Trump’s foreign policy quagmire piles billions onto US debt

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks from Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., January 3, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

President Donald Trump is costing US taxpayers “billions” with his various military ventures, an expert wrote on Tuesday, even though both he and his critics have been strangely silent on the subject.

From his quite real military action in Venezuela to his threatened activities in Colombia, Mexico, Nigeria, Gaza, Iran and Greenland, Trump is repeatedly actually or potentially engaging in multibillion dollar military campaigns all over the globe, according to a report by Bloomberg. For example Operation Southern Sphere in January, during which Trump captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, cost $31 million per day, according to an analysis by the Washington think tank the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

“That comes to more than $11 billion a year if the US maintains its current level there,” reported Bloomberg’s Wes Kosova. If Trump successfully pushes US oil companies to spend $100 billion to rebuild Venezuela’s energy industry, “that means you’re bringing in some kind of occupation,” explained Heidi Peltier, director of programs at Brown University’s Costs of War project. “US taxpayers would be rebuilding the oil industry and paying for a military presence there to stabilize the country and make it a safe enough investment.”

Similarly Trump’s threatened attacks against Iran, which he said would be “far worse” than the B-2 bomber attacks from last year, would cost $8 million daily or $2.9 billion annually.

“That’s on top of the at least $2 billion the US spent on military action against Iran and its proxies in 2025, according to calculations by the Costs of War project,” Bloomberg wrote. “Needless to say, those numbers will climb dramatically if Trump orders further strikes.” And that doesn’t include the cost of Trump’s threatened occupation of Greenland (roughly $700 billion).

“No matter how compelling a president’s argument may be for missile strikes or troop deployments, the current practice of heaping war costs atop the nation’s already staggering pile of debt can last only so long,” Bloomberg reported. “At the start of the Iraq War, US debt held by the public was $3.7 trillion, or 33 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Today it’s more than $30 trillion, equal to 97 percent of GDP.”

Bloomberg is not alone within the business world in looking askance at Trump’s invasion of Venezuela. TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné told reporters that he quit the country in 2022 and Trump’s invasion has not changed that.

"It was too expensive and too polluting," Pouyanné said, "and that is still the case.”

Similarly Exxon CEO Darren Woods has described the Venezuelan market as “uninvestable.” Trump replied by threatening to sideline the Exxon leader by “playing too cute.” Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton also observed in January that oil companies might not feel comfortable investing in Venezuela because of the instability injected by Trump’s policies.

“If I were an oil company executive being pressured by Trump to invest billions of dollars of capital expenditures to revive Venezuela's oil infrastructure, I would want a regime in place committed to the rule of law,” Bolton said.

Overall the economic risk involved in Venezuela stems from the uncertainty baked into the military operation’s future, said one expert.

"Tactically, it was executed with precision," retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling said for the conservative publication The Bulwark. "But the immediate aftermath revealed a strategic uncertainty. Even in the (Trump) Administration's first press briefings, it was unclear who was in charge in Caracas, what authority Washington claimed to exercise, and what political end state the United States was pursuing. That ambiguity has not improved with time."

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