We Americans don’t know if we’re the good guys anymore

Updated March 11, 2026 — 8:12am,first published 8:00am

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It’s been a little more than a week since Donald Trump authorised the most significant military operation of his presidency. And still, Americans don’t quite know what to make of it.

The polling shows that support for the war in Iran essentially matches what people thought of Trump before the war. Most Americans I speak with feel a bit lost.

This war, for all of Trump’s sabre-rattling over the years, doesn’t quite fit with what anyone expected. Even those of us who have long called his actions on the global stage reckless and dangerous, who suggested that his treatment of the world like a box of toys that could be put away after playtime, would end up in calamity, didn’t expect him to drag the US into a prolonged conflict with a well-armed rival.

Trump was for a decade the loudest spokesman for a long-overdue questioning of the justification of American force around the world. That focus would be better spent on affairs at home – wasn’t that the entire point of America First?

After all, it was Donald Trump who, in 2020, kept repeating “we’ve spent $8 trillion in the Middle East, and we’re not fixing our roads in this country? How stupid.”

One of Trump’s arguments in the 2024 election was that, were he in charge,........

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