Andreas Kluth, Columnist

Will the Iran War Make Trump Gun-Shy or Trigger-Happy?

May 1, 2026 at 9:30 AM UTC

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

Master and commander.
Photographer: Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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The Iran war, which Donald Trump started in February for no good reason and which could flare up again at any moment, broke a streak of easy American military wins. This raises a question for other countries that the US president might coerce or attack, from Cuba to Nigeria, and from Danish Greenland to North Korea: Will the strategic fiasco in the Middle East make Trump more gun-shy, or even more trigger-happy?

A consensus among national-security insiders in Washington is that Trump launched the war at least in part out of hubris, after scoring what he perceived as several easy military triumphs elsewhere.