U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the Trump administration’s foreign policy is based on restraint and realism. But U.S. foreign policy actions across the world suggest a lack of understanding for what the concept means in practice. Restraint values diplomatic engagement over military coercion and domination. so don’t be fooled by Pompeo’s hollow language. The latest video from the Quincy Institute explains:
With two months remaining before the April 12 parliamentary elections, Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban and his Fidesz party face by far their toughest challenge since winning power in 2010.
Many polls show challenger Peter Magyar’s Tisza (Respect and Freedom) party with a substantial lead. Orban’s campaign has responded by stressing his international clout, including close relations with U.S. President Donald Trump, and the prominent role he plays among right-populist Eurosceptics in Europe.
Magyar has run an astute campaign, harnessing an anti-incumbent mood. He focuses on social and economic dissatisfaction, as well as Hungary’s estrangement under Orban’s leadership from the European Union’s mainstream.
The Prime Minister is elected by the National Assembly (parliament) following elections. The official campaign period begins in March but it has been intense since mid-January. Hungarian society has become polarized and energized by the first genuinely close race since Orban took office in 2010.
This election will be a crucial test for Europe’s new right, as Orban has achieved success with sovereigntist, anti-migrant, and traditionalist themes, at odds with much of the EU. An Orban loss could signal flagging momentum for the European populist right, affecting, for example, the French presidential election next year, where the like-minded National Rally party leads in polls.
In a clear demonstration of the significance of this race beyond Hungary, the Orban camp last month released exuberant endorsements from prominent right-wing political figures, including Marine Le Pen, head of France’s National Rally, Alice Weidel, leader of the Alternative for Germany Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni Czech PM Andrej Babiš former Polish PM Mateusz Morawiecki Serbian president Aleksander Vučić Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu; and Argentina’s President Javier Milei.
On February 6, President Trump endorsed Orban’s re-election, and Orban has announced plans to come to Washington for a Board of Peace meeting to be chaired by Trump at the end of February. Secretary of State Marco Rubio plans to visit Hungary after taking part in the Munich Security Conference in what will likely be understood as his endorsement.
Orban has staked his re-election on passionate opposition to external pressure on Hungary, personified by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Orban accuses Magyar of being a proxy for Zelensky’s Ukraine and likely to draw Hungary into a devastating war.
To a considerable extent, Orban has made the election a test of public support for an early peace settlement to end the war in Ukraine, and implicitly for U.S. diplomatic efforts to this end.
Orban pledges to stick to his opposition to fund or arm Ukraine and to resist pressure from the EU Commission to bring Hungary into the pro-Ukraine mainstream.
In an escalating war of words with Zelensky, Orban called Ukraine an “enemy” of Hungary, because of Zelensky’s push for a complete ban on all Russian oil and gas imports into the EU. Hungary relies on Russian oil through the Druzhba pipeline, as does Slovakia. Both have been exempted from EU measures to halt these imports, arguing that they have no alternative source. Orban also has accused Magyar of complicity in election interference on the part of Ukraine.
Notably, the recently released election manifesto of Magyar’s Tisza party does not call for Hungarian funding or arming of Ukraine but it does promise better relations with Ukraine and repairing relations with Poland. It opposes any fast-track EU accession for Ukraine.
Magyar seems to be avoiding a direct challenge to Orban’s stance on Ukraine, emphasizing generational change instead (Magyar is 44 years old; Orban is 62). In essence, the Magyar campaign is an anti-incumbent protest against a very long-serving leader with a lot of baggage.
Magyar was a senior member of Orban’s Fidesz party until 2024 and is the ex-husband of Orban’s former justice minister. He was not the obvious choice of much of Hungary’s fragmented liberal and social democratic opposition. He has built support for having demonstrated the potential to defeat Orban, even if he would share some of Orban’s conservative and nationalist worldviews. To win, Magyar needs to attract some disaffected Fidesz voters.
Magyar seeks to mend fences with the European Commission, largely as a means to boost Hungary’s economic performance. He would negotiate with the Commission to unlock some of €18 billion it has withheld from Budapest due to violations of EU laws and norms under Orban’s leadership. The Commission will likely expect Hungary under Magyar to support its approach to Ukraine and Russia, even if Magyar has not publicly offered any such concessions.
Magyar has promised to eliminate corruption, promote judicial independence, and restore independent media. But he would face formidable opponents from within state institutions where leadership will remain in the hands of Fidesz loyalists.
The Magyar camp faces changes in electoral rules which, his supporters claim, favor the incumbent. A very close and contested election could bring disruptive and destabilizing protests. Mutual accusations about foreign interference could result in political instability.
Although a milder version of Orbanism could survive a Magyar victory, Orban’s defeat would be a body blow to the new right’s momentum across Europe. Such an outcome could embolden efforts by some European leaders to stave off any peace settlement not unambiguously favorable to Ukraine and aggravate already tense relations between the U.S., given Trump’s endorsement of Orban, and its NATO allies. Not least, it would embarrass the U.S. president.
On the other hand, European parties of the establishment center-right and center-left might draw encouragement that the new right can be defeated at the ballot box, making it less necessary to quarantine them.
When the George W. Bush administration invaded Iraq in March 2003, that war had 72% support among Americans, according to Gallup.
If Donald Trump now wants to start a U.S. war with Iran, the president would not remotely enjoy that level of support. He doesn’t even have half of it. Scratch that, not even a quarter of Americans want him to bomb Iran today.
A SSRS/University of Maryland poll asked participants earlier this month: “Do you favor or oppose the United States initiating an attack on Iran under the current circumstances?” Only 21% favored, 49% opposed, and 30% answered “I don’t know.”
Republicans were the most favorable toward war with 40%, but 25% of GOP voters said they oppose it, and 35% answered “I don’t know.” So there is not even a consensus in Trump’s own party. It’s split. Only 6% of Democrats favor an attack on Tehran at this time. 21% of independents favored intervention.
The survey, which was taken between February 5-9 is not a one-off, however.An Economist/YouGov poll taken the week before revealed that between January 30 and February 2, 48% to 28% of Americans oppose rather than support the U.S. taking military action in Iran.
This was after the Iranian government was cracking down on protesters, and a chorus of war proponents here in the United States were demanding that Washington intervene militarily to protect them. When poll respondents were asked if they supported or opposed the U.S. bombing Iran over its treatment of protesters, that number rose four points to 52% opposing, with 25% supporting and 23% “not sure.”
A Quinnipiac University survey taken two weeks before the Economist/YouGov poll also asked if the U.S. should intervene to protect protesters in Iran. This poll was taken a week after Trump said that the U.S. was “locked and loaded” if Iran killed peaceful protesters. Between January 8 and 12, 70% believed the U.S. should not become involved in Iran, 18% favored U.S. intervention, and 12% had “no opinion.”
Let’s jump back even further, after Trump ordered strikes on Iran in late June. At the time David Vine reported on Responsible Statecraft that “polling both before and immediately after Trump launched attacks on Iran showed broad opposition to U.S. involvement in Israel’s unprovoked war including among Trump’s base. Most strikingly, 85% of people surveyed nationwide said they don’t want the U.S. to be at war with Iran, while only 5% do, according to YouGov polling conducted in the wake of the bombing.”
These numbers are not a good starting point for support should Trump decide to go to war.
On the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2013, 53% of Americans saw that war as a mistake, according to Gallup. On the 20th anniversary of that war, 61% of Americans believed the U.S. did not make the right decision by invading Iraq, according to an Axios/Ipsos poll.
The Bush-Cheney administration drove a hard propaganda campaign to get Americans behind its foreign policy agenda, something that worked, at least in the beginning. Over 20 years later, recognizing that the Iraq war was a mistake has become something of an American consensus, even in GOP presidential primaries just 13 years after the invasion led by a Republican president.
Does Donald Trump plan to make another colossal blunder in Iran? The same people who thought the Iraq war was a good idea (and still think this) are urging him to.
George W. Bush enjoyed strong support in 2003, and it turned out disastrous, both in the aftermath of the invasion and for his own popularity. Unlike Team Bush, current Iran war advocates are trying to drum up support, but their messaging behind bombing Iran, centering mostly on the protection of Iranian protesters (though that has shifted back some to Iran's nuclear program), is shown by these polling numbers to be a flop.
Donald Trump has a choice to make: The Iraq war is today considered one of the dumbest wars in American history. Is the current American president looking to up the ante with Iran?
Most Americans are not if the polls are any indication.
So far, Trump has stayed his hand. Even when Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the White House on Wednesday, the president insisted he wants to keep talking to Iran. Public opinion and his own popularity must still matter to Trump. He must be aware of the writing on the wall.
“One should never assert a power that he cannot exert,” said British statesman and wordsmith Winston Churchill. My hometown football coach expressed a similar thought: “The man with an alligator mouth and a hummingbird ass” would get more than his share of whippings.
The U.S. military today has a hummingbird’s ass. Despite decades of sky-high military spending, our force is incapable of defeating a peer or near-peer adversary in today’s complex, dangerous world. If we continue on our alligator-mouth-sized trajectory, the consequences will be catastrophic.
The gap is apparent in three critical requirements to win a war: manpower, material, and money. We cannot generate sufficient forces or replace material losses at scale, and we are $38 trillion in debt, with $1 trillion annual budget deficits projected ad infinitum.
Until 1973, the U.S. military met its personnel needs through a mix of volunteers and conscription in both war and peacetime. The move to an All Volunteer Force (AVF) resulted from the most unpopular and unfair draft in American history – the Vietnam War. The AVF was a political solution, not a strategic one.
Over the last five decades, the AVF has seen success and failure tied to economic conditions and perceived risk. It benefited greatly from the fall of the Soviet Union, allowing active forces to shrink from 2.3 million to 1.3 million, and women’s participation, which rose from a 2% legal cap in the early 1970s 24 to 17.7% across the active duty and reserves as of 2023 according to the Department of Defense.
The AVF was decisively tested in 2003. It failed. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan demanded more manpower than the AVF could provide, despite lowered enlistment standards — no longer requiring a high school diploma or GED, lowering aptitude test requirements, waivers for mental health and criminal record — and unprecedented enlistment bonuses that disproportionately attracted working class and middle class Americans.
Rather than exercising its constitutional authority to compel service, the government relied on repeated deployments of active and reserve forces. The result: tens of thousands of service members and families broken by suicide, PTSD, traumatic brain injury, amputations, substance abuse, and more than 7,000 combat deaths.
This abuse of the force makes it unlikely that wartime manpower needs could be met through volunteers. Young Americans’ propensity to serve fell from 15% percent to 9%t; the portion eligible dropped from 30%to 2%; and the U.S. birth rate has dropped to a new low of 1.6 babies per woman. Fewer citizens, from a smaller pool, are willing or able to serve.
The top reasons Americans give for not enlisting: fear of death, fear of serious injury, and leaving home. Americans struggling to afford daily life are not studying maps of distant places for future wars, or dreaming of battlefield glory.
The alternative is reinstating the draft, but the likelihood of success is low, raising a dangerous question: What if we had a war and no one showed up?
In the 1990s, the U.S. government consolidated its military-industrial base, believing a smaller number of suppliers could be more efficient and responsive. By decade’s end, 107 firms became 5: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman.
These five survivors are enormously profitable, wielding unprecedented power with Congress and the Pentagon and fulfilling the warning by President Eisenhower of a dangerous Military-Industrial complex.
This consolidation made us vulnerable. As the 2025 National Security Strategy acknowledges, America lacks the industrial capacity to produce modern systems and munitions at scale and must rapidly adapt to low-cost, high-volume warfare.
Ukraine is a devastating example of our material shortcomings. The U.S. has transferred more than 3 million 155mm artillery rounds – 1250% of current annual production. Rebuilding that inventory will take two years.
Replacing sophisticated weapons systems is more difficult. Restoring stocks of the Javelin antitank missile would take five and a half to eight years to replenish; the HIMARS guided rocket, two to three years, and the Stinger anti-aircraft missile, six to 18 years.
The Navy now operates only four shipyards, ensuring sunk warships will take years to replace. The Air Force faces similar challenges. Further complicating this problem for both branches is their lack of access to the rare-earth materials required for sophisticated weapons systems. Manpower remains a parallel crisis. The Navy is short 14,000 enlisted sailors; the Air Force 1,800 pilots, including 1,100 combat pilots.
Forming a capable factory workforce is another hurdle. In a 2025 survey, 80% of Americans said the country would be better off if more people worked in factories, yet 73% said they personally would not be better off doing so.
No amount of optimism can overcome these facts.
Wars throughout history have always been expensive, often crippling or destroying great nations.
Today, the U.S. is $38 trillion in debt, with trillion-dollar annual budget shortfalls projected for the future. Interest payments alone approach $1 trillion annually.
The Pentagon is a major contributor to this debt, officially consuming nearly $1 trillion annually while failing eight consecutive financial audits. Other budget areas contributing to the real cost of “defense” — the Department of Veterans Affairs, the nuclear budget, and the Department of Homeland Security — drive costs to $1.5 trillion per year. Our defense budget eclipses the next eight nations combined.
There’s little to show for it. Since World War II, the U.S. has won one war, tied another, and lost three: a win in the 1990-91 Gulf War, a tie in Korea, and losses in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Our National Security Strategy is based on insanity – doing things the same way but expecting different results.
“War is hell,” said General Sherman during the Civil War. For many Americans, war remains abstract since it’s not come home since then. For those in Gaza, Kyiv, or Tehran, war is hell.
Wishful thinking won’t stop new technologies from bringing war to our shores. Truth and security can be sought via the following method.
Any time Congress considers committing U.S. forces to armed conflict, it must answer the following questions, drawn from the Powell doctrine, in an open forum so that Americans know what’s being done in their name.
1. Is a vital national security interest threatened?
2. Do we have a clear, obtainable objective?
3. Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
4. Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
5. Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglements?
6. Have the consequences of our actions been fully considered?
7. Is the action supported by the American people?
8. Do we have genuine, broad international support?
I would add two more:
9. How many U.S. troops will die, and from what socio-economic quintile(s) will they come?
10. Will Congress impose an up-front war tax to pay for the conflict without adding to the national debt?
Had we followed this guide, would we have invaded Iraq or stayed in Afghanistan? Would we have taken “ownership” of Venezuela, or considered military action against Greenland, Canada, or Iran? Likely not.
Should America continue to bully weaker nations, more powerful nations could intervene, risking a war that could end this 250‑year democratic experiment, or worse for civilization, trigger nuclear armageddon.
Winston Churchill said, giving credit to Shakespeare, “Cry havoc...and let slip the dogs of war.” Or, as my football coach would say, “When shit hits the fan, no one’s in control.”
It’s time to face facts: we’re sleepwalking into fights we cannot win.
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