President Donald Trump has been many things over years, but he has never been a hawk. Trump’s first term in the White House was a festival of coercive bluster, yet Trump was clearly uninterested in war. Like many officials from both parties, he supported counter-terrorism operations, but Trump never made good on his ominous military threats. The president issued dire warnings to North Korea and Iran, but he did not see them through. This surprised some critics, who feared that the volatile Trump was taking enormous gambles while in office. Trump’s peculiar brand of military restraint, however, was a political selling point, as was his habit of treating matters of war and peace as business negotiations that he can broker without involving US forces in the settlement. As his future vice president J.D. Vance wrote in 2023, ‘In Mr. Trump’s four years in office, he started no wars despite enormous pressure from his own party and even members of his own administration. Not starting wars is perhaps a low bar, but that’s a reflection of the hawkishness of Mr Trump’s predecessors and the foreign-policy establishment they slavishly followed.’

Trump’s instincts are already on display in his approach to ending the Ukraine war. Trump is attempting to negotiate an agreement in which Ukraine would agree to territorial concessions, forego membership in NATO, and provide $500 billion in rare earth minerals in return for continued US aid. Europe would meanwhile provide a non-NATO peacekeeping force. This last point is particularly important to Trump, because it means that the United States will not obligate itself to Ukraine’s defence, whether or not Russia upholds its end of the deal. The president envisions stopping the war on terms favourable to his view of US interests, not setting the stage for a future conflict requiring US intervention.

Not starting wars will be particularly important this time around. The reason is that Trump’s approach to grand strategy – and his attitude towards his own government – will make it more difficult to win them.

A grand strategy is a theory of security, a logical story about how the state will stay safe. All grand strategies start with a set of beliefs about world politics and the sources of stability. Perhaps the world is more peaceful when there is a dominant military hegemon to maintain order and deter violent challengers. Perhaps the pathway to peace and prosperity is through the expansion of trade, institutions, and democracy. Or, more pessimistically, they might believe that world politics are inherently unsafe, given that under conditions of anarchy all states must look at each other warily. Grand strategies change because individuals come into power with different theoretical priors.

Having settled upon certain core beliefs, leaders set out to answer practical questions about diplomacy, trade, institutions, and the use of force. Those who believe in hegemony will invest heavily in conventional power projection. Not only will they increase the size and capabilities of the armed forces, but they will flaunt them conspicuously. They will also downplay arguments about ideology and institutions, given their conviction that the only language that foreign actors understand is the language of power. On the opposite end of the spectrum are leaders who believe that military deployments are provocative and dangerous. Instead of bolstering global stability, they will trigger arms races and encourage counter-balancing alliances. The world will become less stable, the nation less secure. To avoid this fate, they recommend a different set of policies: reducing the size of the military and the scope of its operations, resisting the impulse to use force for anything other than defence against direct threats to the state, and reframing diplomatic engagement to avoid inadvertently provoking crises.

States do not always have a clear grand strategy, however. Sometimes leaders struggle to articulate their basic beliefs about the sources of global stability. Sometimes they cannot choose among viable alternatives. And sometimes, as with Trump, they see value in avoiding grand strategy altogether.

Indeed, President Trump prefers a transactional approach to international politics, one which provides maximum freedom of action. Trump views principled commitments as pointless constraints. As a result, he treats alliances and institutions with scepticism – witness his apparent desire to go around NATO in Ukraine – and he abhors the kind of ideological dogma that would get in his way. For Trump, politics is no different from business, a never-ending saga of deal-making and deal-breaking. He revels in keeping his counterparts off-balance, whether they are allies or adversaries. Here again, his approach to international diplomacy reflects his attitude towards business. Trump believes that uncertainty is a source of leverage, and he encourages the idea that he is fundamentally unpredictable.

One problem with rejecting a clear and coherent grand strategy, however, is that it makes wartime strategy much more difficult. If grand strategy is a theory of security, strategy is a theory of victory. It asks more pointed questions about the use of violence for political ends. What kinds of military forces are best suited to any given conflict? How should they fight? How much decision-making autonomy should political leaders hand over to the generals? Does it make sense to escalate the war or to open new theatres of combat? And how should military forces choreograph the endgame?

Such questions have bedeviled strategists since antiquity. That said, strategic problems are much easier to solve when war serves a clearly articulated grand strategy. When there is no clear theory of security, however, it is extremely difficult to design a coherent theory of victory. Strategy in the absence of grand strategy is an exercise in frustration.

Trump’s ongoing assault on federal agencies – including national security organisations – may compound this problem. Since taking office, Trump has made good on his longstanding promise to gut the civil service. While campaigning for the presidency in 2016 he made ‘drain the swamp’ one of his early slogans, seeking to exploit the decades-long decline in public trust in government institutions. He later accused the so-called ‘deep state,’ a shadowy network of national security officials, for supposedly conspiring against him. These attacks dovetailed with a broader antipathy for big government, fuelled by industry demands for lower taxes and looser regulations.

Trump has attempted to eviscerate agencies through executive orders and Elon Musk. Executive orders are a favoured tool for presidents as they do not require Congressional consent. The downside is that future presidents can overturn them with the stroke of a pen. The courts may also intervene against executive orders, as has already been the case with Trump, if they are unlawful or if they violate the president’s constitutional responsibility to execute moneys appropriated by Congress. How the legal battles will play out is a mystery.

Meanwhile, Trump has unleashed Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on executive agencies. The name of Musk’s outfit is misleading as it is not a government department. Instead, it appears to be a small number of individuals who are carrying out directives from Trump and Musk. More an ad-hoc task force than a formal body, the DOGE representatives have encouraged employees to resign en masse in blunt and condescending emails. Again, it is not clear that any of this is legal, and courts are currently adjudicating lawsuits filed by labour unions.

Legal roadblocks may inhibit Trump’s plan to gut the federal workforce. But even if they do, the DOGE campaign has led to extraordinary churn within government, along with plummeting morale. Organisations under this kind of stress will struggle to achieve their missions under these conditions, especially if their best and brightest decide to leave public service. These effects may linger for a very long time.

National security agencies have not been spared. Employees at the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have reportedly received similar versions of the ‘deferred resignation‘ emails. According to the Washington Post, candidates for senior intelligence positions have faced a loyalty test by being asked whether they agreed that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Tulsi Gabbard, confirmed by the Senate yesterday as the nation’s top intelligence official, has pledged to ‘streamline’ the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. And Trump has publicly authorised Musk to perform some sort of audit of the Department of Defense, an ominous threat given his gleeful work in dismantling USAID and the Department of Education.

We do not know what the future national workforce will look like at the end of this process. Much depends on the cumulative effect of many individual decisions about whether to stay or whether to leave. Legal challenges may inhibit the effort to shrink the size of national security organisations, and other contingencies may also get in the way, including a falling out between Trump and Musk. We are in early days.

One thing is certain, however: Trump is taking a gamble. To his supporters, radically downsizing federal agencies is necessary to make them work efficiently while reducing waste, fraud, and abuse. Doing the same to national security organisations will help them to return to what Trump sees as their traditional missions. The intelligence community will focus on espionage and operations. The military will focus on lethality in combat. Collectively, the United States will become much more adept at spying and warfighting, which ought to make it more effective in war and safer in peacetime.

The risks are enormous. Even if Trump’s instincts about bureaucratic efficiency are correct, it will take time to recover from what amounts to a massive self-inflicted trauma. This means that, should a conflict arise, the responsible organisations will be doing so while simultaneously redefining their organisational best practices. The situation will be especially problematic if the most talented civilian defence officials exit government service, only to be replaced by political loyalists.

Similarly, a soft purge in the intelligence community may have disastrous consequences in wartime. Prewar estimates tailored to suit policymaker preferences may lead to misguided military decisions at the outset of a conflict. And an intelligence community that values fealty above all, and that rejects dissenters as political enemies, will find it difficult to reassess its earlier conclusions. War is a dynamic affair, and adapting to changing circumstances requires an analytical environment that enables constructive criticism and honest self-reflection. Trump’s policies are not conducive to such an environment.

Strategy is always hard. It is especially difficult in the absence of a clear grand strategy, and when military and intelligence agencies are unwilling to reassess the facts on the ground. Trump administration officials might consider the effects of their current actions on the conduct of a future war.

They might also usefully consult recent US history, starting with the Vietnam War. President Lyndon Johnson escalated in Vietnam in the period between the Cuban Missile Crisis and détente with the Soviet Union. Johnson administration officials were unsure about their grand strategy during this interregnum. While they were still committed to the idea of containing communism, they were desperate to avoid another existential crisis. As a result, they were never able to answer basic questions about the value of the war itself, nor were they able to offer clear guidance to US military commanders. The result was a hodge-podge of half-hearted strategies, satisfying no one.

Decades later, President George W. Bush decided to launch a war of regime change in Iraq, based on the fear that Saddam Hussein’s regime was hiding weapons of mass destruction. Intelligence on Iraq was thin and circumstantial, and it was not unreasonable to speculate that Iraq may have some quantity of leftover chemical and biological agents from the 1980s that had not been found by international inspectors in the 1990s. But speculation based on partial information was not a particularly convincing argument of going to war, and members of the administration leaned on intelligence officials to bring their estimates in line with the administration’s public statements. The result was a shift in the tone and substance of intelligence in the fateful summer and fall of 2002, as the White House made the case for war. Moreover, the community was unwilling to reassess its views in the months before the invasion, even though new information suggested that the threat was overblown.

President Trump has long criticised America’s habit of getting stuck in long wars. From Trump’s perspective, these painful experiences are a damning indictment of the Washington establishment, and his approach to Ukraine is a rebuke of those who would continue to pump resources into a war with no clear idea about how to end it. Ironically, however, Trump’s preference for transnationalism and uncertainty, along with his ongoing effort to eviscerate the national security bureaucracy, will make it more difficult to implement strategies with a better chance of success. Because Trump’s approach to grand strategy increases the odds of another strategic quagmire, history may remember his second term as a grim irony.