Here Are 5 Wars Trump Started or Expanded in 2025
The U.S. military is fighting or preparing to fight in more countries than it was when the self-proclaimed "peace president" took office.
President Donald Trump came into office presenting himself as a peace president. "We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into," he said in his inaugural address.
By those standards, his presidency has been a failure. Trump launched nearly as many airstrikes in five months as former President Joe Biden did in his entire term, according to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a nonprofit that monitors wars around the world. And those airstrikes have hit places where the U.S. military was not fighting during Biden's term, from the Caribbean to Iran.
Of course, Biden himself was guilty of the same sort of double-talk. He bragged that "the United States is not at war anywhere in the world" less than an hour after U.S. Central Command announced a new air raid on Yemen. Like death and taxes, it seems a certainty of life that American presidents will talk peace while continuing—and expanding—war.
Here are four countries where Trump has done that:
Venezuela
On the campaign trail, Trump signalled that he wanted a full-on war against drug cartels in Latin America. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Steven Miller originally wanted to target Mexican cartels, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio steered Trump toward a regime change campaign in Venezuela, arguing that the Venezuelan government was itself a drug smuggling gang.
The campaign began by bombing alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean. At least 104 people have been killed in these attacks so far. In one instance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the military to bomb survivors clinging to a shipwrecked boat. The White House reportedly hoped that the military buildup and show of force would convince Venezuelan ruler Nicolas Maduro to "cry uncle," in the words of White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles.
Meanwhile, Trump and Miller's stated goals have shifted from a war on drugs to a naked resource grab. They both demanded that Venezuela compensate the U.S. for nationalizing oil businesses several decades ago as Trump declared a "TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE" of oil tankers from the country. The U.S. military has seized at least two oil tankers leaving Venezuela, and Maduro has ordered his navy to escort oil shipments.
The American people are not enthusiastic about this military campaign. Recent polling shows that 53 percent of Americans oppose the boat attacks and 63 percent oppose attacking Venezuelan soil. But the Trump administration is eager to show that it can do things without permission from Congress or the public, and the Caribbean is apparently full of easy targets.
Yemen
In Yemen, Trump turned a frozen conflict back into a hot war. The Houthi movement in Sanaa, one of the two rival Yemeni governments, had been harassing international shipping in the Red Sea as a tactic to pressure Israel to pull out of Gaza. After Trump secured a ceasefire in Gaza in January 2025, the Houthis stopped their attacks.
Without warning, Trump attacked Yemen in March 2025. He presented this as a prelude to attacking Iran, declaring that any "shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon, from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of IRAN." Then, after two months of inconclusive bombing and the loss of two American fighter jets, Trump ended the campaign.
It was in the Yemen war that former National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally added a journalist to a group chat for planning air raids. (In the process, Hegseth revealed that the military deliberately killed one or more civilian bystanders.)
Only a few months before relaunching this war, Trump had criticized the logic behind it. "It's crazy. You can solve problems over the telephone. Instead, they start dropping bombs. I see, recently, they're dropping bombs all over Yemen," then-candidate Trump said in May 2024. "You don't have to do that. You can talk in such a way where they respect you and they listen to you."
Iran
The Islamic Republic is the Middle Eastern grand prize for neoconservatives, who have been pushing for a regime change war there since the early 2000s. Trump edged toward that outcome in his first term, with military buildups, an economic embargo, and the assassination of an Iranian general. Every time, he stopped just short of an attack on Iranian soil.
That changed in his second term. Publicly, Trump was negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program. Those talks were actually a U.S.-Israeli ruse to prepare for war, PBS and The Washington Post reported last week. Israel attacked without warning on June 13, 2025, killing Iranian commanders and disabling Iranian air defenses.
After 12 days of back-and-forth air raids between Iran and Israel, the U.S. launched a stealth bomber raid on Iranian nuclear enrichment sites, then declared victory. Although Trump didn't go as far as some neoconservatives wanted, experience suggests that if you give war hawks an inch, they'll take a mile. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is headed to the White House on December 29 to make the case for another attack on Iran.
Somalia
The U.S. military has been fighting in Somalia for decades, a lesser-known front to the war on terror. American troops first landed in the country in the 1990s as part of a United Nations operation to disarm Somali warlords. They left after a bloody failure, immortalized in the movie Black Hawk Down, but returned in 2007 to back an Ethiopian invasion aimed at stopping Somali Islamist rebels. That invasion ended up unleashing Al-Shabab, a far more radical rebel group affiliated with Al Qaeda.
Both times he took office, Trump dramatically escalated the U.S. involvement in Somalia. The first Trump administration bombed Somalia 219 times in four years, and the second one bombed Somalia 118 times in only its first year, putting Trump on track to bomb Somalia more than Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush combined. An admiral bragged that the U.S. Navy had carried out the "largest air strike in the history of the world" on Somali soil in February 2025.
Even as he escalated the war, Trump railed against it. "Only in recent decades did politicians somehow come to believe that our job is to police the far reaches of Kenya and Somalia while America is under invasion from within," he told a meeting of generals in September 2025. A week later, the U.S. military bombed Somalia again.
Nigeria
Trump's holiday present to the public was rounding out 2025 with one more undeclared war. On Christmas Day, the American and Nigerian governments announced a joint attack against the Islamic State group in northwestern Nigeria. The U.S. Navy launched over a dozen Tomahawk missiles at two camps in Sokoto State, which has been dealing with Islamist rebellions and general banditry for over a decade.
A month before, Trump had threatened "to go into that now disgraced country, 'guns-a-blazing,' to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities" in response to a Fox News report about violence against Nigerian Christians. Although the Nigerian government publicly balked at the threat of intervention, it began secret negotiations to allow the U.S. military to help fight their common enemy.
The one group Trump didn't consult was, again, the American public. "Offensive military actions need congressional approval. The Framers of the Constitution divided war powers to protect the American people from war-eager executives," former Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.) wrote on social media in response to the strikes. "Whether the United States should engage in conflicts across the globe is a decision for the people's representatives in Congress, not the president."
What Will 2026 Bring?
Although Trump can rightfully brag about securing peace agreements abroad, all of those truces involved conflicts that America wasn't fighting in. When it comes to the U.S. military itself, Trump has only expanded its use. And next year may involve even more war. In the last two months of 2025, Trump threatened Colombia and any other country where drugs are made.
"Not only are we rebuilding our great strength, but for the first time in years, my administration is actually using that strength," the president said in a September 2025 speech, bragging about the attack on Iran. "America is respected again as a country."
