Trump and JD Vance sold strength, but the result looks more like expensive posture. The pitch was simple enough for cable news: call it America First, talk tough, spend big, claim victories, and let the flags do the rest. Critics point to a record less a restoration of power than a louder, pricier version of the same national security machine, with more theater, more escalation, and no clear evidence that the extra noise bought anything durable.
The most revealing move was symbolic. Renaming the Department of Defense as the Department of War does not change the balance of power abroad, repair a broken procurement system, or produce a cleaner strategic doctrine. It does flatter a politics that likes the vocabulary of force more than the discipline of strategy.
The promise versus the bill
America First was supposed to mean tighter priorities and fewer foreign entanglements. Instead, the defense budget kept climbing toward $1 trillion, and the administration kept asking for more hardware, more readiness, and more sacrifice. The problem is not just the size of the bill; it is the quality of what that money bought.
Under Trump, the Pentagon authorized $700 billion in FY2018, $716 billion in FY2019, and $738 billion in FY2020. These are not the spending levels of a movement cutting waste. They are the numbers of a government that keeps feeding the same machine and calling the result renewal.
That machine came with familiar failures. The F-35 remained a symbol of cost overruns, technical glitches, and endless delay. The Government Accountability Office and watchdog groups such as the Project On Government Oversight have spent years documenting redundant systems, weak competition, and procurement choices that look designed to sustain programs rather than solve problems. If the idea was to get more strategic with public money, the evidence points the other way.
The defense buildup also sat awkwardly beside the administration’s rhetoric. Leaders who praised efficiency kept behaving as though strength meant spending more, not choosing better. This is the old Washington reflex in new packaging.
The wars that never really ended
Trump repeatedly claimed he was ending wars and bringing troops home. The claim sounded decisive, which is why it traveled so well. The details were less flattering.
Afghanistan was never actually closed out during his term. The Doha agreement set a withdrawal path, but U.S. forces remained entangled in a conflict that kept running. Syria was handled through partial withdrawals, public declarations of victory over ISIS, and a quick return to ambiguity once the politics turned messy. Iraq was still home to U.S. troops under the anti-ISIS mission, even as the killing of Qassem Soleimani pushed the region closer to open conflict.
Then there was Iran, the clearest test of the administration’s bravado. The 2020 drone strike that killed Soleimani in Baghdad did not produce a clean win. It produced retaliation, heightened risk, and a reminder that “maximum pressure” is not a strategy so much as a dare.
The administration also kept the less visible wars going. Drone strikes, special forces missions, and counterterror operations across places like Somalia, Niger, and Libya continued under the language of containment. The public was told the footprint was shrinking. The state was doing something closer to changing the packaging.
The accountability problem
The sharpest criticism of this foreign policy is that it widened the space for civilian harm while shrinking the space for accountability.
Human rights groups tracked more civilian deaths tied to drone strikes and special operations. In the Caribbean and off Venezuela, the administration backed maritime interdictions and cross-border action against trafficking networks. UN experts and legal scholars later argued that the campaign helped produce more than 200 civilian deaths and crossed into illegal extrajudicial killing. More than 100 international law experts also condemned the direct clash with Iran and said the preemptive strikes violated the UN Charter.
The administration kept acting as if legal restraint were a ceremonial obstacle, something to wave through rather than obey. That habit becomes dangerous fast when a president treats force as proof of seriousness.
Support for embattled allies fit the same pattern. The uncritical backing of Saudi Arabia during the Yemen war left Washington exposed to accusations of complicity in atrocities, because supplying weapons and logistics without real oversight is not neutrality. It is participation with a cleaner brand name.
The ICC fight says a lot
The attack on the International Criminal Court made the broader worldview plain. Trump signed an executive order in 2020 that allowed sanctions on ICC officials involved in investigations of U.S. personnel. The Treasury Department then targeted Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and Phakiso Mochochoko, cutting them off from the financial and digital channels they needed to work.
Rubio’s call to dismantle the court “brick by brick” was not a side remark. It was a governing instinct, expressed in public. The threat to strip security guarantees from allies that cooperated with ICC warrants showed how far the administration was willing to go to turn legal accountability into a loyalty test.
The immediate trigger was the court’s pursuit of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant over Gaza, alongside its investigations into Afghanistan. The message from Washington was blunt: international law is acceptable when it targets enemies, intolerable when it reaches friends or American personnel.
What America First became
The deepest contradiction is that this version of America First did not reduce exposure. It multiplied it. More money went into the military, more force was used abroad, more legal norms were attacked, and more of the burden was shifted onto civilians and allied populations caught in the blast radius.
There are two ways to read that record. One says a permanent national security state kept moving behind the scenes while presidents played the front man. The other says Trump was not a victim of the machine but its enthusiastic operator, rebranding it, expanding it, and punishing anyone who tried to put limits on it.
The second reading fits the facts better.
