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, Trump wants to be a winner. And to hear him tell it, this war is going great. So great, in fact, that Iran has been totally destroyed and he can end it whenever he wants — or maybe he’s just getting started. Every day brings multiple conflicting statements from the president and his cabinet about war goals, achievements, and timetables.

The president doesn’t seem to care that a mistargeted U.S. cruise missile destroyed a girls’ school and killed 165 Iranian children (which he has suggested was actually Iran’s fault). He doesn’t care that nearly every country in the Middle East is paying a steep price for this war, or that Iran’s strategic retaliation is wreaking havoc and killing innocent people throughout the region. He doesn’t care about the Kurds or Iran’s other ethnic minorities, whom the U.S. and Israel have courted as proxy ground forces. He certainly doesn’t care about the Iranian people, even as he claims to be doing them a favor by bombing them.

He clearly wasn’t that worried about the more than 100,000 Americans living throughout the Middle East who were suddenly told to evacuate the region with no warning and next-to-no U.S. support. He’s unlikely to care that the war is deeply unpopular among most Americans. And Trump has repeatedly adopted a fatalistic stance about U.S. war casualties, which as of now include seven servicemembers killed in action and at least 140 wounded. “When you have conflicts like this, you always have death,” Trump reiterated this week.

He does apparently care that the war has led to an entirely foreseeable oil crisis, including higher and more volatile oil prices, which Americans are already experiencing at the pump. He has repeatedly downplayed the scope of the crisis, insisting that oil will be cheaper than ever after the war is over, while also scrambling to come up with ways to alleviate the oil supply pressures. But as long as the war leaves commercial ships and Gulf oil facilities vulnerable and the Strait of Hormuz impassable, there’s only so much he can do about it. As of now, the threats the oil industry faces are getting worse, not better.

In Trump’s mind, it’s all worth it, as long as he can say he and America won. But what is America even winning here?

Perhaps the reason the administration is struggling to articulate a clear goal for this war is that there is no clear upside for the U.S. Sure, ridding the world of a menace like the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei looks like a win, and Iran hawks can argue that degrading or dismantling the Islamic Republic makes the world safer, but that all depends on what comes after. Despite Trump announcing that he needed to pick Iran’s next leader, Khamenei was replaced with his son, Mojtaba, who was the top choice of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and will likely prove at least as hardline as his father. Despite Trump repeatedly bragging about how many Iranian leaders the U.S. and Israel have killed, U.S. intelligence has reportedly concluded that the regime remains largely intact and is at no risk of collapse. Though Trump and Hegseth keep listing all the Iranian targets the U.S. has rained death and destruction down upon, the regime is still surviving, striking back, and hitting plenty of its own targets.

According to the New York Times, the regime’s resilience and the scale and intensity of its retaliation caught Trump and his advisers off guard: they apparently thought they could decapitate the “evil empire” and it would fall apart. But as Iran experts have said for years, the regime built itself to survive at all costs.

Despite whatever Iran hawks and Netanyahu said to convince Trump in the run up to the war, Iran was already so weakened as to pose no threat to the U.S. and a steadily decreasing threat to Israel or its neighbors; the “imminent threat” justification holds no water. But by sending the Iranian regime into last-stand survival mode, the war has made it far more dangerous and increased the risk that it will try to do something reckless like cripple Gulf infrastructure, race to develop a nuclear weapon, or stage terrorist attacks in Israel, Europe, or the U.S.

The other downsides of this war are manifold, beginning with the cost of the war in dollars, lives, and munitions. The damage and disruption to business in the Gulf, and to shipping and the oil market in particular, will have long-lasting ripple effects throughout the global economy. Even if the war somehow ends tomorrow, or even if the U.S. somehow ends up with access to Iranian oil when the dust settles, some amount of economic damage is now locked in.

The war is also putting more strain on longstanding alliances. U.S. allies in the Gulf are furious that they are being targeted in Iran’s retaliation, and they are fearful of what Trump will leave them to deal with when (or if?) the war eventually ends. Some have reportedly urged the U.S. to finish destroying the regime, worrying that it will be far more of a threat when it’s wounded. The war further erodes America’s standing as a reliable partner and stabilizing force in the world, which Trump has already done so much to wreck. His quasi-imperial Donroe Doctrine seems dovish compared to the aggression against Iran (and let’s not forget his threat to invade Greenland). Israel’s hawkish leaders might be pleased with Trump’s partnership now, but they ultimately may come to regret damaging Israel’s image with the American public even further than the Gaza war already has.

Trump keeps saying the war is already won — but he has no apparent appreciation for what a long tail this kind of operation can have. The U.S. armed forces, including boots on the ground, could easily find themselves bogged down for years if Iran or Israel refuse to cease firing, or if the war spreads, or if Trump insists on finding, securing, or destroying Iran’s nuclear material. And if the conflict persists, we’ve already seen in recent months how poorly equipped the U.S. is to respond to multiple crises at once.

That’s especially true if the U.S. runs out of munitions. To the delight of Russian president Vladimir Putin, every missile interceptor used in Iran is one that we’re not sending to Ukraine. Allied countries are now worried that the Iran war will prevent the U.S. from delivering weapons they have already bought — in many cases under pressure from Trump to buy them. The U.S. is now pulling THAAD systems out of South Korea. If, say, China were to invade Taiwan this year, the U.S. might not be able to do much to help defend the island (if Trump is even willing to).

Between his first and second term as president, Trump’s foreign policy doctrine hasn’t changed all that much, but his temperament has. During his first term, he and his associates spun his erratic behavior on the world stage as a strategic asset, on the premise that it kept our rivals on their toes and spurred our allies to acquiesce to his demands rather than risk setting him off. World leaders quickly learned how to flatter and appease him and give him enough of what he wanted so he wouldn’t break the world.

A little more than a year into his second term, Trump, now unconstrained and seemingly addicted to the rush of exercising his war powers, has become dangerously impulsive. Convinced that he alone has the will and strength to wield America’s big stick the way it was always meant to be wielded, he is determined to do whatever it takes and take whatever he wants, regardless of how much it costs anyone else. The trouble with pretending to be a madman is that after a while, the pretense becomes reality. What the hell is happening, indeed.

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