How Trump Finally Buried the Iraq Syndrome

Ben Shapiro
Wed, 07 Jan 2026 14:26:26 -0800
Opinion

Something crucial happened with President Donald Trump's recent actions in Venezuela. In fact, taken together with his earlier moves abroad, they mark the substantive death of what might be called the "Iraq syndrome" — a paralyzing mindset that has distorted American foreign policy for more than two decades.

The Iraq syndrome emerged after the failure of the Iraq War and the long, costly occupation that followed. In the American mind, it became shorthand for a broader fear: that any U.S. use of force overseas would inevitably spiral into a quagmire. But this was not the first time such a syndrome had taken hold.

To understand Iraq syndrome, one has to go back to Vietnam.
Updated: Wed Jan 07, 2026

Something crucial happened with President Donald Trump's recent actions in Venezuela. In fact, taken together with his earlier moves abroad, they mark the substantive death of what might be called the "Iraq syndrome" — a paralyzing mindset that has distorted American foreign policy for more than two decades.

The Iraq syndrome emerged after the failure of the Iraq War and the long, costly occupation that followed. In the American mind, it became shorthand for a broader fear: that any U.S. use of force overseas would inevitably spiral into a quagmire. But this was not the first time such a syndrome had taken hold.

To understand Iraq syndrome, one has to go back to Vietnam.

In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, America's foreign-policy establishment fell into disarray. A new conventional wisdom took hold among elites: The war had not been lost because of bad strategy or domestic unrest but because it never should have been fought at all. From this conclusion flowed a much larger claim — that the United States needed to fundamentally rethink its role in the world.

This worldview, later known as the "Vietnam syndrome," argued that America should abandon assertive foreign policy in favor of restraint or outright withdrawal, lest it stumble into further disasters. Underlying this posture was a thinly veiled anti-Americanism: the belief that the United States was not a force for good but a malign presence on the world stage. As former Princeton professor Richard Falk put it at the time, "I love the Vietnam syndrome because it was the proper redemptive path for American foreign policy to take after the Vietnam defeat."

In other words, America was guilty — and the appropriate response was retreat.

That retreat carried real costs. A world without strong American leadership proved far worse than its critics anticipated. America's self-imposed paralysis helped usher in the Cambodian genocide, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

By the mid-1980s, Ronald Reagan decided it was time to move past Vietnam syndrome. In 1983, the United States intervened in Grenada, deposing a Marxist government in a swift operation that cost few American lives and restored democracy to the island. Shortly thereafter, then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger articulated six criteria for military intervention: a vital interest at stake, a commitment to victory, clear political and military goals, continuous strategic reassessment, sustained public support, and the exhaustion of nonmilitary options.

Together, the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations applied these principles in Panama and during Operation Desert Storm. By 1989, Vietnam syndrome was effectively dead.

Then came Afghanistan and Iraq.

Both wars began with clear, limited objectives. The war in Afghanistan aimed to depose the Taliban and prevent al-Qaeda from regaining sanctuary. The war in Iraq sought to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Those goals were quickly achieved. What followed, however, was years of large-scale nation-building — at enormous cost in blood and treasure. The result was a revival of the old paralysis, now rebranded as the "Iraq syndrome."

This was not a reasonable skepticism about intelligence failures or a caution against nation-building. It was a full restoration of Vietnam-syndrome thinking: the assumption that every U.S. intervention would inevitably become another Iraq or Afghanistan. That belief took hold across the political spectrum, echoed endlessly by both the horseshoe Left and the horseshoe Right.

Predictably, the Iraq syndrome produced the same results as its predecessor. Under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, American retreat became policy. The withdrawal from Iraq enabled the rise of ISIS. Iranian proxies expanded across the Middle East, culminating in the catastrophe of Oct. 7, 2023. Biden's disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan left 13 U.S. servicemembers dead and signaled American weakness — encouraging Russia's invasion of Ukraine and emboldening China's global ambitions.

But now, at the end of an Iraq-syndrome presidency, something has changed.

Just as Reagan once did, Trump has put the prevailing paralysis to bed.

Trump has done so through what can fairly be called the "Trump Doctrine," a framework I outlined in November 2024. Its principles are straightforward: America's interests come first; those interests must be matched to proportional investment; all tools — from diplomacy to military force — remain on the table; and threats should be explicit, not implied. Deterrence works best when it is public and unmistakable.

Over the past year, Trump has applied this doctrine twice. First, with the June 22, 2025, B-2 strikes on Iran's Fordow nuclear facility, reestablishing American deterrence in the Middle East and reshaping regional geopolitics. Then, with the ouster of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.

In both cases, critics warned — yet again — of World War III. Once more, Iraq syndrome spoke. And once more, it was wrong.

These actions have restored American deterrence without dragging the country into quagmires or endless nation-building. America's enemies are now on notice. The message is simple: Actions have consequences.

The Iraq syndrome should be dead. If it truly is, it died at the hands of Trump.

America is once again feared on the global stage — an extraordinary turnaround given where the country stood just a year ago.

This is what many of us voted for.

At least those of us who actually want to make America great again in the world.