One of the central pillars of Trump's foreign policy brand has been the "no new wars" argument: that while his predecessors got America into costly, prolonged military entanglements in the Middle East and elsewhere, he keeps America out of wars and brings troops home. In his first term, there was meaningful substance to this claim. His second term has complicated it considerably.
The honest assessment requires examining both what the claim was based on and how Operation Epic Fury — the strikes on Iran that killed Supreme Leader Khamenei and triggered the ongoing Gulf conflict — changes the picture.
The First Term Record
Trump's first term foreign policy record, assessed on the specific question of military engagement, was genuinely different from his predecessors. He did not start a new war. He reduced troop levels in Afghanistan — a reduction that his successor ultimately completed through the chaotic withdrawal of August 2021. He struck Syria twice in targeted operations but did not escalate into sustained military campaigns. He killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in a January 2020 strike, which produced significant regional tension but not the broader war that critics predicted.
Compared to Bush, who launched two of the longest wars in American history, and to Obama, who expanded the drone war to seven countries and intervened militarily in Libya, Trump's first-term restraint was real. The president who ran against "forever wars" and the military-industrial complex's appetite for endless conflict did, in his first term, largely practice what he preached.
The Abraham Accords: A Genuine Achievement
The most substantive foreign policy achievement of Trump's first term was the Abraham Accords, and it represents something that the "no new wars" framing undersells. The normalization of relations between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco was not just the absence of conflict — it was affirmative diplomatic construction, the creation of new relationships that had not existed and that have proven durable despite the subsequent Gaza conflict and regional tensions.
The conventional diplomatic wisdom held that Middle Eastern countries could not normalize with Israel while the Palestinian issue remained unresolved. Trump's team — Jared Kushner, in particular — approached the problem as a negotiation in which the parties had addressable interests that could be satisfied without waiting for the Palestinian question to be answered first. The result proved the conventional wisdom wrong. Countries that had maintained formal hostility toward Israel for decades established normal relations. The achievement stands regardless of how one assesses the broader Trump foreign policy record.
Operation Epic Fury and the "No New Wars" Complication
Operation Epic Fury — the February 2026 coordinated strikes on Iran that Trump ordered in his second term — is the central challenge to the "no new wars" foreign policy brand. It is, unambiguously, a new war. It killed a foreign head of state. It produced Iranian retaliatory strikes on American military assets. It closed the Strait of Hormuz. It has involved ongoing military operations for months. By any definition, the United States is at war in the Gulf in a way it was not before Trump ordered the strikes.
Trump supporters have offered several responses to this. The first is that the strikes preempted a greater threat — that an Iran on the verge of nuclear capability represented a danger that justified the military cost of Operation Epic Fury. The second is that the war is, as of this writing, moving toward a ceasefire resolution rather than an indefinite occupation or counterinsurgency — that it is a decisive strike rather than the kind of open-ended entanglement that the "no new wars" argument was aimed at. The third is that the Iran conflict, unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, is being prosecuted with a defined strategic objective and without large-scale ground troop deployments.
These arguments have merit. They also do not change the fundamental fact that Trump started a war. The question is whether the war's justification, its execution, and its likely outcome justify that departure from his stated foreign policy doctrine. That question will ultimately be answered by how the Iran situation resolves — whether the ceasefire holds, whether the Strait reopens, whether the region is more or less stable in 2027 than it was in 2025.
The Broader Comparison
Assessed across both terms, Trump's foreign policy record sits in an interesting position relative to his predecessors. He did less harm than Bush, whose wars produced catastrophic human and financial costs with mixed strategic results. He was more willing to use force than his rhetoric suggested, but less willing than Obama to deploy it in open-ended ways across multiple theaters. The Abraham Accords represent a positive achievement with no clear equivalent in either the Bush or Obama records on diplomatic construction in the Middle East.
The Iran conflict is the variable that history will weigh most heavily. If it produces a durable strategic realignment — a denuclearized or significantly weakened Iran, a Strait that reopens and stays open, a regional order that is more stable — then Operation Epic Fury may be assessed as a difficult but ultimately successful strategic decision. If it produces continued instability, higher energy costs, and a region more hostile to American interests, the "no new wars" brand will be its own obituary.
The answer is being written right now. The oil price is the real-time indicator. And at $100 a barrel, the verdict is not yet in.