Trump's Gaza vision would be US counterinsurgency failure 2025

In his 1971 classic “Every War Must End,” Fred Charles Iklé painfully reminded every would-be commander and statesman of the wrenching tragedies that result from confusing military means with political ends.

Thus, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, any U.S. veteran counterinsurgent listening to President Trump’s press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday evening had to measure clearly the spoken words against such warnings and shudder.

"The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too. We'll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. Level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings. Level it out," the president said. "Create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area," he added. "Do a real job. Do something different."

These are the terms of a successful real estate developer and epoch-changing politician. They are filled with similar emotions raised by others who have also sat in the same office, especially next to a needful friend and flush with an electoral victory from which he believes he has a powerful mandate to bend the arc of history.

Yet these presidents are also not reflective of the American experience overseas. They instead represent the kind of nightmare that has awakened every American administration since Israel was recognized by President Truman in 1948.

For all its dynamism, America has long proven its structural inadequacies at this kind of security and development mission. It’s just not in its DNA, regardless of the clarity of the orders or willingness of its troops. No matter how well meaning at the outset, the United States has often failed its friends, not due to any perfidy but to lack of clear-eyed statesmanship towards Iklé’s famous ends and a repeated misreading of the unique relationship between America’s transient democracy and the sustained application of force necessary to compel an often invisible foe to submit to its will.

English philosopher John Gray recently noted that one of the positives from Trump’s election is that he was “not a war candidate” and was without “a universal mission” trying “to reshape” the world, but rather led with “a transactional realism.” Gray remarked that this realism is potentially more “morally clean” than the “negative soft power” results of both the neoconservative and liberal exercise of power (often intertwined) for 40 years since the end of the Cold War. Much of this exercise, if we haven’t yet forgotten, occurred in the killing fields of the Middle East.

Trump clearly wants to succeed where President Biden and his inept advisers clearly failed. Yet instinct must always be met by the rational, and both have practical, political, and global power ramifications that go well beyond one term of office.

On Wednesday his surrogates worked to dial his Tuesday remarks back, saying, he “doesn’t want to put any U.S. troops on the ground, and he doesn’t want to spend any U.S. dollars at all.” That would be smart, because otherwise the U.S. would be immediately involved in fighting a war that has not come to its natural political end, and likely never will. If American servicemembers touch the Gaza Strip, they are immediately in a state of war, surrounded not only by Hamas and other militant fighters and gangs, operating in a place where governing institutions now barely exist.

Strenuous rules of engagement for self-defense, which Trump bolstered during his first tenure, would mean more civilian harm and likely loss of life for our own soldiers. A carefully considered endgame here is not a choice, but a political and moral imperative.

Next, the mission has very little chance of immediate clarity or resolution. Lack of active-duty troop strength, exhaustion of weaponry in other overseas commitments like those in Ukraine, ship readiness and construction all mean that time would not be on America’s side in maintaining effective armed presence necessary to “clear, hold, and build.” Any presence in Gaza would immediately be opposed not just on all three sides facing land but also the one at the Mediterranean's edge requiring absolute naval command of the seas. The U.S. military’s history is filled with impossible odds when attempting to contain irregular adversaries with easy access to a porous border.

Much like in Iraq and Afghanistan, today’s readiness woes mean that the reserve component will be asked to do much of this work, if sustained. Although successful in many ways, America’s reserve force is still constructed from the same “total force policy” of General Creighton Abrams at the end of the Vietnam War, designed to prevent long-term commitment of overseas troops by dividing the necessary capabilities of such campaigns throughout the national guard and reserve. Consistently late and insufficient congressional budgets for defense has only increased uncertainty and added to strategic myopia.

Finally, the interplay of economic, diplomatic, and military statesmanship would require a deft coherence — and strategic honesty — that no American administration has successfully wielded since World War II. As the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction noted, “Yet over two decades — and even as Afghan provinces fell like dominoes in the summer of 2021 — I do not recall any senior official telling Congress or the American people that failure was a real possibility. … Self-serving delusion was America’s most formidable foe.”

Although the Army’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual 3-24, famously written by the generals of the Iraq War clearly states that “counterinsurgency is not a substitute for strategy,” for American leaders desperately looking for any success in a strategic vacuum, it became one. And no one was ready to say it wasn’t — or to offer any viable alternative. There is no reason to believe anything is different today in terms of opportunistic careerism or strategic hubris.

What then could work to accomplish the president’s vision? This would be the first real test of President Trump’s Joint Chiefs whom he inherited from former President Biden. What will they recommend to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, someone with “dust on his boots” from two failed counterinsurgencies himself? What have they learned from America’s ignominious departure from Afghanistan, or past efforts to resupply civilians in Gaza, and how are those lessons reflected in the plans they will present?

To truly “do something different,” as the president proclaimed, the United States might start by reviewing its own past playbooks on attracting allies to accomplish well-defined political objectives instead. That is why General Colin Powell regularly referred to Ikle’s book and urged his staff to study it, especially when determining recommended courses of action to then President George H.W. Bush about the desirable ends of ejecting Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.

But these are not the early unipolar salad days of 1991, but rather a much more competitive and unpredictable world. This is a solemn test of a new administration, and for those serving in uniform today, especially those in our youngest generations — those who will never allow America to fail within their temporal power. The stakes couldn't be any higher.