You Can Just Do Things

As ever, the horrors Trump embodies implicate more than just his singular odious person. His “habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world”—in David Frum’s formulation over the weekend—is hardly a tendency idiosyncratically restricted to our forty-sixth president. It’s a core feature of the office, especially after decades of bipartisan fealty to the all-rationalizing theory of the unitary executive. No matter how crude or clumsy Trump may be in forcing his will upon the world, his grandiose and murderous entitlement is directly continuous with his predecessors’.

You don’t have to learn any lessons you don’t want to

This is an entry in Patrick Blanchfield’s column about the second Trump term.

In the summer of 2002, the United States put together a military exercise with a name that broadcast the nation’s ambitions for projecting force not just into a New American Century, but beyond. Years in the planning, and costing around $250 million ($435 million today), the “Millennium Challenge” was the single most expensive simulation the military had ever mounted. Mustering some 13,500 American servicepersons across military branches and theaters for three weeks of intricate joint-service operations, the enterprise sought to put the latest in military doctrine, hardware, and communications infrastructure to the test. With the war in Afghanistan in full swing and the invasion of Iraq on the near horizon, the wargame also offered George W. Bush and his cabinet a nonpareil opportunity to rehearse their much-coveted fantasy of taking the global war on terror to the next target on the Axis of Evil: Iran. The primary antagonists were cast accordingly: Team Blue would be the US, and Team Red would be a Persian Gulf power whose resources and disposition of forces approximated an amalgam of Iran and Iraq. Blue and Red were set into conflict per an elaborate background scenario involving disputed island territories, threats to regional shipping, sectarian fundamentalists, naval showdowns, high-priority land-based targets, and the like. To head Red’s forces, the United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) tapped a retired Marine Corps Brigadier General with a bullet-headed central casting mien, a chest bedecked with decades of combat decorations, and the Pynchonesque name of Paul K. Van Riper.

Sailing into the theater, Blue demanded the immediate surrender of Red. Van Riper, however, declined to serve up his comparatively backward forces to his enemy’s cutting-edge reconnaissance and surveillance technology. Instead, the veteran counterinsurgency fighter went analog, running communications to units via motorcycles and dispatching his vintage Soviet and American-made planes on sorties using light and flag signals instead of radio. And then, using local fishing boats as cheap patrol craft, he launched a sneak attack on the US fleet, swarming them with inexpensive missiles and ramming them with suicide runs.

The effect was catastrophic. On the first day of the exercise, in just ten minutes, Riper’s Reds “sank” sixteen American warships, including an aircraft carrier, ten cruisers, and all but one of Blue’s amphibious landing vessels. Had the wargame been real, the cost in hardware would have been billions; by USJFCOM’s own reckoning, twenty thousand Americans would have come home in boxes, or, to put it more bluntly, been vaporized, drowned, or eaten by sharks. A subordinate broke the news to General William “Buck” Kernan, one of the Millennium Challenge’s designers: “Sir, Van Riper just slimed the ships.”

What to do? Having lost its game of Battleship against a developing world adversary that never had any battleships to begin with, US military brass immediately called foul and demanded a do-over. After all, there were thousands of assets already in the field, and still plenty of time to “learn.”

When the Millennium Challenge’s organizers rebooted the exercise, they placed a suite of new restrictions on Red. Troops had to use radios, even if doing so guaranteed their prompt annihilation. Van Riper was forbidden from using his abundant chemical weapon stockpiles. His forces were no longer allowed to open fire on American transport aircraft, meaning that Blue’s venerable C-130s, and its brand-new $84 million V-22 Ospreys, could fly in unthreatened by anything except mechanical malfunctions.⁽¹⁾ Most importantly, it was decreed from the outset that no matter what happened, Blue would win. Or, to put it in the terms of USJFCOM’s own report, after being

attrited to a combat ineffective state . . . Blue forces were regenerated to support experimental objectives. As the exercise progressed, the OPFOR [Red] free-play was eventually constrained to the point where the end state was scripted. This scripting ensured a Blue team operational victory and established conditions in the exercise for transition operations.

Facing a scripted loss from the outset, and increasingly disgusted as the exercise went on, Van Riper resigned six days later, damning the affair as “rigged,” “prostituted,” and “a sham intended to prove what [USJFCOM] wanted to prove.” It didn’t matter. The military got its exercise, the Red threat to American interests and regional security was neatly vanquished, and that was that.

The intervening quarter century has witnessed abundant new technological developments, from the profusion of cheap and effective drones like the Iranian Shaheds to a new generation of American Littoral Combat Ships. The former run between twenty thousand dollars and fifty thousand dollars per unit, while the latter cost taxpayers upwards of a billion dollars each and have already spent more time at dock being repaired than at sea. LCS safety and performance records have been so comically abysmal that their crews have been driven to seek mental health care.⁽²⁾

As Trump’s new war with Iran proceeds, battlefield events will reveal what may or may not be different this time around. But one thing is already the same, and indisputable: American officials and military chiefs seem confident they can script this outcome, too. The rules of the game are set, we are in charge of those rules, and it’s the job of the Iranians to fulfill our expectations. As Donald Trump told Axios on Saturday, “I can go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days and tell the Iranians: ‘See you again in a few years if you start rebuilding.’” Never mind that just last year, after a previous series of American and Israeli strikes on Iran, Trump breezily asserted that Iran’s alleged nuclear and missile construction program had been “obliterated” past any hopes of rebuilding. We’ve started a new gaming session, reset some parameters, and rebooted the scenario. Surely all that’s left now is for Iran to play Red and roll over.

Why did Trump strike Iran, for the second time in less than a year, during a second go-round in the White House, after having already carried out a targeted assassination of an Iranian general in his first? Why do so after undoing Obama’s nuclear deal, repeatedly blowing up negotiations (figuratively), and cheering as the Israelis did so literally? Why attack Iran without any explicit stated objective? You can take your pick of answers, all of them gratingly obvious, none of them mutually exclusive.

A year of deploying our military on missions of murder and piracy (forgive me: unilateral sanctions) in the Caribbean and Pacific has offered Trump plenty of opportunities to get comfortable with kinetic naval operations, and fed an appetite in the administration and beyond for virality-ready scenes of seaborne carnage. By the same token, America’s kidnapping operation against Nicolas Maduro clearly reinforced fantasies of easy decapitation strikes and cost-free “regime change” against longstanding high-profile enemies. Some foreign head of state giving you problems? Just remove them and see who takes their place; repeat the procedure until you get one you can work with. Extending this logic from our hemispheric manifest destiny project is straightforward enough, especially if you’re partnered with a Netanyahu administration that’s explicitly pursuing its own imperial ambitions from the Nile to the Euphrates, to quote Mike Huckabee.

If the game’s about relieving domestic pressures, meanwhile, Trump’s poll numbers speak for themselves. And that’s to say nothing of what’s been variously unsaid, implied, and screamed out loud in the ongoing Epstein saga. Whatever the White House has invoked as its rationales, the Trumpian drive to generate spectacle after spectacle has never slowed. Good press, bad press, whatever—if the clips and headlines keep coming and the antics keep pushing new boundaries, the churn apparently always works out to Trump’s benefit in the end. The goal is to always appear at the center of events, continually in motion, continually wrecking things, alternately throwing bones to his fans and eliciting howls from his opponents.

Is it really such a shock that a man who’s bragged about the joys of sexual assault doesn’t give a shit about ignoring the tedious rituals of manufacturing consent from a populace he despises before getting violent? If you’re President Trump, you can just do things. And as far Trump is concerned, other human beings, girls, women, and Muslims especially are really just things—props you can use, manipulate, dispose of, and otherwise leave buried beneath the rubble of consequences and layers of bullshit, a problem for somebody who isn’t you to bury, explain, or otherwise do the weak business of caring and grief. Let the losers bury the dead.

As ever, the horrors Trump embodies implicate more than just his singular odious person. His “habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world”—in David Frum’s formulation over the weekend—is hardly a tendency idiosyncratically restricted to our forty-sixth president. It’s a core feature of the office, especially after decades of bipartisan fealty to the all-rationalizing theory of the unitary executive. No matter how crude or clumsy Trump may be in forcing his will upon the world, his grandiose and murderous entitlement is directly continuous with his predecessors’. It seems unlikely that Frum in particular has forgotten the oft-circulated words of his own erstwhile colleague, Karl Rove, who boasted:

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

“The American bombardment of Iran,” Anne Applebaum wrote over the weekend, “has been launched without a coherent strategy for the Iranian people, and without a plan to let them decide how to build a legitimate Iranian state.” But when was the last time the US had a workable plan, rather than a series of whims and projections?

According to the principles of our Millennium Challenged foreign policy, Trump’s ostensible lack of a plan might as well be the plan. So what if the state currently known as Iran fails outright, igniting as-yet unimaginable misery and slaughter? That’ll be a problem for the MEK, the latest Pahlavi pretender, or whatever other wretched players want to compete for control and settle scores there. For the elites currently jockeying for position in our nascent multipolar global order, meanwhile, such places are perfect arenas for extracting wealth, fighting proxy wars, and testing new weapons. May a million Libyas, Syrias, and Ukraines blossom—and if those places were once your home, well, that’s unfortunate.

Our grim moment already teems with horrors aplenty. But the uncertainties and dangers of whatever comes next are underscored precisely by the fact that the administration’s current rhetoric feels so hollow and formulaic, its half-assed renewals of tired public rituals so exhausted and exhausting. Those who can remember the run-up to the second Bush’s war in Iraq should get this point intuitively. It took a lot of concerted effort, at all levels, to sell that enterprise, and an immense expenditure of will and treasure to pursue it even as literal millions turned out in the street to protest. And even then, that war still happened, kept happening, and only got worse after we declared Mission Accomplished.

This time around, nobody in charge has seemed to bother to care about going through the motions. It’s all felt inevitable, lazily telegraphed at every stage, from the steady buildup of American naval power in the Persian Gulf to Pentagon pizza deliveries tracked by cheeky OSINT types online right down to the Polymarket bets—half a billion dollars’ worth!—that the shooting would start on the last day of February exactly.

Trump is the perfect vehicle, spokesman, and avatar for our late-imperial heedlessness, and at the same time, he clearly represents a continuation and intensification of tendencies that have long been converging in American politics, pushing those tendencies to their logical extreme with all the ruthless dependability of the profit motive itself. What differentiates Trump from his predecessors is his refusal to do what Lacan would call feigning to feign, his total inability to conjure the pretense of at least pretending to publicly care about pretense. Especially in his second term Trump has pushed on without restraint, internal or otherwise, at once lazy and inexorable, leaving everybody else to bemoan norms that no longer apply. The machinery of war is in motion, because it’s been in motion for a long, long time. What else is that machinery supposed to do?

The real lesson of the Millennium Challenge is one that Trump understands reflexively: You don’t have to learn any lessons you don’t want to. In this aspect, Trump is exemplarily American. We have allocated to ourselves, for so long now, the sovereign prerogative to set and reset the timelines of what counts as meaningful history, to determine which lives and deaths matter and which constitute less than a rounding error. Projecting our power onto the world, we have grown so used to imposing our stories about cause and effect in ways that benefit and exculpate us that we don’t think twice. Whatever we may perceive as the consequences of our actions, to say nothing of our sense of our responsibilities, has already been pre-filtered, neatly packaged and shunted away into the most convenient and easiest elsewheres in space and across time.

Drunk on a hypertrophied sense of sovereignty, our leaders and their adjutants have lost the ability to distinguish the Millennium Challenge from real life, to make distinctions between the foreclosed nature of a game and the challenge of contingency. Some Americans may sincerely believe, and loudly insist, that what we’re doing right now in the Gulf is simply a response to the protests and brutal crackdowns that have convulsed Iran since last year. Or they’ll say that it’s payback for 1979—a matter of unfinished business that incidentally bodes ill for Cuba. Other Americans, in a different key, but no less blinkered, may perhaps insist that all this started in 2016, or perhaps in 2024. Still other Americans—prominent Democratic politicians in particular—have decided the best gameplan is to applaud certain effects and outcomes, like the targeted assassinations of foreign officials they don’t like, while also condemning the process that got us there. So we get thrust into useless considerations of hypothetical alternate timelines and differences of degrees. Anything to avoid facing up to life outside the game and negotiating with conditions and forces that resist our control.

We may still believe, or at least feign to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that airpower alone can produce regime change, that if we just bomb a population enough they’ll take to the streets and install democracy themselves (or else), that no “boots on the ground” will be necessary, that we can just get’er done via operators or advisors or contractors, that if we do invade in force we’ll be greeted as liberators and the boys will be home by Christmas. We may believe we can simply use missiles and SEAL Teams to cycle through foreign leaders. We may even believe that blowback has been discredited or that you can simply kill bad people, to the point that we have the hubris to proclaim as much in so many words aloud. We may feel we have a singular sovereign right to dictate what game everyone has to play, what the rules are, and when and how the game wraps up.

But events don’t end when we say they do. We do not enjoy a singular and uncontested prerogative to alter reality through magical thinking, force of arms, indignant entitlement, and sheer dippy fiat. We may think we’re playing a game that ends when we say it does, that the past only matters when we want it to, that the places we project our power will somehow always remain elsewhere, that the repressed will never return, and that repression takes no toll on all parties involved. At some point, and on some timeline you don’t get to choose, the world pushes back. You can just do things, sure, right until the game is up, and then you can’t.

1. These remain a recurrent and lethal problem for the latter. https://www.military.com/daily-news/2025/12/12/navy-investigation-finds-osprey-safety-issues-were-allowed-grow-years.html [find in text]
2. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-billions-littoral-combat-ship [find in text]

If you like this article, please subscribe or leave a tax-deductible tip below to support n+1.