On October 13, international representatives gathered in the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh in the southern Sinai Peninsula. Sharm el-Sheikh had been occupied by Israel from 1968 to 1982, and suffered a major al-Qaeda attack in 2005; now President Donald Trump was there to ink an agreement that would end what he described as three thousand years of conflict in the Middle East. In keeping with such a momentous occasion, Trump called in dignitaries from around the world to witness the signing of the commitment to inaugurate the full twenty-point “Gaza peace plan.”
There was Britain’s Keir Starmer, whose country had supplied bullets and F-35 components to the Israeli military over the course of the war. There was Germany’s Friedrich Merz, whose country had sent more than five hundred million dollars’ worth of arms to Israel since 2023. There was Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president whose government has not controlled Gaza since 2007, and the president of Paraguay, Santiago Peña. Also on the list was the Japanese ambassador to Egypt, and to round things out, inexplicably, the president of FIFA. No one from Israel was present, nor were any representatives from Hamas, but the ceremony wasn’t really about them anyway. It was about Trump: all were gathered to watch him do the honors, sign the papers and “solve the Middle East,” to employ a phrase recently used by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.
Across his two terms, Trump has been obsessed with the theater of diplomacy and the drama of deal-making. He has evinced an almost existential need to be seen as a peacemaker, as the peace president. “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible,” Trump said in August regarding his role in facilitating talks between Ukraine and Russia. “I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole.” In other moods, he is less self-effacing. Although newly minted Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado, a right-wing politician, was nominated for the award by Trump allies and had fiercely backed Trump’s extrajudicial executions of alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean, Trump still wished the prize had gone to him. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung insisted the president was more deserving, explaining that “he has the heart of a humanitarian, and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will.” (The day after winning the award, Machado publicly thanked Trump for his service to Venezuela.)
Trump’s desperate desire to receive the world’s gratitude for his diplomatic leadership has driven him to a hostile posture toward actors who do not want to play along with his peacemaking. “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace,” he remarked after ordering air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June. He later threatened on Truth Social that things would “only get worse” for the nation until it could “realize that you often get more with HONEY than you do with VINEGAR.”
When Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the White House in February, U.S. Vice President JD Vance asked him if he had “said thank you once.” The remark was not a leak, but instead a deliberate orchestration in front of the entire White House press corps and its rolling cameras. “Offer some words of appreciation for the United States of America,” Vance continued, “and for the president who is trying to save your country.” Trump has since pivoted back to supporting Ukraine with full force, but the incident was a reminder that a perceived lack of gratitude could move the eastern European state from the category of valiant defender of freedom to underappreciative freeloader.
The Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer framed the episode with Zelenskyy as “a perverse trading of places.” American leaders were acting like the bad guys we used to fight, while Zelenskyy, Foer wrote, was left “holding true to American values in the face of American intimidation.” Trump’s inner circle frequently broadcasts its disregard for the idea that America has an obligation to promote universalist, liberal principles on the world stage, leading some to characterize Trump’s new term as a decisive break with the neoconservative outlook of the War on Terror era. Bret Stephens wrote in an August New York Times column titled “Trump Just Reminded Me of Why I’m Still a Neocon” that Trump’s friendliness with Russia and his attitude toward Ukraine shows that “some old fashions,” namely the penchants for moralizing and interventionism, “deserve to be made new again.” Trump allies are happy to endorse this framing, albeit with the value judgment reversed. As Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Secretary of the rebranded Department of War (still officially known as the Department of Defense), put it in May, “The United States is not interested in the moralistic and preachy approach to foreign policy of the past.”
Preaching aside, from the beginning, members of the neoconservative class understood the “higher values” for which they claimed to fight not as a set of binding moral standards, but as gifts to people who were ultimately undeserving. America, in this paradigm, went above and beyond the call of duty by intervening abroad. When the recipients of this benevolence failed to react with sufficient gratitude, America was well within its rights, and perhaps even required, to jettison all of its previously high-minded rhetoric and fully embrace the amoral pursuit of raw national interest. The Trump administration hasn’t abandoned the Bush-era foreign policy worldview; its approach represents an extension of the same line of thinking about what America does and doesn’t owe the subjects of its interventions.
Pundits who lament Trump’s sharp departure from the foreign policy consensus that guided the U.S. earlier this century may have nostalgic memories of that moment in 2003 when a man named Paul Bremer was installed as the interim leader of Iraq. Bremer’s outward professionalism and apparent humility before the cameras conveyed the message that America had Iraq’s best interests at heart. But the falsity of that altruistic pretense was soon revealed as the occupation government’s violence and authoritarianism sent Iraqi society hurtling toward total ruin, and the neoconservative class placed the blame on Iraqis and their choice to welcome American troops with bullets rather than roses. The neocons never truly believed they were morally accountable to the people their military actions were allegedly serving.
To those currently in power, the U.S. doesn’t even need to claim to uphold higher principles — they would be wasted on the ungrateful. Today’s leaders rarely spout truisms about American values, let alone the rule of law. As Vance said in response to a question about whether bombing alleged Venezuelan “drug boats” in the Caribbean violated due process: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.” In the past, a vice president might have been inclined to conjure up some sort of mealy-mouthed, focus-grouped explanation for such a blatant rejection of international law. With the members of this administration, there is no such attempt. They can speak honestly about American ruthlessness — and expect to be thanked for it anyway.
On the night of March 19, 2003, when President George W. Bush addressed the nation to announce the invasion of the Republic of Iraq, many in the Arab world watched in horror as violent explosions rocked Baghdad. The explicit intent of this first phase was to frighten — to inspire “shock and awe,” in the military’s language. It was to be imparted on the Americans from this spectacle that their nation was fighting for the freedom of the Iraqi people. News networks would begin plastering the name of the invasion, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” on screen in huge letters. “We come to Iraq with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization, and for the religious faiths they practice,” Bush said in his speech. “We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.”
Some of the architects of the war may have really believed — in deep ventricles yet to be found by science — that America had a moral obligation to depose the dictators of the world, to liberate their subjects, and to install justice where there was none. “The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations,” Bush said in his second inaugural address. “America’s influence is not unlimited, but fortunately for the oppressed, America’s influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom’s cause.”
In practice, freedom meant replacing one form of tyranny with another, one more difficult to dislodge. Bremer, in a September 2003 op-ed in The Washington Post, acknowledged the contradictory nature of the so-called “liberation” of Iraq. “Although Iraqis have freedoms they have never had before,” he wrote, “freedom is not sovereignty and occupation is unpopular with occupier and occupied alike.” Bremer, who previously served as chief of staff for Henry Kissinger and coordinated counterterrorism efforts under Reagan, was a creature of the American defense bureaucracy. His wordy title — “Administrator of the Coalitional Provisional Authority of Iraq” — obscured the reality of his position. He was, in essence, a colonial viceroy who ruled by decree and could veto any decision of the “Governing Council” of Iraqis. In 2003, when a U.N. official questioned Bremer’s power to speak for the Iraqi government, he responded, “I am the Iraqi government for now.”
Bremer decreed that statements in support of either violence against the occupying military or the return of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party were “prohibited pronouncements” punishable by army internment. Tens of thousands of Ba’athists were barred from public sector employment, in a process the U.S. called “de-Ba’athification.” The Iraqi newspaper Al Hawza, born out of the post-Saddam political landscape, was accused of inciting opposition to the occupation and “printing lies,” as The New York Times put it. Per Bremer’s decree, Al Hawza was banned, and its headquarters were forcibly closed by a battalion of U.S. military police. (It took nearly four months to reopen.) The message was clear: if Iraqis would not welcome the American occupation on their own, their media would be forced to do so.
What followed from these sweeping measures was nothing less than chaos. The so-called democracy forcibly installed in Baghdad almost immediately collapsed into dysfunction. The insurgency against the occupation killed thousands of American soldiers, and the ensuing sectarian violence killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. At the same time, untold masses were rendered unemployable in a country that, before the invasion, had (according to different estimates) between 40 and 75 percent of its jobs tied up in the public sector. Many of these people went on to become fighters for the Islamic State, with the Associated Press estimating that up to 160 former officers from the Iraqi Army, which had been disbanded by Bremer, later took up leadership positions within ISIS.
While loudly proclaiming the arrival of American values in Iraq, U.S. forces also created their own unaccountable system of justice. Already by 2004, the U.S. military admitted that up to ninety percent of the thousands it had arrested were innocent. A few of the wrongfully detained Iraqis were sent to Guantánamo Bay, where they were imprisoned and tortured for years under spurious legal justifications. At facilities like Abu Ghraib, a prison where Saddam’s government had formerly tortured inmates, American soldiers beat, killed, and raped detainees, even smearing them with feces and siccing dogs on them. Meanwhile, America continued to insist it was acting benevolently on behalf of the Iraqi people. “We all have to avoid arrogance,” Bremer told occupation officials soon after arriving in Iraq in May 2003. “Yes, we’re an ‘occupying power.’ No getting around that. But we must never forget that this country belongs to the Iraqis.”
At its core, the ideology that drove the War on Terror was always deeply contradictory. As the journalist Richard Beck writes in his 2024 book Homeland, “the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims were simultaneously enemies to be destroyed and victims in need of rescue, with America the only country strong enough and compassionate enough to do both.” Take the remarks of conservative radio host Michael Savage, later a guest of the Trump White House, who at once maintained the fiction that the U.S. was liberating Iraq and cast practicing Muslims as de facto enemies of America. “When I see a woman walking around with a burqa, I see a Nazi,” he said on the air in July 2007, “a hateful Nazi who would like to cut your throat and kill your children.”
As the war raged on, talking heads and politicians alike found a way to resolve the paradox at the heart of American foreign policy: to the extent that people unwilling to accept American hegemony were somehow victims and enemies simultaneously, it was because they were constitutionally unappreciative of all that America was doing on their behalf. Fred Barnes, cofounder of the now-defunct neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard, wrote after visiting Baghdad in 2004 that he would “like to see one other thing in Iraq, an outbreak of gratitude for the greatest act of benevolence one country has ever done for another.” Four years later, National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy made explicit what gratitude was supposed to look like: “Americans were assured, when the nation-building enterprise commenced, that oil-rich Iraq would underwrite our sacrifices on its behalf,” he bemoaned. “Yet, to be blunt, the Iraqis remain ingrates.” Tucker Carlson went even further than Barnes and McCarthy did. Iraqis “can just shut the fuck up and obey, is my view,” he said on “The Bubba the Love Sponge Show” in 2006. In a 60 Minutes interview toward the end of Bush’s second term, the president said, “I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude.”
Some estimates put the death toll in Iraq as a result of the invasion at over a million. Countless people lost livelihoods, homes, family members, friends. But for Bush and his yes-men, this sacrifice was not enough. That the Iraqis did not respond to the supposed liberation of their country with obsequious praise was a debilitating conundrum for the conservative mind. If America was righteous in its mission, then everyone in the Middle East should have acknowledged that righteousness. If those in the Middle East instead saw the mission for what it truly was, a war driven by imperialistic ambition, then they were ungrateful. If the Middle East was ungrateful, then those living there were undeserving of America’s righteousness. If they were undeserving of America’s righteousness, then nothing we could do to them was off the table.
After two terms of Bush, an official end to the war in Iraq, and the rise of the Islamic State, the allegedly noble policy of state-building in both Iraq and Afghanistan appeared pointless in hindsight. Even Trump heavily criticized the Iraq war during his first presidential campaign, raising hope in some circles that, as Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan approvingly put it at the end of the primary, “Trump’s triumph is a sweeping repudiation of Bush Republicanism.” But Buchanan’s hopes that Trump would send neoconservatives packing were soon dashed. The appointment of John Bolton, George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, to the vaunted position of National Security Advisor, he wrote, was “irreconcilable” with Trump’s campaign promises.
Bolton still operated under the old foreign policy paradigms, which necessitated keeping up at least the appearance of a consistent internal logic in order to maintain America’s leverage internationally. But consistent logic was of no use to a president interested only in unchecked power and the subjugation of enemy nations. When, in August 2025, Bolton’s house was raided by the FBI over allegations of mishandling classified information, Trump confessed his true use for the diplomat. “When I hired him he served a good purpose because as you know he was one of the people that forced Bush to do the ridiculous bombings in the Middle East,” the president said. “I’d walk into a room with him in a foreign country and the foreign country would give me everything because they said, ‘oh no,’ they’re gonna get blown up because John Bolton’s there.” In other words, Trump regards the Bush administration’s bombings as “ridiculous,” but he likes the way their memory can continue to project American power. Far from breaking with the ideology of the War on Terror, Trump has rejected only one side of its contradictory synthesis: the idea that America was obliged to pay lip service to any particular set of values. The side that demonized Muslims as America’s subhuman enemies, refusing the American people the gratitude they deserved, has always still been very much welcome in Trump’s White House.
“When I’m back in the White House,” Trump remarked in a speech in August 2024, “we will restore world peace and it will be, again, peace through strength.” Previous administrations insisted that peace could be achieved by spreading democracy and American ideals, albeit through force when necessary. Now, according to Trump, peace could only be spread through overwhelming American power. In his second administration, Trump has sought to eliminate the last vestiges of the idea that the goodwill of the rest of the world is something America needs to work to earn. He has abandoned soft power as a goal, gutting institutions like USAID that were designed to project an image of the United States as a global humanitarian force. Diplomatic posts sit empty, and the State Department has shrunk. America, this administration believes, does not owe anyone the pretense that our wars are about anything more than what “we” as Americans can extract from those unlucky enough to be caught on the receiving end of our bombs. In 2025, America won’t make the mistake of blindly hoping, as Andrew McCarthy did in Iraq, that any country will “underwrite our sacrifices on its behalf,” that gratitude for our incursions will redound to our financial benefit. We’ll make sure of that fact. We’ll take territory and minerals, as forced tokens of the gratitude we feel we’re owed. In Ukraine, Trump has explicitly leveraged past military support to demand a share of the country’s mineral riches: “The United States of America has provided significant financial and material support to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine,” reads the agreement’s opening.
Meanwhile, the U.N. Security Council passed a U.S.-backed resolution to create what is now being called an “International Stabilization Force” in Gaza. The Trump-brokered peace deal outlines an eventual Gaza Strip where the Palestinian people will, supposedly, be allowed to remain on their land; an international grouping of forces will deploy in Gaza to disarm Hamas and train “vetted” Palestinian forces; a council of “apolitical” Palestinian technocrats will be installed to manage daily goings-on; and the real governing of the country will be done by an extra-territorial “Board of Peace,” with Tony Blair as one of its members, and Trump himself as chair. According to Reuters, five anonymous sources “compared the proposal to the Coalitional Provisional Authority in Iraq that Washington established in 2003” under Bremer.
Like that regime, the new board in Gaza represents authoritarianism disguised as a gift — the rejection of which will likely license unrestricted violence. In July, Trump complained that Gazans were ungrateful for American aid. “We gave sixty million dollars,” he said, inaccurately. (At that time, only thirty million dollars of aid had been approved for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation by the State Department. By August 2, only three million dollars had been released.) “Nobody said even ‘thank you,’ you know, ‘thanks,’” the president went on. “Somebody should say ‘thank you.’” The Gazans and their regional allies seem to have taken note. After the ceasefire was announced on October 10, Dr. Basem Naim, a senior political figure in Hamas, said in a Sky News interview, “We thank President Trump and his personal efforts.” The same day, according to the Times of Israel, a group of local officials in Gaza sent a letter to Trump thanking him explicitly. “We wish to express our sincere gratitude for your leadership and unwavering commitment to ending the war in Gaza,” it read. “On behalf of all Egyptians and peace lovers around the world, we salute with appreciation and respect for this unprecedented and momentous achievement,” Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said in a televised meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh.
The current administration expects gratitude not only from places like Ukraine, Gaza, and Venezuela — where Trump is angling to seize control of oil — but from those entering the country as well. When discussing a migrant caravan in 2018, Hegseth, then a cohost of Fox & Friends Weekend, asked, “Are you coming to this country you want to go to with a grateful spirit or are you coming with an entitled spirit?” Since his sudden elevation from talking head to cabinet secretary, the War Secretary has dedicated himself to rebuilding the status of what he calls America’s “warfighters.” Having dispensed with the pretense of merely defending the American homeland, the revamped Pentagon is explicitly on the offensive. Now, threats must be headed off without consideration for allies, or for much of anything other than American power. “Our focus is the warrior ethos,” Hegseth told soldiers stationed at Fort Benning, “reestablishing deterrence, so that when the enemy sees an American, they don’t want to fuck with us.”
There is no humanitarian veneer; there is only the desire to destroy America’s enemies, endlessly, forever. Those subalterns whose skulls must be crushed in service of this mission should be forced to be grateful for that honor, and they should be satisfied with nothing more than the scraps they are offered, the debris of civilization left for them to live in.
The war crimes of the past, hurriedly covered up and regarded with shame in their time, might have been framed altogether differently if perpetrated during the second Trump term. Abu Ghraib, for instance, might not have been acknowledged as an indelible stain on America’s historical record. A contemporary prison of its kind would be celebrated in the conservative press, posted on official White House social media as evidence of what awaits terrorists who threaten our brave warfighters. Unspeakable acts would not have to be filtered through euphemisms like “enhanced interrogation.” And afterwards, we’d demand gratitude.
