Championing his new war with Iran at a campaign rally in Kentucky on Wednesday, President Donald Trump repeatedly boasted of how amazingly well his Middle East “excursion” has gone. Imagining the shock and awe Iran’s regime felt on the receiving end of so much American superpower, Trump told the crowd, “They don’t know what the hell hit them! … They said: What the hell is happening?!”

Much of the world is asking the same question.

While Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu starting a war with Iran can’t have come as that much of a surprise globally, the far-reaching shockwaves of the war — which now involves the militaries of at least 20 nations, is triggering an unprecedented global oil crisis, and seems set to drag on for an indeterminable amount of time — clearly have. And this new version of Trump, who has gone from decrying costly foreign wars to gleefully waging one he barely seems to understand, should have everyone on edge.

In his first term, the Trump doctrine manifested in his blustery but mostly unsuccessful attempts to strong-arm allies and adversaries into agreements that favored the U.S. He seemed leery of starting shooting wars (as opposed to trade wars), and he was also restrained by the professionalism and pragmatism that still prevailed in the Departments of Defense and State. Yet he was unmistakably convinced that as commander-in-chief of the world’s largest and most powerful military, he should have gotten whatever he wanted from other countries.

Since returning to office last year, Trump has been unbound. The “adults in the room” are mostly gone, replaced with loyalists, sycophants, and opportunists. He has renamed the DoD the Department of War and put a man in charge of it, Pete Hegseth, whose performative bravado so far exceeds his competence, it might as well be called the Department of Male Insecurity. Secretary of State/National Security Adviser Marco Rubio has proven himself a deft and reliable lackey, but he has also influenced the president toward agendas of his own, namely the ousting of socialist dictators in Venezuela and (soon) Cuba. Supposed isolationist J.D. Vance seems to have been sidelined.

Trump has discovered in his second term that war is a way to demonstrate his own power and get what he wants, fast, while generating sensational headlines that crowd out other unfavorable news he might want the public to forget (like the brutality of ICE, inflation, job losses, rising health care costs, or the never-ending scandal of the Epstein files). Nothing says “winning” like crushing an enemy on an actual battlefield, and more than anything else,........

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