In his 2025 article, “Start Making Sense, Strategy and Grand Strategy in the Trump Administration,” Joshua Rovner argued Trump’s flexible approach to a grand strategy could be a strategic problem in the event of war. A year later, amidst an escalating conflict in the Middle East, we asked Joshua to revisit his argument.Image: Tia Dufour via The Trump White House In your 2025 article, “Start Making Sense: Strategy and Grand Strategy in the Trump Administration,” you explained the complexities and contradictions that encompass President Donald Trump’s grand strategy (or lack thereof). You wrote, “Unclear grand strategies can produce unsuccessful strategies, but this will not matter if Trump stays out of war.” Now that Trump is no longer exercising the same military caution he did in his first term, how much does his ambiguous grand strategy matter? Why does it matter and to whom does it matter most?Trump has always valued flexibility in his grand strategy, seeing it as a bargaining advantage. But as I warned last year, this can be a strategic problem in the event of war. I think we saw an example at the start of the bombing campaign against Iran. U.S. purposes were unclear: Was the bombing necessary to prevent an imminent Iranian attack? If so, what was the threat? Was the war about coercing Iran to accept a more comprehensive nuclear agreement? If so, why was this necessary, given that U.S. air strikes “completely totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program just last year? Was the bombing simply an attempt to destroy Iran’s conventional military forces and its arsenal of ballistic missiles? Or, as Trump announced on the first night of the campaign, was it about regime change? Changing official rationales for the war suggest internal confusion. Uncertain peacetime grand strategies lead to uncertain strategies when the shooting starts.In
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