Now well into its second week, the US-Israeli war against Iran has gone beyond the “combat operation” the US president, Donald Trump, announced when it began on February 28. Civilians and infrastructure have been struck across the region from Lebanon, to the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. The conflict has spread rapidly across the Middle East. Now, with the strait of Hormuz effectively closed, oil prices have risen sharply threatening global economic chaos.
This is not an abstract strategic contest. It is unfolding in a region shaped by decades of conflict driven both by external intervention and by regional actors themselves. Israel’s overwhelming use of military force in recent years in Gaza, Lebanon and now against Iran has been a central factor in the current escalation, while Iran and allied armed movements such as Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis have pursued their own strategies of deterrence and retaliation.
The latest US-Israeli strikes and Tehran’s response therefore add another layer to an already volatile landscape in which multiple actors pursue security, influence or survival through force. The human cost is mounting. Meanwhile, the legal principles meant to constrain the use of force under the UN Charter have increasingly been overshadowed by power politics.
In this context, the meaning of the “America first” slogan on which Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 demands urgent reassessment. So does the manner in which American power operates.
US involvement in and response to the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East show a pattern of Washington enlisting regional partners to help realise its foreign policy aims. It is letting Europe bear the main burden in economic terms in the Ukraine conflict while in the Middle East, it has partnered with Israel. Meanwhile, it is happy to directly manage affairs in the Americas – in the Venezuela raid in January, for example, or the Cuba blockade.
When Barack Obama called it “leading from behind”, there was a furore on the American right. But now, this approach is central to maintaining America’s dominant global position.
One of this article’s authors, Inderjeet Parmar, has highlighted elsewhere how US policy seeks to combine realist power projection with liberal ideological framing, using the language of universal values such as human rights. This enables it to legitimise interventions, alliances and proxy arrangements that distribute burdens to partners and sustain America’s global position while helping avoid overextension. Washington’s approach masks self-interested expansionism as consensual leadership rather than the naked unilateralism it actually represents.
This approach reduces the risk of domestic backlash from costly direct engagements. It avoids the pitfalls of imperial overstretch that were seen in cases such as Iraq, while retaining ultimate control and benefits.
In his analysis of US actions, this article’s other author, Bamo Nouri, suggests that US foreign policy often serves corporate and elite interests under such guises as the promotion of democracy. Nouri portrays how Washington’s use of partners in foreign policy arenas in recent years has been a calculated tactic that sustains empire efficiently. But it risks partner fatigue, escalation, or blow-back when partners falter, fail to achieve their goals or where it leads to wider regional escalation.
But ultimately it underscores a consistent US strategy: using its networked power to get its way. In other words, leading from behind.
‘America first’ interrogated
The “America first” slogan that Trump has adopted (a 19th-century phrase used by nativists. It gained prominence in the US after the first world war when it became associated with the Ku Klux Klan and other far-right organisations) was framed by the president as a decisive break from the post-cold war bipartisan foreign policy consensus. Trump denounced regime change, criticised the Iraq war’s architects, and promised to end “forever wars”. That resonated with a weary American public lamenting costly interventions that destabilised the Middle East while achieving little.
America first was presented as a strategic correction: abandoning liberal interventionism, rejecting ideological crusades and restoring prudence to US statecraft. Intellectually, it appeared to prioritise realist recognition of limits, restraint and national interests over moral grandstanding.
Yet Trump 2.0 actions – with the raid on Venezuela, threats against Greenland and Canada and now the full-scale war against Iran – have cast serious doubts on that claim. Evidence suggests continuity in the pursuit of American primacy, but expressed now in more nationalist and unapologetic language. The rhetoric has shifted, but the structure of power and the willingness to employ force remain strikingly familiar.
White House
To Trump’s base, the appeal of America first was partly due to its critique of liberal internationalism. For decades, both Republican and Democratic administrations justified US primacy through the language of promoting democracy, humanitarian intervention and multilateral order-building. Trump argued that these ventures drained American resources while delivering little tangible benefit. Indeed, both parties’ presidential candidates in 2020 stood on a platform of ending “forever wars”. But ultimately, America first was largely a branding exercise led by influential thinktanks.
The Washington-based conservative thinktank, the Heritage Foundation, played an important role in developing policy frameworks and identifying personnel for Trump’s second administration.
Heritage had historically championed a robust national defence and assertive US leadership. Under Trump, newer networks explicitly branded under the banner of America First Policy Institute emerged to provide intellectual support for the movement. These institutions promoted the idea that Trumpism represented a decisive shift toward state-centred realism, as opposed to liberal nation-building.
But realism, properly understood, is not simply a rhetoric of strength, but a doctrine of prudence. Classical realists, from the German-born scholar Hans Morgenthau onwards, have always stressed the dangers of ideological crusading, the unpredictability of military escalation and the limits of power. War was to be a last resort, not a way to demonstrate power and resolve.
But America first has not dismantled the core architecture of US global primacy. The US continues to rely on military superiority, sanctions regimes and alliance systems to maintain its position of global primacy. The difference lies in presentation. Liberal internationalists justified primacy through universalist ideals. America first recasts it in nationalist terms: sovereignty, strength, deterrence. But the underlying strategic objective remains constant – preventing the emergence of challengers and preserving US dominance.
The escalation with Iran underscores this continuity. It signals that when confronted with perceived threats to its authority or credibility, Washington will often consider the use of coercion, whether economic or other means, including force. In this sense, America first may represent not a rejection of primacy but its simplification, stripped of multilateral vocabulary and reframed as unapologetic power politics.
The costs of abandoning restraint
The consequences are profound. Domestically, America first promised a renewed focus on national reconstruction. But the gap between promise and practice risks deepening public cynicism about foreign policy and political leadership alike.
If Trump’s foreign policy “art of the deal” culminates in airstrikes, region-wide escalation and blowback, the claim that it represents a realist recalibration of US foreign policy becomes difficult to sustain. Rather than ending liberal interventionism, America first appears to have refashioned American primacy in starker, less apologetic terms, without the veneer of restraint.
The recent strikes are therefore more than tactical decisions for the Trump administration. They reveal how deeply embedded primacy politics remains in Washington, regardless of who is doing it. The rhetoric has shifted. The structural impulse to defend US dominance through force has not.
