Before Donald Trump’s recent military campaigns, Iran and Venezuela weren’t often spoken of in the same breath. But in fact, the countries share much in common. They’ve both been demonized as evil, as bad guys, formally designated as states that promote terrorism. They’ve both suffered under intensive sanctions that have damaged life for civilians. And influential advocates from both places have been gunning for regime change for decades. Although recently their paths have diverged, with Iran’s battered regime hanging on even after a month of American and Israeli fire, and Venezuela’s government left intact but co-opted, their fates may yet converge again, thanks to a recently rebranded “Department of War” directed by a president who has heedlessly started confrontations around the globe without much of a plan. As the retired career diplomat Chas Freeman put it in January, “The United States now unabashedly presents itself as an untrustworthy expansionist power that substitutes unilateral diktats, intimidation, and the use of force for diplomacy.”Trump’s foreign policy has long been misunderstood because of its inherent incoherence. He came to power in 2016 by telling Americans what they wanted to hear. He had little interest in laying out a grand strategy or a bigger worldview beyond his promise to “Make America Great Again,” itself a slogan in which voters could hear what they wanted. His forceful criticism of the Iraq War, however, differentiated him from Hillary Clinton, who voted for it when she was in the Senate in 2002. But it was never all too clear whether Trump had opposed George W. Bush’s invasion or just thought his Republican predecessor should have taken the oil.The president’s more recent turn to militarism has led to immense changes in U.S. statecraft. In the first months of his second term, he enlisted Elon Musk and the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency to dismantle America’s soft-power infrastructure, notably the humanitarian and development arm USAID, but also government-funded think tanks, media organizations, and other Cold War legacy programs. In Trump’s world, soft power apparently has little value. At the same time, Trump has dismantled the global alliance system. He has slowly chipped away at NATO, built a “Board of Peace” to counter the United Nations, and levied tariffs in contradiction of the global economic order.Trump is known to cut bait on unpopular policies, but his war continues. The risk-averse president who turned away the jets from striking Iran in June 2019, much to the chagrin of John Bolton, the national security adviser at the time, is gone. In his place is a careless, casual warmonger, a leader who thinks that he can recklessly use force whenever and practically wherever he wants—and that his past track record of avoiding quagmires and entanglements means he can do so with few long-term consequences.Bolton, the perennial hawk, has transformed himself into a critic of Trump’s latest misadventures. One recalls his candid admonition from 2022: “As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat—not here but, you know, other places—it takes a lot of work.” In his second term, Trump has embraced the coup—but not the work.The president’s tendency to jump from conflict to conflict has made it difficult to understand where one war ends and another begins. But Iran and Venezuela are part of the same war—and that war is at the center of America’s foreign policy under Trump.The first act of the Iran war, it must be noted, was the strike on a girls’ school in Minab that killed at least 175 people, most of them children. The fact that Trump can launch a war on a whim that has already killed thousands and is sending the global economy into shock is not so much an indictment of him—although it is that, too—but of the security state he presides over. It’s remarkable that decades after the Cold War, it’s still possible to stumble into war without guardrails or stopgap measures to get in the way. The national security infrastructure cobbled together in the paranoid, red-baiting moments at the end of World War II gave the American president the capacity to launch shadow wars; after the September 11 attacks, those powers were further consolidated. There has been no real accountability for war on terrorism part one, and so here we are barreling into part two, with terrorism even more vaguely defined.There has been no real accountability for war on terrorism part one, and so here we are barreling into part two, with terrorism even more vaguely defined. Trump is also breaking conventions and laws from the era before that.