When America Steps in without Strategy, the World Burns

By Trygve Olson

The United States bombed Iran Saturday.

This didn’t come out of nowhere — but that doesn’t make it any less dangerous.

Missile exchanges between Israel and Iran. The collapse of nuclear talks in Geneva. Iran threatening weapons-grade enrichment. American allies caught between silence and smoke. And now: a U.S. military strike.

We’re not watching a crisis unfold. We’re watching a vacuum explode.

And we didn’t get here by accident. We got here by design — through years of undermining diplomacy, undercutting alliances, and mocking the very institutions that made American leadership possible.

Now, in the middle of a spiraling global conflict, those same voices are telling us they’ll fix it. That they’ll bring peace. That they’ll end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. That they alone can stop World War III.

Meanwhile, the world burns hotter.

This is the authoritarian whiplash — and it’s not strength. It’s instability.

One day it’s “peace through strength.” The next, it’s bombing through chaos.

One moment it’s “I’ll end the forever wars.” The next, it’s drone strikes with no clear strategy.

One week it’s “NATO is obsolete.” The next, it’s “Why didn’t anyone stop the war?”

What we’re seeing isn’t leadership. It’s reaction without direction — a performance of toughness that leaves everyone less safe.

I’ve worked in regions where U.S. leadership mattered. Where American presence — even just as a convening power — kept authoritarian regimes in check. Where alliances we built after World War II gave democracies room to grow and citizens the chance to breathe.

But leadership like that doesn’t survive showmanship. It requires consistency. It requires clarity. It requires the very things we’ve been told to throw away as “globalist,” “weak,” or “woke.”

Let’s be clear: Iran’s regime is brutal. Israel’s security is real. This isn’t about moral equivalence.

It’s about strategic collapse.

You don’t bomb your way back into credibility after you’ve walked out of the room.

You don’t rebuild trust by attacking the very institutions that sustained peace for generations.

And you don’t become the world’s stabilizing force by saying one thing at a rally or on social media and doing another from a war room.

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We are witnessing a world where what has made truly made America Great — the institutions we built, the alliances we developed, the soft power we held — is being dismantled in real time.

And what we’re getting in return is a more chaotic, more dangerous, more unstable world.

Three Things You Can Do Today to Push Back on Reckless Power:

1. Demand a strategy — not just a strike.
   Military action without a political endgame isn’t strength. It’s theater. Ask your representatives: What is the U.S. trying to achieve? Who are we working with? What does peace actually look like?

2. Don’t let the chaos con you.
   When leaders claim they’ll end wars “in 24 hours” while lighting new ones — call it what it is. Empty rhetoric wrapped in authoritarian swagger. Real peace takes partners. It takes patience. It takes principle.

3. Defend what built stability — even when it’s under attack.
   NATO. Multilateral diplomacy. Nonproliferation frameworks. These aren’t buzzwords. They’re the guardrails that have prevented a Third World War for 80 years. We tear them down at our peril.

The truth is, firepower without purpose isn’t leadership — it’s liability.

And if we don’t start acting like a nation that understands the difference, we’re going to lose more than global influence.

We’re going to lose the world we helped build of historical peace and prosperity.

Trygve Olson is a strategist, pro-democracy fighter and a founding Lincoln Project advisor. He writes the Searching for Hope Substack. Read the original column here.