America's military assertiveness and its four structural limits

 Under President Donald Trump, the US is determined to reverse the growing global opinion about its decline.

In the span of nine weeks between January and February 2026, the United States seized a foreign head of state from his own capital, escalated a bombing campaign against one of the world's most militarized states, and watched its president declare America was "reasserting power." The word choice was telling. You do not reassert what you securely possess. The flurry of military action, in Venezuela, in Iran, across the Caribbean, is best understood not as the expression of uncontested hegemony but as an elaborate performance of it, driven by the anxiety that the audience may no longer be convinced.

The Theatre of Force

On January 3, 2026, the United States launched a military strike in Venezuela and captured incumbent President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in an operation codenamed Operation Absolute Resolve. The optics were carefully managed. Trump declared that the US was "reasserting American power," and hours later said the country would "run Venezuela" until a proper transition could take place. The theatrical dimension was unmistakable: the White House rapid response account posted a video of Maduro being walked down a DEA hallway captioned simply "Perp walked."

This was only the opening act. On February 28, 2026, the US and Israel launched a series of coordinated strikes on Iran, targeting key officials, military commanders, and facilities, in operations codenamed Operation Roaring Lion and Operation Epic Fury. The strikes included the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, whose compound was destroyed, along with several other Iranian military commanders. The accompanying rhetoric from Trump described the campaign in terms of "annihilation" and "elimination." This, too, was the language of spectacle — designed to communicate strength to allies, rivals, and a domestic audience simultaneously.

These actions fit a larger pattern: between December 2025 and February 2026, the US bombed Nigeria, struck alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean and the Pacific, attacked Venezuela, and then attacked Iran. Beyond military action, threats over Greenland, tariffs wielded as weapons, and a blockade of Cuba reinforced the message that Washington intended to operate through coercion, not consensus.

The Signal Being Sent

The audience for this performance is multiple. There is China, which has watched the US retreat from multilateral institutions and wondered whether the resulting vacuum was an invitation or a trap. Russia, bound to Iran by a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership that entered into force in October 2025, stood meekly by as the strikes proceeded — calling them "an unprovoked act of aggression" but taking no action, just as it had done when Assad fell in Syria and when Maduro was seized. Every instance of Russian impotence is a data point the US is anxious to circulate.

There is also the hemisphere. Venezuela's capture deliberately echoed the 1989 seizure of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega. Historians note that the US has "never directly intervened in South America to effect regime change," making the operation unprecedented in geographic scope. The message to every government in the Americas — and particularly to Chinese-aligned ones — was that the Monroe Doctrine had been reloaded.

And there is Iran's proxy network. For years, America's adversaries operated with confidence that Iran's "axis of resistance" — Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas — provided deniable leverage. The military capacity and strategic initiative of two allied groups, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, has been significantly degraded over the 2023 to 2025 conflicts, while Iran's counter-strikes on Arab Gulf states may leave it further isolated. The assassination of Khamenei himself, unprecedented in modern history, sent the starkest possible signal: no one is untouchable.

The Structural Ceiling

Yet beneath the spectacle lie structural limits that no amount of precision bombing can dissolve. The first is fiscal. In 2024 alone, the United States spent $881 billion on debt interest payments — an amount that surpassed domestic military spending by $31 billion. The country is now, in effect, spending more to service the cost of past power projection than it spends on current power projection itself. Net interest payments are projected to rise from 3.2 percent of GDP in 2025 to 6.3 percent by 2054, far exceeding the previous historical peak of 3.2 percent in 1991. The share of the federal budget allocated to defence has fallen from nearly 30 percent at the end of the Cold War to just 10 percent today, squeezed by the growing costs of Social Security, Medicare, and debt servicing.

The second limit is industrial. Existing backlogs and labour supply shortages are likely to remain a headwind to defence spending for the foreseeable future. The US defence industrial base has contracted since the Cold War and cannot rapidly replenish precision munitions, ship hulls, or submarine construction at the pace geopolitical ambition demands. Wars consume inventory faster than factories can restock it — a lesson the Ukraine conflict taught, and which simultaneous operations in Iran and Venezuela are now stress-testing in real time.

The third limit is legal and political legitimacy, both domestic and international. Trump's decision to go to war in Iran without a vote or even debate in Congress creates both constitutional problems and political challenges, departing from the precedents set before the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq. A majority of Americans, around 77 percent, say the US should focus its time and money on priorities at home rather than using military force abroad, according to recent polling. Internationally, the European Council on Foreign Relations described the Iran strikes as "an illegal war of choice," while legal scholars cited Article 3 of the UN General Assembly's definition of the crime of aggression.

The fourth limit is strategic coherence. Some analysts note that Trump faces "virtually no check on his foreign policy, no experienced advisers to pivot to a plan B, and, by his own design, no allies to help." The Venezuela operation illustrates this vividly: different advisers supported it for different reasons — Rubio sought to cut ties between Venezuela and Cuba, while Miller appeared to see a wartime footing as a mechanism for expanding presidential power domestically — meaning nobody agreed on a post-Maduro plan. Winning the battle and losing the peace, as in Iraq, is a structural failure that military superiority cannot prevent.

Finally, there is the adversary problem. Even if the United States and Israel continue mowing down newly replaced Iranian leaders for weeks, the IRGC and various armed forces and their economic assets will not simply melt away, and even a future electoral process may not lead to a sustained democratic system. Iran's nuclear material, according to Iranian officials, had been evacuated before the strikes began. By March 2026, the IAEA stated it had no indication that any nuclear installations had been hit or damaged. The surgical strike met the messy reality that states, unlike their leaders, are not so easily decapitated.

Decline and Rise?

The United States in early 2026 is behaving like a power that feels its predominance is being questioned — and is answering that question with force. The Iran war and the Venezuela operation are simultaneously real military campaigns and symbolic performances, designed to demonstrate to China, Russia, and a domestic audience that American primacy remains non-negotiable. But deficits are expected to average more than 6 percent of GDP over the next decade, the industrial base strains under demand, allies are alienated, and the legal architecture of post-war international order is being dismantled not just by adversaries but by Washington itself. A nation that must perform dominance is not the same as a nation that possesses it. The performance may be convincing in the short term. The structural math is not.