A rchive Date
[ 10-03-2026 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[https://slate.com/news - and - politics/2026/03/trump - iran - war - biden - bush - obama.html
This Presidential Pitfall Ensnared Wilson, Bush, and Biden. Now Trump’s Falling Into It Too.
Why is the “America First” president so focused on the rest of the world?
By Ian Prasad Philbrick March 10, 2026 5:45 AM
There are many things that set Donald Trump apart from the presidents who came before him. This is a story about one of the ways he’s similar.
For much of his second term, Trump has seemed to bestride the globe, lavishing his attention on a wide range of international issues. He has bragged about ending wars, summited with Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, threatened to annex Greenland, used the risk of tariffs as leverage for foreign - policy concessions, and ordered U.S. military operations in Venezuela, Ecuador, Syria, and elsewhere.
And now, perhaps most consequentially, he has started a war with Iran. But by engaging so heavily abroad, Trump is repeating a pattern - often a politically costly one - that has bedeviled many, many American presidents before him: focusing too much on foreign policy and not enough on the domestic issues that most voters actually care about, which today include high prices and the economy. Call it the foreign - policy trap.
The temptation has existed for at least a century. After World War I, Woodrow Wilson barnstormed the country to gin up support for a treaty that would have seen the U.S. join the League of Nations. He discovered a public more concerned with Progressive Era anti - monopoly reforms that Republicans cast as anti - business, a postwar economic slump, and acts of domestic terrorism committed by anarchists. Republicans retook the White House the following year. One world war later, Harry Truman confronted the Soviet Union and helped architect the modern international order but watched his approval ratings sink as inflation soured voters on the economy. (Truman overcame those headwinds enough to win the 1948 election, only for backlash to the Korean War and resurgent inflation to dash his hopes of running again.)
There are many things that set Donald Trump apart from the presidents who came before him. This is a story about one of the ways he’s similar.
For much of his second term, Trump has seemed to bestride the globe, lavishing his attention on a wide range of international issues. He has bragged about ending wars, summited with Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, threatened to annex Greenland, used the risk of tariffs as leverage for foreign - policy concessions, and ordered U.S. military operations in Venezuela, Ecuador, Syria, and elsewhere.
And now, perhaps most consequentially, he has started a war with Iran. But by engaging so heavily abroad, Trump is repeating a pattern - often a politically costly one - that has bedeviled many, many American presidents before him: focusing too much on foreign policy and not enough on the domestic issues that most voters actually care about, which today include high prices and the economy. Call it the foreign - policy trap.
The temptation has existed for at least a century. After World War I, Woodrow Wilson barnstormed the country to gin up support for a treaty that would have seen the U.S. join the League of Nations. He discovered a public more concerned with Progressive Era anti - monopoly reforms that Republicans cast as anti - business, a postwar economic slump, and acts of domestic terrorism committed by anarchists. Republicans retook the White House the following year. One world war later, Harry Truman confronted the Soviet Union and helped architect the modern international order but watched his approval ratings sink as inflation soured voters on the economy. (Truman overcame those headwinds enough to win the 1948 election, only for backlash to the Korean War and resurgent inflation to dash his hopes of running again.)
More recent presidents have similarly succumbed. Jimmy Carter inked a historic agreement between Egypt and Israel at Camp David but lost reelection in a landslide fueled by high inflation and an oil crisis. (Iran’s capturing of dozens of American hostages didn’t help.) George H.W. Bush oversaw the collapse of the Soviet Union and won the Gulf War but lost reelection to Bill Clinton, whose campaign emphasized Americans’ dissatisfaction with the national economy. Joe Biden was dogged by headlines that proclaimed him too focused on arming Ukraine and uniting NATO than on bringing down inflation. During prep sessions for what would turn out to be a disastrous 2024 debate with Trump, Biden’s former chief of staff Ron Klain “wondered half - seriously if Biden thought he was president of NATO instead of the U.S.,” according to the journalist Chris Whipple. “I was struck by how out of touch with American politics he was,” Klain told Whipple.
Now it’s Trump’s turn. True, the president has pushed an aggressive domestic agenda, including mass deportations, tax cuts funded with cuts to the social safety net, and vengeance against political foes. But the perception that Trump is too focused on what’s happening outside America’s borders and not enough on what’s happening within them - particularly given his repeated pledges to skirt foreign wars and put America First - appears to be broadly held. January polls from YouGov and Fox News found pluralities of voters who felt he was too absorbed with foreign affairs and majorities who thought he wasn’t attentive enough to the economy. A Politico survey last month found that 47 percent of Americans, including 41 percent of those who backed Trump in 2024, say the government is too focused on international issues and not enough on domestic ones. And in a CNN poll taken shortly before Trump’s State of the Union address, two - thirds of Americans stated that he had the wrong priorities as president.
If the foreign - policy trap is so obvious, why do presidents keep falling into it? Polls have long shown that international affairs tend be less influential in how Americans vote than issues like the economy or health care. But some commanders in chief have international affairs thrust upon them. Carter didn’t create tensions in the Middle East any more than Biden wanted Russia to invade Ukraine, but both suffered politically for their divided attention. “Events are in the saddle,” said Whipple, whose two most recent books document Biden’s struggles to straddle foreign and domestic affairs.
Other presidents retreat to foreign policy after their domestic agendas hit roadblocks. It’s not a coincidence that a Pacific trade agreement, detente with Cuba, and a nuclear deal with Iran consumed Barack Obama’s second term after Democrats lost both houses of Congress. Presidents have a freer hand to craft policy on the global stage, with lawmakers and courts less empowered to constrain them.
Still other presidents seem to treat foreign policy as a legacy play, a chance to etch their names for the ages to a degree that domestic politics just can’t match. “It feels more historic,” Peter Baker, the New York Times’ éminence grise of presidential coverage, said recently of Trump’s forays into international affairs. “This is what presidents like to do,” Whipple told me. “Partly because it’s easier, there are fewer constraints, and partly because it makes them, or at least they think it makes them, look strong.”
In presidents’ defense, as the world’s most powerful country, the U.S. has the capacity to do good things abroad, and the life - and - death stakes of many international issues can burnish presidential legacies even if voters don’t always reward them in the moment. George W. Bush - who doesn’t exactly have a spotless record with foreign affairs - still earns plaudits from liberals for creating PEPFAR, a program that distributes HIV/AIDS medication across the world and has saved an estimated 26 million lives. (Trump temporarily froze PEPFAR funding last year, and advocates have said the program’s operations remain disrupted.) Experts (and even some later presidents) retrospectively consider George H.W. Bush’s management of the end of the Cold War a master class. Sometimes, as in the case of Clinton and Rwanda, presidents get dinged for not intervening abroad. And Whipple predicts that history will look more kindly on Biden’s efforts to bolster Ukraine and NATO than voters did.
Still other presidents might have come to office not interested in international affairs, but international affairs turned out to be interested in them. Those commanders in chief - like Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor or George W. Bush after 9/11 - have little choice but to get involved overseas. They can even enjoy a temporary bump in popularity, although polling indicates that partisanship has eroded the so - called rally - ’round - the - flag effect in recent years.
But based on all the reporting so far, Trump’s ongoing bombing campaign against Iran is the definition of a war of choice. Unlike most of his predecessors, Trump explicitly campaigned against embroiling the U.S. in more foreign wars. And history suggests that what starts abroad doesn’t always stay there. When foreign policy does become an issue that matters to how a meaningful number of Americans vote - as Vietnam, the Iraq war, and Gaza did - it’s usually bad news for the party in power.
A few Trump allies seem to appreciate the risks. After Democrats romped to electoral victories last November, Steve Bannon warned the president against “spending so much time in the Mideast” and urged him to prioritize domestic concerns. “We need to focus on the home front,” Vice President J.D. Vance said then. Trump may be getting cold feet in Iran (“I think the war is very complete, pretty much,” he told CBS News yesterday after the war spiked oil prices), but he doesn’t seem to be tiring of foreign adventurism in general. “Cuba’s going to fall, too,” he told Politico last week.
In fairness to Trump, the public can be fickle. Americans may say they want him to focus more on the economy, but what would that really look like in practice? Fewer headlines about Iran might help. So far, though, voters don’t seem to much like Trump’s economic agenda either. The same Fox poll that showed most Americans yearning for a president who spends more time on the economy also found that most dislike how he’s handling that issue.
Which leads to Whipple’s other theory about why Trump spends so much time looking outward: to seek refuge from Americans’ disenchantment with how he has approached virtually every aspect of his job. “I think with Trump, what it comes down to is he’ll do whatever it takes to look strong,” Whipple said. “Domestically, he’s got all kinds of challenges, from Epstein to tariffs. But overseas, he’s unconstrained, unshackled.”
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