FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One during travel to Palm Beach, Florida, from Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., November 25, 2025. REUTERS/Anna Rose Layden/File Photo
According to a top defense expert, President Donald Trump’s Iran war has made it impossible for millions of Americans to ever trust their government’s foreign policy again.
“For decades, the U.S. government has been willing to start wars but not strategically and transparently manage them, consistently misleading its citizenry to justify adventurism abroad,” Alexander Langlois, a contributing fellow for Defense Priorities, wrote for Reason on Tuesday. “The conduct of the Trump administration in the current war with Iran is no exception.”
Langlois added, “President Donald Trump's claims of ‘victory’ as the war persists through a blockade and multiple troop surges without a clear win-case highlights how optics designed to mislead dictate Washington's approach to war today. This war could mark a crucial lesson and potential turning point, however, forcing the nation to come to grips with the real costs of violent conflict.”
The foreign policy scholar explained that Trump’s loss of credibility over the Iran War did not occur in isolation. In fact, for more than 60 years, American foreign policymakers have made unpopular decisions that eroded the public’s ability to believe their words.
“Unable to achieve already unclear objectives and trapped in a quagmire of its own making, Washington has chosen destruction as the war's defining characteristic,” Langlois observed. “The evolution of the war in this direction reflects the ‘body count’ rhetoric used by the White House during the Vietnam War, in which a narrative of mass killing and destruction was believed to bolster perceptions of American victory. In reality, it only obscured the quagmire, prolonging an already lost war in a conflict with no military resolution in the first place.”
Comparing Vietnam to Iran, Langlois concluded that “a strategic loss cannot be defined as a win. A lie is still a lie. That victory is and will be hollow.”
Langlois is not the only foreign policy scholar to raise the alarm about the president’s Iran war and how its ongoing unpopularity could hurt America’s foreign policy.
“Trump’s Easter Sunday blast at the Iranians thus offered a stark contrast with even his most profane predecessors,” presidential historian Barbara A. Perry recently wrote for The Atlantic. Perry quoted Trump’s Easter Day social media post to Iran in which he wrote “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F—— Strait, you crazy b------, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”
While presidents like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were notoriously profane in private, Perry pointed out that they were very careful about protecting the office’s image and credibility by not speaking like that in public.
“All previous presidents have wanted to appear serious, dignified, and statesmanlike when speaking to their fellow Americans and the world about war,” Perry wrote. “Not every commander in chief can rival Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg—or even Franklin D. Roosevelt describing Japan’s ‘unprovoked and dastardly attack on Sunday, December 7, 1941’ as a ‘day that will live in infamy’—but the others have all tried.”