{"id":841649,"date":"2026-09-09T10:52:21","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T10:52:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/841649\/"},"modified":"2026-09-09T10:52:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T10:52:21","slug":"analysis-how-trump-has-failed-to-learn-the-lessons-of-the-wars-that-followed-9-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/841649\/","title":{"rendered":"Analysis: How Trump has failed to learn the lessons of the wars that followed 9\/11"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n EDITOR\u2019S NOTE:\u00a0 Peter Bergen is a CNN national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the author of the just published, \u201cAll the Presidents\u2019 Wars: Twenty-Five Years of America\u2019s War on Terror<\/a>,\u201d from which this piece was, in part, adapted.\n<\/p>\n

\n Friday marks the 25th anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001<\/a>. Since 9\/11, US presidents have expanded their power, step by step, to wage war anywhere, anytime, as they please.\n <\/p>\n

\n With Operation Epic Fury in Iran, President Donald Trump reached a new peak in the war-making powers claimed by the US commander in chief. Trump launched his war of choice on Iran<\/a> \u2014 in his words, \u201cthe world\u2019s No. 1 state sponsor of terror\u201d \u2014 without any congressional authorization, the support of NATO allies or a UN resolution. There was also scant buy-in from the American public for what was at its outset the least popular war of the modern era, nor was there anything resembling an imminent threat to the United States. Nor had Trump bothered to learn anything from past American wars, and he did not have a real plan for the \u201cday after\u201d hostilities commenced.\n <\/p>\n

\n The US military has long been adept at breaking things and killing people, but when its tactics were not aligned with a clear strategy, the United States ended up in the quagmire of Vietnam, or the sectarian civil war in Iraq that eventually birthed ISIS, or precipitating a possible global economic recession caused by the Iran war.\n <\/p>\n

\n Trump\u2019s predecessors also laid the groundwork for the Iran war. The \u201cwar on terror\u201d morphed over time in the months after 9\/11, beyond the war in Afghanistan against the Taliban and al Qaeda that was backed by the UN and NATO allies. It then grew to encompass President George W. Bush\u2019s doctrine of \u201cpreventive war\u201d that justified the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That invasion led to a civil war during which an estimated 200,000 Iraqi civilians died.\n <\/p>\n

\n The war on terror expanded to include President Barack Obama\u2019s prolific use of armed drones in countries such as Pakistan and Yemen that were not at war with the United States; attacks that killed thousands of suspected terrorists and a sizeble number of civilians.\n <\/p>\n

\"Pakistani<\/p>\n

\n With UN and NATO support, Obama also ordered the campaign to remove the Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi<\/a> from power in 2011, but Obama didn\u2019t seek approval from Congress. The overthrow of Gadhafi precipitated a civil war in Libya that lasted a decade, and the country continues to be divided, ruled today by two governments. Obama later said that not planning for the \u201cday after\u201d Gadhafi\u2019s fall was his greatest failure as president.\n <\/p>\n

\n During the \u201cglobal war on terror,\u201d the United States cycled through a variety of strategies and tactics, some of which backfired spectacularly. Those include Bush\u2019s Iraq invasion and the bipartisan fiasco of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan more than a decade and a half later, an agreement negotiated under Trump and executed under President Joe Biden.\n <\/p>\n

\n The US pullout from Afghanistan<\/a> predictably resulted in the Taliban taking over the country. The debacles of the Iraq War and the Afghanistan withdrawal signaled that the US superpower had little idea what it was doing when it came to foreign policy, which undercut its position around the world.\n <\/p>\n

\n There were some real American operational successes during the war on terror: The CIA became an effective paramilitary agency hunting and killing terrorists; Joint Special Operations Command transformed from a barely used counterterrorism force to an industrial-level killing machine; US Special Forces partnered adeptly with Afghan and Iraqi ground forces; and the National Security Agency skillfully penetrated enemy communications.\n <\/p>\n

\n All these developments played important roles in eventually decimating the leadership of al Qaeda and ending the geographical \u201ccaliphate\u201d of ISIS. As a result, there were no large-scale lethal attacks by foreign terrorist groups in the United States following 9\/11, which was a major national security goal of the four post-9\/11 presidents.\n <\/p>\n

\n Last fall, Trump dramatically expanded the ambit of the war on terror when he claimed that he could kill suspected Latin American drug cartel members at will on the grounds that they were \u201cnarcoterrorists.\u201d This resulted in dozens of American strikes<\/a> on boats transporting drugs in the Caribbean, and when US Joint Special Operations Command captured Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro<\/a> in early 2026, Trump asserted he was a narcoterrorist.\n <\/p>\n

\n Encouraged by what he termed the \u201cbrilliant\u201d operation to remove Maduro from power, Trump soon issued the order for Operation Epic Fury. This echoed the way the relatively quick war to overthrow the Taliban after 9\/11 emboldened Bush to launch the war on Iraq a year and half later.\n <\/p>\n

\n A lesson that the United States never learned after 9\/11: Make real plans for the \u201cday after\u201d the war appears to be won, or you will likely lose the peace. The Bush administration didn\u2019t negotiate a peace agreement with the Taliban until after the group was utterly defeated in December 2001 when many of its leaders were looking to cut a deal, which could have avoided many years of war. The many failures to plan for what followed the fall of Saddam Hussein\u2019s regime in Iraq were well known, and yet only eight years later the Obama administration also made no plan for what happened after the overthrow of Gadhafi.\n <\/p>\n

\"Iraqi<\/p>\n

\n The confusion about what constituted American strategic success and merely tactical US wins was particularly evident during the Iran war when the many military victories against the theocrats in Tehran did not produce any meaningful change in the regime. As Trump himself admitted during the first days of the conflict: \u201cYou go through this, and then in five years you realize you put somebody in who\u2019s no better.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n This grim prediction would come true in only a matter of weeks. The United States\u2019 dismal record of regime changes in the post-9\/11 Middle East also did not inspire confidence that America\u2019s regime decapitation project in Iran would have a happy ending. Meanwhile, the Iranian regime has wielded its newfound control of the Strait of Hormuz<\/a> to inject great turmoil into the gas and oil markets that fuel the global economy.\n <\/p>\n

\n Twenty-five years after 9\/11, the United States, which once prided itself on being the guarantor of global order, is now its chief disruptor.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EDITOR\u2019S NOTE:\u00a0 Peter Bergen is a CNN national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":841650,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-841649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=841649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/841650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=841649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=841649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=841649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}