By now, it is almost impossible to honestly defend the humane facade of the US’s post-War foreign policy. The Truman Doctrine of 1947 and a general anti-Soviet rhetoric of bolstering liberal democracies and opposing the threat of communist authoritarian dictatorships were convenient scapegoats for implementing a rule of the American market model across the globe. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri – two of the greatest theorists of the capitalist logic of US globalisation – were therefore ultimately correct in arguing that the collapse of empire nation politics after WWII quickly reversed into America’s own brand of “Empire”, an economic colonialism which imposed a postmodern form of market and military violence on any fledgeling democracies across the world. 

The neo-colonial US empire and its corporate techno-capitalist operation became the director of the world stage. The most fundamental fact about this foreign policy of violent economic control is obvious, but worth recollecting: it worked. For all of its crimes, foreign policy violence equated to effective foreign policy for nearly eight decades (“effective” only for private US interests, of course). But this straightforward relation no longer holds true with the Trump Administration – the correlation between violence and profitable foreign policy has halted in an unexpectedly humiliating and destructive way for Trump, and in a way which forces us to reconsider the relationship between violence and effectiveness. 

Before looking further into Trump’s Iran fiasco and the future politics of violence that it heralds, it is worth insisting on the effective foreign policy violence that went hand-in-hand with the US’s post-War colonialism. We can begin by looking at Operation Condor: a period of major political repression across almost all of Latin America between 1975 and 1983. The US financed and trained right-wing dictators across the continent to violently hinder the organic growth of leftist and left-sympathising movements, resulting in around 70,000 deaths and a near-permanent economic and political instability in the development of Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay etc. The intention and result of Operation Condor was clear enough: the US ensured that Latin America would not threaten the US’s economic and political superiority. A similar violent effectiveness can be seen for example with Iraq, Serbia, East Timor, Vietnam (and Cambodia and Laos), Iran in 1953, or Syria. In all of these cases, the US either directly and aggressively intervened militarily, or backed violent right-wing political repressions. And in all of these cases, with everything else considered, the US’s unapologetic and brutal foreign policy worked – the US got what it wanted. 

As Noam Chomsky argued even in the 1980s: the US desire for control over global markets and political democracies was almost identical to the Soviet Union’s desire, rather than its direct opposite. The important difference was that the Soviets were not as good at achieving it: the US’s system of market censorship (which made its citizens think they were free whilst blocking any genuine channels of free information exchange) and its overwhelming military foreign influence ensured that no real political opposition was ever possible. No matter how brutal it was, foreign policy violence was justified from the American perspective because it yielded the desired results: it secured the US’s position as the political determinant of a progressive neoliberal globalisation.

The pressing question to ask now, however, is what the relation is between violence and effectiveness today, where a quick look at the enormous ineffectiveness of Trump’s war on Iran gives a good indication. Currently, and according to Pete Hegseth’s own conservative estimates, the Iran War has cost the US $37.5 billion. War is of course expensive, as Trump loyalists will argue, but with Iran we see a staggering amount of money which has strangely yielded absolutely no results. Trump reversing his promise to not start unnecessary wars has led to major dissent by previous supporters and a major dip in his approval ratings, currently down to only 34%. Any attempts at negotiations have been equally farcical, with the supposed ‘success’ of the Memorandum of Understanding (now rendered irrelevant) being little more than a pathetic return to pre-war relations – the principal difference being that Mojtaba Khamenei has replaced his father as Supreme Leader, with an even more far-right, anti-Western, fundamentalist affinity than his father.

What we are left with are Trump’s desperate and hysterical threats of annihilation combined with endless bombing campaigns which somehow synthesise a catastrophic violence with a profound inefficiency. Trump’s humiliation is now undeniable, and despite prolonged bombings no resolution is in sight that would benefit US interests. This, then, is the paradoxical future of foreign policy signalled by Trump: whilst violence at one time yielded results, today it seems to yield nothing. The more concerning fact is that, with Trump, violence continues because it achieves nothing. Trump’s method of violence is unrecognisable even by US standards: a purely gestural and vindictive violence – a paradoxical violence that works both ways and continues only by lacking a defined goal. 

Those who believe we still live in an ideology of instrumental and utilitarian politics have clearly not considered Trump properly. We cannot account for Trump’s politics by utilitarian interpretations alone – something about his specific brand of erratic foreign policy (non-)diplomacy and everyday deployment of violence is irreducible to the pure and cold instrumentality seen in the previous decades. In the first decades of the post-War era, US interests exercised violence because they knew that, despite atrocious humanitarian transgressions, this violence would yield results. It could perhaps be argued that there are exceptions here, such as the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, which was unsuccessful in toppling Fidel Castro, or the hugely unpopular Vietnam War which ended with a North Vietnamese victory. But were these really failures? The US’s control-at-a-distance over Cuba, and its levelling of Vietnamese forests and agricultural land, have led these countries to stagnate and suffer enough for them to be ignored, to never have become market-level threats to American interests. 

These decades of foreign policy were sinister, but they were instrumental: they achieved a determinate goal. This instrumental clarity is absent when we look at Trump. With the current administration, there is a more obscene and performative dimension to foreign policy violence: Trump does it just because he can, and violence continues even though there is no calculable or beneficial outcome. What we are left with resembles a scene from a William S Burroughs novel: grotesque torture-machines and sadistic contraptions that persist even if they are discontinued, even if they are left unmanned, and even without any possible benefit to their continuation.