As the Iran war drags on and the death and devastation grow, I keep returning to a three-minute clip from a Republican presidential debate in February 2016.That debate took place a few days before Jeb Bush was set to hit the campaign trail for the first time with his elder brother, former President George W. Bush. Citing that scheduled appearance, moderator John Dickerson asked Trump about a 2008 interview, in which he expressed surprise that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hadn’t impeached Bush for his handling of the Iraq War. That, Trump said at the time, would have been a “wonderful thing.” Dickerson asked Trump if, eight years later, he still felt the same way. Never forget in 2016, on the debate stage when Trump SLAMMED George W. Bush for entering Iraq.10 years later, he would go on to do the same thing in Iran. pic.twitter.com/IUSedeg2MF— Kacee Allen (@KaceeRAllen) March 8, 2026“Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. All right?” said Trump. “We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives, we don’t even have it. Iran is taking over Iraq, with the second-largest oil reserves in the world. Obviously it was a mistake. George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.” But the quotes don’t do the clip justice; you really have to watch it. Trump is not just animated but visibly, righteously angry. He’s pissed off about the Iraq War, and the fact that he’s standing on the debate stage with the brother of its principal architect disgusts him. It is a perfect encapsulation of a key aspect of his initial appeal: Trump loathed the American political establishment in precisely the same way many voters did (and still do): These people make stupid, costly, destructive decisions, and they’re never held accountable for them. A decade later, Trump is the one making stupid, costly, destructive decisions. The war on Iran is probably the worst American foreign policy move since Iraq, and that’s only one of several ill-conceived imperialistic adventures abroad during his second term. He is leading the United States into a new kind of forever war that may well continue even if the one in Iran winds down. Did Trump really believe any of what he said on the debate stage in 2016? He certainly understood something back then: that he was really running against the political establishment writ large, that Jeb Bush was the perfect stand-in for that establishment, that few recent events encapsulated its failures like the Iraq War, and that millions of people viewed that war as a costly disaster and a waste of resources. Trump was running on refocusing those resources on the issues he said actually mattered: a supposed epidemic of violence and drug abuse caused by a flood of undocumented immigrants. At the same time, Trump had more strategic criticisms of the war. Again and again, he railed against Bush—and President Obama, to a lesser extent—for failing to seize Iraqi oil during the war. But he also clearly viewed the war as a cautionary tale. Once you deploy tens of thousands of ground troops, as Bush did, it’s very hard to pull them out. And if you can’t pull them out, you can’t declare victory. A great deal of Trump’s foreign policy can be explained via those conclusions. Trump believes American power should be used in a coercive, extortionary, and often outright imperialistic manner. He shuns the abstractions of “soft power” and thinks the NATO alliance is a con job because weaker nations don’t pay up for the protection the U.S. provides. He also believes that military intervention and regime change should always prioritize new revenue streams: When the U.S. kidnapped Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January, Trump didn’t pay lip service to democracy or freedom—he went on TV and said he took Maduro in large part so he could seize Venezuela’s considerable oil reserves. Trump’s pointed criticism of the Iraq War in 2016 led many to conclude that he was an isolationist. Nothing could be further from the truth. Trump loves using American military power, and he has few compunctions about using it. In his six years in power, he has bombed over a dozen nations, assassinated and kidnapped foreign military and political leaders, and risked war via bombastic and reckless actions on a number of occasions. He has embraced missile and drone strikes, in particular, but on occasion has used stealth bombers (as he did against an alleged Iranian nuclear site last June) and U.S. special forces (as he did to kidnap Maduro). He has, it seems, just one red line: He is extremely reluctant to deploy thousands of American troops overseas. The lack of a mass deployment is misleading in two ways, however. For one, Trump is waging his own kind of forever war. The U.S.