, in conjunction with Israel, and call for the overthrow of the Iranian government, President Donald Trump’s foreign policy has come full circle. The US has once again launched the sort of regime change war, where the actual stakes for US national security are far from clear, that he has spent more than a decade deriding his predecessors for pursuing.
During the 2016 election, Trump initially distinguished himself from his Republican rivals with his willingness to call the war in Iraq a mistake — in fact he called it possibly the worst decision in presidential history. During the general election, Trump was viewed by many as less hawkish than his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, who infamously backed the Iraq war as a senator. In 2024, he once again ran as a non-interventionist, blasting the Washington foreign policy consensus for its willingness to send American troops to die in foreign wars.
Along the way, his “America First” supporters and the Republican Party eagerly sought to canonize him as the “peace” candidate leading a broader movement against reckless militarism. In endorsing Trump in 2023, then-Sen. JD Vance wrote an op-ed with the title “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.” It was, Vance wrote, “perhaps a low bar, but that’s a reflection of the hawkishness of Mr. Trump’s predecessors and the foreign-policy establishment they slavishly followed.” Later, as his running mate, Vance said on a podcast that “our interest very much is in not going to war with Iran” and that Trump would resist any pressure from Israel to join one.
Vote the pro-peace ticket. Vote Trump-Vance 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/N1TwMxivnF
— GOP (@GOP) November 4, 2024
Trump’s second-term foreign policy has not exactly been dovish — it has already featured a major air campaign in Yemen, an earlier round of airstrikes against Iran, the decapitation of the Venezuelan regime, a less discussed but much larger air campaign in Somalia, and the threat to use force to annex Greenland.
A small number of “America First” supporters, most notably former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, broke with him over these policies and accused him of abandoning his campaign promises. Among the many non-interventionists in Trump’s orbit who have stuck by his side, however, the goalposts appear to have shifted a bit. Even if Trump’s foreign policy has been highly interventionist, they’ve argued, the interventions have been short, sharp campaigns with limited objectives and — most importantly — few US casualties. It’s an approach more akin to the “gunboat diplomacy” of centuries past than the costly nation-building projects of the post 9/11 years.
Vance told the Washington Post on Thursday that while an attack on Iran might be necessary to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon, there was no chance of a “Middle Eastern war for years with no end in sight.” He has previously said that the difference between Trump’s wars and those of previous presidents was that those presidents were “dumb” and got the United States embroiled in long, drawn-out, unwinnable fights.
It’s far from clear how this conflict will play out, but the comparisons to Iraq in 2003 are hard to avoid. Just as George W. Bush’s administration promoted — untrue, as it turned out — claims about Iraq’s weapons programs to justify the intervention, the Trump administration over the past several weeks has been hyping unproven or just plain false claims about Iran’s ability to build an intercontinental ballistic missile or a nuclear weapon. (The latter is also hard to square with Trump’s repeated assertion that last summer airstrikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program.)
The Israeli military has described the airstrikes as a “preemptive attack,” another echo of the Iraq era. As with “Operation Midnight Hammer” last summer, the bombs started falling at a time when the US and Iran were still engaged in ongoing negotiations over the country’s nuclear program — just yesterday it appeared some tentative progress was being made.
Trump’s calls for Iranians to rise up against their regime actually echoes Bush’s father, who called for Iraqis to “take matters into their own hands” during the 1991 Gulf War. Tens of thousands were later killed when the US ultimately opted to leave Saddam Hussein’s regime in place, leaving the dictator free to put down a Kurdish uprising with attack helicopters.
Just a few months ago, in a speech in Saudi Arabia, Trump decried decades of “neocons” and “interventionists” for “intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves,” wrecking them in the process. In December, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told a national security conference that the US military “will not be distracted by democracy building interventionism, [or] undefined wars” but would instead focus on the country’s “practical, concrete interests.”
With strikes already targeting Iranian leadership compounds, including those used by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, it’s hard to see this as anything other than a regime change war. “All I want is freedom for the people,” Trump told the Washington Post early Saturday.
It’s true that the United States has not committed ground troops to this operation and given the force posture it has arrayed in the region in recent weeks, seems very unlikely to. It’s also worth noting that just because Trump is talking about the overthrow of the regime now, the operation could very well stop short of that goal. He has shown in the past that he is very willing to walk away from military operations with limited wins, even with underlying issues left unresolved.
But that doesn’t mean US troops won’t be at risk from retaliatory strikes from a desperate Iranian regime. Iranian retaliation against US assets and allies in the region already appears larger and more widespread than during last summer’s operation. Trump, who is typically reluctant to acknowledge any potential downsides to his decisions, jarringly warned on Saturday that “the lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties.”
The eternal temptation of bombing the Middle East
Every US president since Jimmy Carter has ordered some sort of military operation in the Middle East and every president since George W. Bush has done so while vowing to extricate the US from the region’s conflicts to focus on larger priorities.
In its National Security Strategy released by the White House in November, the administration made a major break with its predecessor by emphasizing the Western Hemisphere and border security above overseas conflicts. The brief section on the Middle East stated that “Conflict remains the Middle East’s most troublesome dynamic, but there is today less to this problem than headlines might lead one to believe.” Iran, the region’s most destabilizing force, the regime noted, “has been greatly weakened” by Midnight Hammer as well as Israeli actions since October 7, 2023. Overall, the document concluded, with greater US energy independence, “America’s historic reason for focusing on the Middle East will recede.”
And yet, here we are. Advocates for regime change argue that this is is a historic moment of opportunity to change things for the better in Iran; that while the risk of destabilization from military intervention is real, that the Iranian regime itself has been a source of destabilization for decades, and that it’s worth taking action now to remove it at a moment when it’s at its weakest, both domestically and internationally.
It’s hard to begrudge those who’ve lived under this repressive regime or its violent regional proxies from hoping for a better outcome; that a push from US and Israeli airpower is all that’s needed to topple this house of cards and make space for a better Iran and a better Middle East.
But this is the kind of logic Americans have heard before in the 21st century and have, for very good reasons, largely rejected. And the person who, one would think, understands that rejection the best, is its main political beneficiary: Donald Trump.
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Originally published on Vox on 2/28/2026