The War Presidency: A Pattern, and Its Price — Part Two: Bush to Trump

Long read 7 minutes

"The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
— Richard Dearlove, Director of British Foreign Intelligence, July 2002

Part One of this series traced the arc from Carter to Clinton — a period in which the American political system consistently punished restraint and rewarded visible military resolve, producing by the end of the Clinton presidency a template precise enough to calibrate a bombing campaign to a congressional calendar. Part Two picks up where that template broke — when the logic that made Grenada and Desert Fox politically functional was applied at a scale the original model was never designed to bear.

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George W. Bush did not refine the Reagan template. He discarded it.

The September 11 attacks created a political environment unlike anything the postwar presidency had encountered. Congressional authorization for the use of military force passed the Senate 98-0 and the House 420-1 within three days. Public approval of Bush's handling of the crisis reached 90 percent. The institutional incentives that had always favored military resolve were now amplified by a genuine national trauma — and by an administration that understood, from its earliest days in office, that Iraq was unfinished business.

Richard Dearlove, director of British foreign intelligence, wrote in a secret memo in July 2002 — eight months before the invasion — that "military action was now seen as inevitable" in Washington, and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Paul O'Neill, Bush's own Treasury Secretary, later confirmed that Iraq was on the agenda at the administration's first National Security Council meeting, in January 2001 — nine months before September 11.

The WMD case was the public justification. In February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell presented intercept evidence to the UN Security Council that he characterized as proof of active Iraqi weapons programs. The Security Council declined to authorize an invasion. The United States invaded anyway on March 20, 2003, with a coalition that notably excluded France, Germany, Russia, and China. No weapons of mass destruction were found. David Kay, who had led the Iraq Survey Group of 1,400 inspectors tasked with finding them, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in January 2004: "We were almost all wrong."

The "Mission Accomplished" banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, marked the moment the Bush administration believed the Reagan template had been followed to its conclusion — a decisive military victory that would consolidate presidential authority and reshape the region. What followed instead was an eight-year occupation, 4,431 American military deaths, an Iraqi civilian death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands, and the emergence of the Islamic State from the vacuum the invasion created. The political cost arrived on schedule: Democrats won control of Congress in 2006, and Bush left office in January 2009 with a 22 percent approval rating — the lowest recorded for any departing president in the modern polling era.

Bush Junior demonstrated what happens when the template is no longer small. The rally effect is real but temporary. The occupation that follows a military victory is neither temporary nor controllable. And the political cost of a war that cannot be concluded accumulates far past the point where any initial approval rating can protect a presidency.

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Barack Obama inherited two wars and spent eight years trying to prosecute them at lower cost — in American lives, in political capital, and in public attention. What he developed was not a departure from the war presidency pattern but a technological adaptation of it.

The drone program was the instrument. By the end of Obama's second term, the United States had conducted strikes in at least seven countries — Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya — under legal authorities that were largely classified, with casualty counts that were shrouded in secrecy until near the end of his administration. The ACLU noted that Obama left office having established "expansive claims of war authority without congressional authorization in multiple parts of the world." He became, as one frequently cited observation had it, the fourth consecutive president to order airstrikes on Iraq.

Libya in 2011 was the clearest expression of the Obama model. A UN Security Council resolution authorizing the protection of civilians provided the legal cover. NATO provided the operational structure. American air power provided the decisive capability — including, eventually, the drone strike that killed Muammar Gaddafi. No American ground troops entered combat. No American servicemen died in action. Regime change was not the stated objective, even as it became the outcome. Obama described the approach as "leading from behind" — a phrase his advisers later walked back but which accurately described the political logic: maximum military effect at minimum political exposure.

Libya is also the clearest illustration of the model's limits. The country descended into a failed state, divided between competing militias and governments, with the United States subsequently conducting more than 550 drone strikes there — more than in Somalia, Yemen, or Pakistan. The Embassy was evacuated and relocated to neighboring Tunisia. The security situation remained so unstable that a US general testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that despite years of strikes and $635 million in assistance, "the risk of a full-scale civil war remains real."

Obama adapted the war presidency for an era in which the public had been exhausted by Iraq and Afghanistan. He kept the military instrument active across a wider geography than any previous president while minimizing the political visibility of its use. The adaptation was technically sophisticated and strategically inconclusive.

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Donald Trump has presented the war presidency pattern with its most significant complication — a president who appears to have inverted the formula by making the deal, rather than the conflict, the political product.

Trump's first term included the killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020 — the most significant targeted killing of a foreign official by the United States since the Second World War — and then a deliberate withdrawal from the brink when Iran's retaliatory missile strikes on US bases in Iraq produced no American fatalities. Trump accepted the off-ramp. The escalation logic that had governed the war presidency since Reagan did not hold.

His second term has produced the most consequential test of this inversion. The US military campaign against Iran's nuclear infrastructure, conducted in coordination with Israel, generated the conditions for the US-Iran memorandum of understanding — a diplomatic framework that Trump presented as the deal, the product, the political achievement. Where previous presidents had needed military action to project strength, Trump needed the signed agreement. His brand is the negotiation, the photograph, the announcement.

The MoU is now being tested by the Lebanon ceasefire crisis examined in this publication's ongoing series on the patron-client relationship between Washington and Jerusalem. On June 19, 2026, the United States announced a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. Israel's ambassador endorsed it publicly. Within hours, Israeli strikes continued across southern Lebanon. The Switzerland talks collapsed. The patron announced. The client continued.

What this means for the Trump presidency's place in the war presidency pattern is genuinely unresolved. If the MoU holds and produces a durable regional framework, Trump will have demonstrated that the deal can substitute for the conflict as a source of presidential authority — that the incentive structure Carter encountered can be navigated without the military instrument. If the MoU collapses under the weight of Israeli conduct in Lebanon, Trump faces the same choice every president in this series has faced: absorb the political cost of a failed diplomatic achievement, or reach for the military option that the pattern has always rewarded.

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The pattern from Carter to Trump describes not a conspiracy but a structural feature of American political life — one in which the incentives consistently favor the visible projection of force over the patient pursuit of diplomacy, and in which the costs of that preference accumulate not in Washington but in the places where the weapons land.

Carter paid for restraint with his presidency. Reagan established the template with Grenada. Bush Senior won the war and lost the peace for stopping too soon. Clinton calibrated bombing campaigns to congressional calendars. Bush Junior broke the template by scaling it past the point of political recovery. Obama adapted it technologically while multiplying its geography. Trump has attempted to replace it with the deal — and the outcome of that attempt is being written, one ceasefire violation at a time, in southern Lebanon.

Sources:

PART TWO — Bush Junior to Trump

Bush Junior

Richard Dearlove, Downing Street Memo, July 23, 2002. The primary source for the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" quote. The memo was leaked to the Sunday Times of London in May 2005 and its authenticity was never disputed by the British government.

Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill (Simon & Schuster, 2004). Primary source for O'Neill's account of Iraq being on the agenda at the first NSC meeting in January 2001.

Colin Powell, Address to the United Nations Security Council, February 5, 2003. Primary source for the WMD presentation. Powell later described it as a "blot" on his record.

David Kay, testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, January 28, 2004. Primary source for "we were almost all wrong." Kay had led the Iraq Survey Group of 1,400 inspectors.

Iraq Body Count project — for Iraqi civilian death toll estimates. The project has maintained a continuously updated database since 2003 using cross-referenced media reports and official figures.

iCasualties.org — for the 4,431 American military death figure in Iraq.

Gallup historical approval ratings, George W. Bush — for the 22 percent approval rating at the end of his presidency, confirmed as the lowest recorded for a departing president in the modern polling era.

War on the Rocks, "The Iraq War's Intelligence Failures Are Still Misunderstood," February 2024 — for the analysis of both the WMD and al-Qaeda intelligence failures.

Obama

The Intercept, "The US Has Conducted 550 Drone Strikes in Libya Since 2011 — More Than in Somalia, Yemen, or Pakistan," June 2018 — for the drone strike count and the ACLU quote on expansive war authority claims.

CNN Politics, "Countries bombed by the US under the Obama administration," September 2014 — for the seven-country list and the fourth-consecutive-president-to-bomb-Iraq observation.

Obama White House Archives, "Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Libya," March 28, 2011. Primary source for Obama's stated justification for the Libya intervention.

General Thomas Waldhauser, testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee — for the "risk of full-scale civil war remains real" assessment and the $635 million assistance figure. Waldhauser was AFRICOM commander.

American Civil Liberties Union, statement on Obama drone war legacy — for the "expansive claims of war authority without congressional authorization" characterization, quoted in The Intercept reporting.

Trump

The sourcing for the Trump section draws primarily from this publication's ongoing Iran-Lebanon series, which is itself sourced in the patron-client pieces and the June 19 ceasefire reporting. Specific sources:

Al Jazeera live coverage, June 19, 2026 — for the ceasefire announcement, the Swiss talks cancellation, and the continuation of Israeli strikes.

Reuters, senior US official confirmation of the ceasefire — cited in Al Jazeera and PBS NewsHour reporting, June 19, 2026.

The Soleimani killing — Department of Defense statement, January 3, 2020, confirming the strike at Baghdad International Airport.

Trump public statements on Iran, January 2020 — for the withdrawal from escalation following the Iranian missile strikes on Al-Asad Air Base, Iraq, January 8, 2020, which produced no American fatalities.