American President Donald Trump wants to be known as the U.S. leader who ends wars—the “president of peace,” as he puts it. He campaigned in 2016 as someone who would put a stop to endless overseas entanglements and, in 2020 and 2024, as one of the few modern American leaders who didn’t start a conflict. But Trump’s behavior over the last year has been remarkably hawkish. Within just the last two months, he has bombed two countries and sunk multiple ships in the Caribbean. He is now massing American naval forces near Iran, which he attacked in June. And on January 3, he had American troops fly into Caracas in the dead of night, grab Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and take them to New York City to face criminal charges.
The domestic political consequences of Trump’s hawkish pivot are not yet clear. His actions in Venezuela, for instance, have drawn condemnations from Democrats and also some Republicans who embraced Trump’s promise to forgo foreign wars. Polls taken shortly before and after the attack on Venezuela show that fewer than 40 percent of Americans thought the move was a good idea. But this does not mean that voters are overwhelmingly critical of the decision, either. A Reuters survey, for example, found that Americans were almost evenly divided among those who supported the attack, those who opposed it, and others who remained unsure.
History nevertheless offers some guideposts for anticipating how both the Venezuela operation and Trump’s other foreign adventures will ripple through American politics and shape the president’s legacy. Interventions that make U.S. presidents look strong tend to boost an administration’s domestic approval—even in cases in which voters doubt the value of those actions on their merits. By contrast, when military interventions make the White House look weak and reckless, they tend to hurt. That means operations that are effective, relatively brief, and technically impressive tend to be political assets, whereas operations that drag on and incur costs without realizing key objectives become hindrances.
For Trump, the domestic consequences of his actions could therefore depend on what happens next in Venezuela and beyond. If the White House is finished attacking Caracas and the new Venezuelan government does as Washington asks, the capture of Maduro may prove politically helpful. If future interventions play out similarly, they could also work to Trump’s advantage. But invasions and assaults are dangerous gambits for presidents. And Trump, perhaps emboldened by his success in Caracas, may embark on bigger, more complex, and thus more fraught operations. If he does, Americans could sour on them—and him. It is a fact that most recent American presidents have discovered, at some point or another.
SHOCK AND AWE
U.S. political analysts often claim that ordinary voters care little about foreign policy. But scholars have found that Americans do have views about military conflicts and that public opinion tends to follow some consistent trends. Americans, for example, are more likely to support the use of force when it is designed to stop interstate aggression by other countries, as was the case with the 1990-91 Gulf War, when a U.S.-led coalition of countries pushed Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. By contrast, voters tend to be more skeptical of wars whose purpose is to change other countries’ political systems. They are less supportive of interventions that Washington launches by itself, without any kind of international cooperation or approval. And they are more suspicious when a president enters a conflict without authorization from Congress, or when political elites are divided over what they think.
But the ways Americans evaluate the merits of military interventions is just one part of how these events shape presidential politics. The more important question, in many situations, is how military interventions affect presidents’ personal images—and specifically whether they make presidents seem like strong leaders. President Bill Clinton’s 1995 intervention in Bosnia provides a case in point. Polls consistently showed that a minority of voters supported using military force to stop Serbian atrocities in Bosnia. But Clinton’s adviser, Dick Morris, believed that doing so would help the president anyway by making him seem tough. Another Clinton aide, George Stephanopolous, later recounted that Morris explicitly told Clinton he should “bomb the shit out of Serbia to look strong.” Clinton listened, striking the country and sending in thousands of American troops. And Morris was proved correct: the president’s approval rating rose. Clinton, according to the journalist Bob Woodward, later mused that “while 60 percent of the public had opposed the deployment of U.S. troops to Bosnia, public approval of his foreign policy went up, not down, after he ordered the deployment.” The episode, Woodward added, caused Clinton to conclude that “toughness and decisiveness were appreciated even if people disagreed” with the substance of his choices.
For presidents to seem powerful, however, they need to do more than just launch an attack. The attack must achieve its aims. For Clinton, the strikes on Bosnia did; they forced Serbian fighters to withdraw from the city of Sarajevo. President Ronald Reagan had similar success in his 1983 invasion of Grenada, which deposed a military junta that had recently toppled and executed the country’s prime minister. The political stakes in that case were low—it is doubtful that most Americans had even heard of Grenada before the United States invaded it. The risks, meanwhile, were high—hundreds of Americans attended medical school on the island, and the Grenadian regime could easily have taken them hostage. And the mission’s prosecution was so sloppy that it led Congress to overhaul the Defense Department to ensure better cooperation among the different military services. But Grenada’s army was such a small and weak target that the United States trounced it anyway. Reagan’s approval ratings subsequently jumped. In fact, U.S. success there is generally thought to have helped restore Americans’ confidence in their country’s ability to use military force after the Vietnam War.
Presidents typically hold their best political cards at the start of wars.
But plenty of other military interventions have dragged on and ended poorly, damaging presidents’ personal images. That includes another under Clinton. The president ordered U.S. forces to Somalia in August 1993 to capture the head of the Somali National Alliance, a militia that was preventing the United States from delivering food aid that could stave off the country’s famine. But Washington failed, and during the operations, Somali militias killed 19 U.S. soldiers in Mogadishu. In response, American support for the intervention in Somalia cratered, and Clinton’s approval ratings fell. The issue for Clinton was not the American casualties, which were similar in number to those incurred in Grenada and the victorious 1989 invasion of Panama under U.S. President George H. W. Bush, but that the war was unsuccessful. These events are consistent with broader research showing that Americans are willing to bear substantial costs in fighting foreign wars, but only if they appear to be achieving important objectives.
The war in Afghanistan provides the most recent major example. The U.S. military suffered very few casualties in Afghanistan after President Barack Obama stopped the United States’s combat mission in the country in 2014, 13 years after the initial U.S. invasion. But American involvement did not end there, and the conflict dragged on with no resolution in sight. It thus became a political albatross no president could salvage. Although Obama and Trump, in his first administration, took heat for carrying on the conflict, Americans reacted even more harshly when President Joe Biden pulled troops out in 2021. A majority of voters may have said at the time that the decision to withdraw was the right one, but the sight of Taliban forces storming Kabul as American troops fled made Biden look weak. His approval ratings quickly declined and never bounced back.
SUGAR HIGH
The politics of military interventions frequently shift over time. Presidents typically hold their best political cards at the start of wars, when patriotic Americans often rally around the flag—as happened during the initial years of the invasion of Afghanistan. The outset of wars is also when the White House has the greatest ability to shape public opinion, given presidents’ access to the bully pulpit and the fact that journalists and opposition groups often need time to marshal independent information and construct critical narratives. Americans also tend to be awed by the sheer might of the U.S. military, which is on clearest display during an operation’s opening days. But as time goes on, those advantages fade. Public support often follows close behind.
The effect that military interventions play in presidential politics, in other words, resembles that of high-sugar energy drinks. In the short run, they can deliver a useful jolt, but in the long term, they can lead to a crash. President George W. Bush, for instance, benefited from the 2003 invasion of Iraq when running for reelection in 2004. The president contrasted his pledge to “stay the course” with calls by John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, to move toward a withdrawal, which made Kerry seem like a weak flip-flopper because he had originally voted to authorize the war. Bush and his advisers believed this contrast was one of the main reasons he won. But by the middle of Bush’s second term, it was obvious to most Americans that the war was not heading in a positive direction. The president’s approval ratings steadily slipped as more U.S. troops died in the never-ending conflict. Democrats retook Congress in 2006, and Bush’s political standing never recovered.
Using military force to project strength thus carries both benefits and risks, and whether the tradeoff ultimately works in a president’s favor depends on whether the intervention decisively achieves its stated objectives. In the case of Venezuela, it is not clear whether those conditions will be met. Trump promised to get rid of Maduro, and he did so in a dazzling display of military power. But Trump has also gestured at broader ambitions, including reshaping Venezuela’s government and extracting oil revenues, which seem less likely to succeed. The president has threatened to strike again if Caracas does not comply with U.S. demands, which suggests his administration might entangle itself in a more complex, extended conflict that could fail to produce a decisive outcome. Trump, in turn, would look weak.
For now, however, Trump appears unconcerned. If anything, he seems emboldened. In addition to menacing other Latin American governments, Trump has deployed what he calls a “massive armada” to the Persian Gulf and is threatening to strike Iran if it does not cease nuclear enrichment, give up its advanced missile programs, and halt its support for militant groups. It is easy to see why Trump might be confident that this kind of swashbuckling behavior will produce the desired results. Over his five years in office, the president has built a growing track record of using overwhelming force to accomplish limited aims in ways that may have helped his political fortunes: killing the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in 2020, degrading Tehran’s nuclear reactors in 2025, and now decapitating Venezuela’s government. He may well be riding the sugar high of the Venezuela operation’s success.
But there is no guarantee that future military interventions will play out on similarly rapid timescales with similarly low costs. And if they don’t, Trump will not only further erode his claim to being a president who opposes wars of choice. He could also sacrifice his reputation for being a strong leader—which has been one of his primary political assets.
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