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Donald Trump spent the holidays drifting further and further from the “America First” doctrine he campaigned on. The president who once promised to disentangle the United States from foreign conflicts has turned his focus abroad: On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, respectively, the U.S. bombed a dock in Venezuela and struck ISIS militants in Nigeria. And this morning, just over six months after the U.S. struck three nuclear facilities in Iran, Trump threatened to deploy military force in support of anti-government protesters in the country. “If Iran shots [sic] and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go,” he wrote on Truth Social.
Trump’s statement about Iran included no elaboration or specific plan for military action. But with only a few short lines on social media, the president effectively put Iran’s government on alert. “Trump should know that U.S. interference in this internal matter would mean destabilizing the entire region and destroying America’s interests,” wrote Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, on X. “The American people should know—Trump started this adventurism. They should be mindful of their soldiers’ safety.”
As my colleague Nancy A. Youssef put it, Trump’s version of “America First” has so far meant avoiding large-scale military incursions “oriented around nation-building.” But the policy has also apparently allowed for aggressive interventions around the world, both to pursue America’s enemies and to aid its allies. When the U.S. conducted its clandestine operation in Iran in June under the code name “Operation Midnight Hammer,” Trump gave a televised address explaining his thinking: forcible disarmament to further American security interests in the Middle East.
Other strikes can’t be as easily slotted into “America First.” After the U.S. launched more than a dozen Tomahawk missiles at ISIS camps in northwest Nigeria on Christmas Day, Nigerian Foreign Minister Yusuf Maitama Tuggar said the strike had “nothing to do with a particular religion.” But Trump claimed in a Truth Social post that militants had “been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries!” (Although there have been several high-profile killings of Christians in northern Nigeria in recent years, Muslims have been deeply affected too—and it’s not clear what evidence Trump is drawing on for his claim that the rate of Christian deaths is the highest that it has been in centuries.) Trump’s focus on the plight of Christians abroad is in line with his explicit defense of Christian heritage at home. But these actions don’t seem to contribute to immediate American security needs, nor will they bring stability to the broader region. Military insurgency in northern Nigeria has been going on for decades, and these latest strikes aren’t likely to end it.
The Nigeria attack came a day after the CIA conducted a drone strike on a Venezuelan port facility. The White House has threatened Venezuela with land strikes for months as part of what my colleague Jonathan Chait has called a “slow roll to war” with the country: ostensibly a military campaign against drug cartels in Latin America, but also a kind of imperialistic push. Although Venezuela is a transit country for illegal drugs on their way to the U.S., plenty of other countries share that distinction. It could be that the conflict is a pretext for deposing the country’s autocratic leader, Nicolás Maduro, as White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles recently suggested in an uncharacteristically candid interview, or for seizing Venezuela’s oil wealth (a theory that Maduro advanced in an interview this week). But so far, the president’s thinking remains largely unknowable.
Over the past two weeks, Trump has threatened foreign governments, unleashed military strikes in sovereign territories, and pledged his support for at least one American ally looking to conduct campaigns of its own: During a recent summit with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump said the U.S. would back potential Israeli strikes on Iran. Rather than explicitly acknowledging the apparent shift in policy, Trump has simply slowed down on the “America First” rhetoric.
At the same time, his approach to announcing new foreign interventions has become more brazen. As my colleague Tom Nichols pointed out, today’s ungrammatical threat to Iran arrived on Truth Social at 2:58 a.m. EST, as if it just couldn’t wait. A “locked and loaded” country isn’t what Trump promised, but it’s what Americans should start to expect.
Related:
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
- Trump almost has a point about the Federal Reserve.
- Iranians have had enough.
- Just break your New Year’s resolution now.
Today’s News
- Authorities said that sparklers attached to champagne bottles likely caused a fire in a Switzerland bar that killed at least 40 people and injured 119 people.
- Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as the mayor of New York City yesterday. He signed an executive order to rescind all orders that former Mayor Eric Adams issued after he was indicted on corruption charges in 2024.
- House Republicans released the testimony of former Special Counsel Jack Smith, who spoke before the House Judiciary Committee on December 17 about his work on two cases against President Donald Trump.
Dispatches
- The Books Briefing: Bump older, culturally important, or much-recommended works to the top of your to-be-read list, Emma Sarappo writes. It’s a reading resolution you can keep.
Explore all of our newsletters here.
Evening Read
The People Who Marry Chatbots
By Amogh Dimri
I met a 35-year-old woman with a human husband who told me about her love affair with a bespectacled history professor, who happens to be a chatbot. A divorced 30-something father told me that after his wife left him, he ended up falling for—and exchanging vows with—his AI personal assistant.
Most of the users I interviewed explained that they simply enjoyed the chance to interact with a partner who is constant, supportive, and reliably judgment-free. Dating a chatbot is fun, they said. Fun enough, in some cases, to consider a bond for life—or whatever “eternity” means in a world of prompts and algorithms.
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- The MetroCard never got its due.
Culture Break
Read. The true pleasure of literature can be found in demanding works such as Your Name Here, Robert Rubsam writes.
Watch (or skip). Stranger Things’ final season (streaming on Netflix) settles for “compulsively watchable.” Is that all we get?
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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