On 23 January 2026 the United States published a National Defense Strategy promising an end to interventionism, endless wars, regime change and nation building. American force had removed Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela only weeks earlier, and five weeks after the strategy appeared the United States and Israel struck Iran, killing Ali Khamenei and several senior military and security leaders in the opening attacks.

Hypocrisy is an easy charge to make, although it does not explain very much. The more useful observation is that the strategy bundled together four commitments that sit on different axes. Regime change concerns what intervention is trying to achieve, nation building what follows it, and endless war how long the commitment lasts. Interventionism sits more broadly over all three, describing the willingness to use power abroad in the first place.

A government can abandon some of these and intensify others at the same time, which is roughly what happened. Treating restraint as a single quantity makes the record look contradictory. Separating its dimensions makes it legible and exposes the real difficulty, which is practising restraint while preserving hegemony in a system where self-help is becoming more demanding.

The administration wanted to leave behind the forms of military involvement associated with Iraq and Afghanistan while preserving American influence across an international system in which strategic demands were becoming more dispersed. Those aims could sit together politically for a time, particularly if restraint was understood mainly as the rejection of occupation and nation building, but they were always going to pull against each other once preserving influence required recurrent military action across several theatres.

Power is becoming more dispersed across the international system. China now shapes outcomes well beyond East Asia, while Russia retains the ability to impose substantial costs in Europe and regional powers have more room to manoeuvre under a looser hierarchy. States that once operated inside a relatively predictable order now have more alternatives, and Washington has fewer reasons to assume that developments elsewhere will wait for American attention. None of this obliges the United States to intervene. It does mean that places Washington leaves alone continue to evolve in ways that may later constrain its choices.

If Washington still wants a substantial say in how those changes unfold, restraint quickly becomes a question of which changes it is prepared to allow without resistance. A theatre left alone may look stable for a time and then become harder to re-enter once access has shifted, allies have adjusted to stronger neighbours or a new local balance has taken hold. Withdrawal is therefore not a neutral baseline. Absence gives other actors more room to shape the outcome, and Washington may later face what it chose not to address earlier, only from a worse position and at a higher price.

American force planning has been wrestling with some version of that dilemma for decades. The 1993 Bottom-Up Review assumed that the United States should retain the capacity to fight and win two nearly simultaneous major regional conflicts, and although the formula was revised repeatedly over the following decades, the underlying problem never disappeared. Competition with China does not suspend events in Europe or the Middle East, and a weakened commitment in one region can alter expectations in another because allies and adversaries alike read American behaviour comparatively.

The 2026 strategy itself comes close to acknowledging this difficulty, describing what it calls a “simultaneity problem” in which several adversaries may act together or exploit the fact that American attention and resources are already being consumed elsewhere. The answer it sketches is already visible in American posture.

Across Europe, the Middle East and the Korean Peninsula, allies are expected to carry more of the standing burden while the United States retains the high-end capabilities and long-range reach needed to move military weight between theatres. Washington wants less of its capacity permanently fixed in place while preserving enough reach to return when a regional balance moves too far in an unfavourable direction.

Self-Help and the Price of Restraint

A more dispersed distribution of power makes the behaviour of other states harder to discount when several of them possess enough power to alter regional balances on their own initiative. The effect becomes stronger when some of the institutions and arrangements that once moderated competition are under greater strain, because governments then have fewer reasons to assume that disputes will remain contained or that an unfavourable shift will eventually be corrected through rules and institutions rather than through power.

There is nothing new about anarchy in that basic sense. States have long operated without an authority above them. What varies is how much of their security they feel able to leave to the rules, institutions and relationships around them. When those arrangements are dependable, states can rely more heavily on expectation and habit. When they become less reliable in particular relationships, more of the burden returns to the state itself and self-help begins to organise behaviour more directly.

This is perhaps where it becomes interesting to bring Hobbes into the frame, because his account offers a useful way of thinking about the condition without requiring us to describe the international system as a whole as Hobbesian. His state of war did not require continuous fighting. What mattered was the absence of reliable assurance that others would refrain from violence, which meant that actors organised themselves around the possibility that force might again become necessary.

A period without fighting can therefore still be organised by the expectation of fighting. The interval may be peaceful in one sense while governments are already preparing for what might come next. After one confrontation, they watch whether damaged capabilities are being rebuilt and whether the local balance is beginning to move again. An ally may become more exposed, or access gained by one state may narrow another’s room for manoeuvre. None of these changes has to be dramatic on its own for the sequence to recreate the fear that waiting will leave a government in a worse position later.

Seen in those terms, endless war does not have to appear endless from inside any individual campaign. One intervention may last weeks and another months, troops may return home, occupation may be avoided and no attempt may be made to rebuild the state that was attacked, while the wider competition continues to generate further reasons for coercive action. The continuity can sit in the recurrence of the demand for force rather than in the uninterrupted duration of a single war.

For the United States, deeper restraint under those conditions would involve more than smaller deployments or fewer occupations. Washington might have to watch a rival secure a stronger regional position or an ally adapt to a less favourable balance without trying to reverse either outcome. The more such developments an administration defines as unacceptable, the narrower the practical space for restraint becomes.

There is something important in that objection. Barry Posen and Stephen Walt argue that local states have strong incentives to balance regional threats themselves, while extensive American guarantees can suppress that effort and encourage allies to shift more of the cost onto Washington. Local balancing does happen. The harder question is whether balancing alone produces an order Washington is willing to live with.

It may prevent a rival from dominating a region while still leaving the shape of that order to other states. Restraint is easier for a United States willing to accept that outcome; it becomes more costly for one that still wants a decisive say in how regional balances are struck, and the 2026 strategy, for all its language of withdrawal, never gives up that ambition.

The opposite pressure is equally obvious. Military power cannot be moved endlessly between theatres without wearing down the force that carries it. Sustained operations consume stocks, tie up equipment and support, and leave less margin for the next contingency. Industrial capacity cannot always replenish munitions at the pace they are used. A strategy that treats too many adverse shifts as requiring an American response eventually encounters material limits that declaratory doctrine cannot remove.

Once both propositions are kept in view, the usual opposition between engagement and restraint becomes less useful. Abstention can weaken a strategic position while intervention consumes resources needed elsewhere. Washington is left deciding where scarcity will be carried, which risks can be deferred and which unfavourable outcomes it is prepared to tolerate.

From Presence to Reach

Part of Washington’s answer has been to keep less capacity permanently fixed to particular places and preserve more of it in forms that can be moved when the pressure shifts. A base tells you where capacity is. Reach tells you where it might go. For planners dealing with several theatres at once, that difference is valuable because it postpones the moment at which capacity has to be committed and leaves Washington less tied to any one theatre.

There is also a larger strategic logic behind that choice. Under an offensive-realist reading, a regional hegemon has an interest in preventing another great power from becoming hegemonic in a different region, because a peer competitor would eventually have greater freedom to challenge its position. Mearsheimer and Walt, in their case for offshore balancing, draw a much more restrained conclusion from this. Washington should rely on local powers to contain an aspiring hegemon and intervene directly when they cannot.

Venezuela and Iran both fall well below the classic offshore-balancing threshold, which assumes an aspiring hegemon that local powers can no longer contain. Venezuela was no contender for regional hegemony, and Iran, whatever its ambitions, faced powerful regional competitors already balancing against it. The pattern looks closer to primacy than to classical offshore balancing, with adverse shifts well short of rival hegemony still treated as threats to a dominant position.

Such shifts keep generating reasons to become involved even after a previous campaign has ended. Long-range strike and mobile naval and air forces give that logic a more flexible operational form, while surveillance and other supporting capabilities make it possible to intervene without first rebuilding a large permanent ground presence. The strategic commitment to defend primacy can remain continuous even when the military presence does not.

That flexibility only goes so far because every mobile capability depends on enablers and weapons stocks that are themselves finite. Reach remains flexible only for as long as the industrial base can replace what each episode consumes.

In practice, reach lets Washington pursue much of the same strategic purpose with a different rhythm. American power can recede between crises and return when Washington judges that a balance has moved too far. This reduces the need to keep large forces continuously committed everywhere, although each return draws again on the same mobile capacity.

A Middle Eastern crisis can become partly a decision about what can safely be drawn away from Europe or Asia, while a new requirement in Europe changes the margin available elsewhere. Several individually reasonable allocations can gradually thin the system without any single decision looking excessive on its own.

The pressure becomes harder to manage when governments believe that waiting will leave them in a worse position later. They do not have to see an attack as imminent. It can be enough to conclude that a missile programme will become more difficult to destroy, that a rival will become harder to dislodge, or that a regional balance will move in a direction that will be more expensive to reverse later. Once this preventive reasoning enters strategy, it can continually regenerate because resolving one problem does little to prevent another adverse shift from appearing somewhere else.

Reach fits that kind of reasoning particularly well because it allows Washington to intervene, leave, and retain the option of returning later. Each episode can remain relatively discrete. A strike may end quickly, a naval deployment can be temporary and a campaign can retain a narrow declared purpose.

The strategic function nevertheless continues across the intervals, because the same capacity is kept available for the next adverse shift. Over time, a posture that looks politically limited in each instance can become materially demanding as the force has to regenerate what the previous intervention consumed before another crisis arrives.

There is a limit to how far this can take the argument. Governments tolerate many unfavourable developments without using force, and possible futures are too uncertain for every strike to be treated as structurally necessary. Changes in delegated command authority and in how strikes are conducted can also lower some of the operational barriers to action.

Remote strikes expose fewer American personnel directly, while CENTCOM has operated with wider authority to approve attacks than under the preceding administration. The strategic environment may generate recurring demands for security and influence, while the available military tools shape how quickly and at what political cost those demands can be answered.

The operational record shows the change more clearly than doctrine does. During the first year of the second Trump administration, unilateral American air and drone strikes abroad accelerated sharply even as some permanent deployments were being reduced. The precise comparison changes once coalition operations are included, which is why the unilateral character of the count matters, but the broader pattern remains one of sustained operational activity alongside a lighter footprint in some theatres.

Syria shows the two movements happening at the same time. Washington consolidated its deployment during 2025 and left al-Tanf in February 2026, while CENTCOM continued to emphasise that American forces remained able to strike emerging threats from elsewhere and reported attacks on more than a hundred targets using hundreds of precision munitions around the same period. Large occupation forces and prolonged programmes of political reconstruction have clearly lost their former place in American strategy, while military coercion has continued through forms that create fewer standing obligations.

On the administration’s own terms, there is therefore something real to point to. Fewer troops are permanently deployed in some places, occupation has receded and nation building has almost disappeared from the strategic vocabulary. Those changes describe the form through which American power is being used more clearly than they describe how often Washington may still decide to use it.

A government can shrink its ground footprint and still strike more often across a wider geography, just as it can reject occupation and reconstruction while returning repeatedly to force when a regional balance moves against it. Supporters and critics of the administration are therefore both describing real parts of the same posture, because reach allows a lighter presence to coexist with recurrent intervention.

Finite Wars, Indefinite Competition

This is where the question of endless war returns in a different form. A hegemon committed to preserving its position may end particular wars, but it cannot end the competitive condition that keeps generating reasons to prepare for, threaten and occasionally use force. If reach lets Washington leave and come back, the continuity of American involvement is easier to see across campaigns than inside any single one, and the sequence of interventions can remain open even when every operation inside it has a recognisable beginning and end.

The statements made during the Iran war show how difficult that distinction is to describe politically. Officials were talking about finite operations inside a posture designed for recurring involvement, and the vocabulary of endless war kept sliding between the duration of the current campaign and the much longer competition surrounding it.

On 26 February, two days before the Iran war began, Vice President JD Vance said there was “no chance” that military action would draw the United States into a years-long Middle Eastern war. The statement was still intelligible if his comparison point was Iraq, since the administration had clearly ruled out that model of large occupation and political reconstruction. The trouble began once officials had to explain how long the alternative might last and what would count as its endpoint.

On 2 March, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told the Pentagon press corps, “This is not Iraq. This is not endless.” Asked about duration, he declined to give a timeframe and warned that more American casualties were likely. The administration had drawn a clear boundary around the kind of war it said it would not fight while leaving considerably more room over the frequency and duration of coercive action conducted at distance.

Late that night, the President described the material side of the same posture in unusually expansive terms when he wrote that parts of the American munitions stockpile amounted to a “virtually unlimited supply” and that wars could be fought “forever” using them. The exaggeration matters less than the assumption underneath it, because a strategy built around reach only preserves flexibility while the inventories supporting it remain available.

His language offered a blunt version of what the posture required, enough depth in munitions and industrial replenishment to make repeated intervention sustainable without the visible infrastructure of another Iraq.

By late summer, those inventories looked considerably less abundant. Months of fighting had placed serious pressure on Patriot interceptors and ATACMS, raising questions about the resources available for European contingencies and for a possible confrontation involving China, and some of the relevant inventories could take years to restore. The distance between the March boast and the August constraint captures the wider problem. Optionality can look plentiful before several demands begin drawing on the same stock of resources.

Duration became similarly elastic as the war continued. Asked on Meet the Press in June whether the conflict contradicted his earlier promises, Trump denied having promised an absence of war, repeated his dislike of endless wars and added that the United States had been fighting for three months. Three months was offered as evidence that the war remained finite, although no threshold was identified beyond which duration would turn it into something else.

The shifting language is not only political evasion. A ceasefire may end one round of fighting without resolving the regional balance, destroyed capabilities can be rebuilt and political settlements can erode as the parties reassess the distribution of power around them. The end of one episode therefore says relatively little about how quickly another may become necessary, which helps explain why officials could continue to describe each operation as limited while remaining unable to describe the broader competition in finite terms.

The same difficulty appears when we move from duration to objectives. At the 2 March briefing, Hegseth said, “This is not a so-called regime change war, but the regime sure did change, and the world is better off for it.” A conjunction joins the denial to the boast because the sentence is trying to preserve the political category while taking ownership of an outcome that sits uneasily inside it. The awkwardness shows how difficult it had become to describe episodic coercion through a vocabulary designed to distinguish clearly between restrained and interventionist policy.

By May, similar ambiguity had moved into the legal vocabulary surrounding the conflict. The sixty-day War Powers deadline arrived on 1 May, and the administration told Congress that hostilities had “terminated” because a ceasefire was in effect even as American forces remained in the region and the wider coercive relationship with Iran continued. Congressional critics challenged that interpretation, but the constitutional dispute is less interesting here than the underlying need for a categorical answer to a condition that remained much less definite in practice.

Schmitt is useful here, though only in a narrow sense. In Inter pacem et bellum nihil medium, written in 1939 while he was serving as a Nazi jurist, he described situations in which war and peace no longer mapped cleanly onto actual coercion. His political argument and his role in the regime make the historical setting essential.

Even so, one narrower observation remains useful. Military acts can take place without being given the legal name of war, while measures officially treated as peaceful can still carry substantial hostility. Once that gap opens, the authority to name the situation begins to matter alongside the conduct itself.

The May declaration can be read in that narrower sense because the administration needed a definite legal category for a relationship that had not acquired an equally clear ending. The fighting through the summer then showed how provisional such an ending could be.

At the beginning of September the United States and Iran exchanged their heaviest attacks since July, with American aircraft striking Iranian air defence, radar and missile infrastructure while Iran responded against American installations across the region. On 2 September the President again said the renewed campaign would not last long, and the following day Vance resisted describing the continuing confrontation as a war while declining to offer a timeline for when it would end. By then the conflict was entering its seventh month.

Over the following months, the category kept moving. In February officials were confident that a prolonged war would not happen. By March the campaign had been separated from endless war even though its duration was still open. The May ceasefire allowed hostilities to be declared terminated, but by June three months of fighting were still being cited as evidence that the war was finite. September brought another promise of brevity and renewed uncertainty over whether the continuing confrontation should even be called a war.

There is no need to assume that every statement was consciously deceptive for the pattern to matter. Each becomes more understandable when attached to the particular episode being discussed, because fighting can stop and resume, forces can leave and return, and temporary settlements can interrupt the sequence while every intervention still retains its own beginning and end. Reach is what makes that rhythm strategically useful because Washington can disengage from one episode without surrendering the ability to intervene again when the balance shifts. What remains open is the competition that keeps supplying reasons to do so.

That gives “endless war” a different meaning from the one usually implied by the phrase. The campaigns can remain finite, and their footprint much smaller than Iraq or Afghanistan, while the practice of recurrent intervention continues for as long as Washington chooses to defend a hegemonic position across several regions.

That is where the promise of restraint finally meets the logic of primacy. Washington can reduce its footprint, reject occupation and close individual campaigns while keeping open the capacity to return when the balance shifts again. Reach changes the rhythm and visible burden of intervention. The strategic requirement to defend primacy remains.

Restraint, taken seriously, asks for something harder than ending wars one by one. It asks Washington to accept some shifts in power that it has the capacity to contest. As long as preserving primacy remains the objective, particular wars can end while the reasons to prepare for, threaten and occasionally use force continue to regenerate. The United States can end its wars. What it cannot end, while defending a hegemonic position, is the competitive condition that keeps producing reasons for another one.