If America First Means Anything, It Means This Isn’t Our Job

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Every government we’ve removed in an oil-producing country was replaced by something just as bad or by chaos that was worse. We don’t have the ability to fix what we break, and it’s not our place to try. If we actually wanted to help these people, we’d find ways that work, and don’t involve destroying their country.

We are good at destroying governments. We have never successfully replaced one in the Middle East.

Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan.

Iraq: 2003: Saddam Hussein was a genuine monster. The case for removing him had real moral force. Removing him created a vacuum, filled by sectarian violence, corruption, and persecution of Sunnis. Out of that instability came ISIS — a self-proclaimed caliphate that seized territory the size of the United Kingdom, ruled through public beheadings and mass enslavement, and didn’t collapse until we spent another decade fighting it.

  • We removed the bad government. What we got was something worse.

Libya: 2011.  Our reasons were cleaner. There was a UN mandate, genuine international support, and real evidence that Gaddafi was preparing to massacre civilians. NATO intervened, Gaddafi fell, and the international community congratulated itself and went home.

Nobody stayed to help build what came next. The country fractured into competing militias and civil wars almost immediately. Fourteen years later, Libya still has no unified government. Warlords control territory and oil revenue. Open slave markets operate on Libyan soil. The people who protested for freedom in 2011 watched their country consumed by the chaos that followed.

  • We removed the bad government. What we got was no government, and then several bad ones fighting each other.

Afghanistan: 2001. We spent twenty years and over two trillion dollars. We built schools and roads and power plants, trained an army, held elections, put women in government. It looked to us like it was working.

When we withdrew in 2021, the Taliban waltzed back in and took the country in eleven days. Everything we had built was theirs now — the dams, the irrigation systems, the trained army with modern weapons.

Twenty years. Two trillion dollars. Eleven days.

  • We removed the bad government. It came back.

At Least They Had a Plan

Every one of those wars came with a reason and a theory of what happened next. In Iraq, it was weapons of mass destruction, then democracy promotion. In Afghanistan, remove the Taliban and build a stable country. In Libya, stop a massacre and let the people take it from there. Wrong theories, bad plans — but plans.

The Iran war has been justified as stopping a nuclear program, stopping missiles, protecting Israel, freeing the Iranian people, and regime change — sometimes all in the same week. The reason keeps changing because nobody has settled on one.

And there was no plan for what comes after. The Strait of Hormuz closed. Every military analyst in the country predicted that would happen the moment we struck Iran. Americans were still in the country when the bombs dropped. Some of them are still there. Other countries stepped in to help get them out. That is not a plan. That is improvising after the fact and hoping someone else cleans it up.

  • Previous administrations failed with a plan. This one didn’t bother.

It Never Works, Because We’re Not Them

Every society has its own history, its own culture, its own beliefs, its own religion, its own relationships from the family unit to the top levels of government. Their government is the sum total of thousands of years built from their culture. We don’t know how they see the world, or why. We are strangers barging into a family situation that’s been going on for a thousand years.

Afghanistan proved this as definitively as anything can be proved. The society snapped back to its own center of gravity because what we built had no roots there. It was ours, not theirs. A saltwater fish dropped in a lake doesn’t adapt. It dies.

We Were Doing The Slow Work

Societal change doesn’t happen overnight, and can’t be forced. It can be supported.

For decades, USAID was funding the unglamorous work of actually helping people in the Middle East. Supporting journalists who risked their lives to report the truth. Funding human rights organizations documenting abuses. Providing food and medicine to the people. These were not dramatic interventions. They were slow and incremental, with mixed results. The Trump administration shut it down in 2025.

The administration that shut down that work is now spending roughly a billion dollars a day on the war that replaced it. The Pentagon told Congress the first six days of the Iran war cost $11.3 billion. That is more than the United States spent on foreign assistance to the entire Middle East in a year.

If America First Means Anything

To me, “America First” means prioritizing domestic strength, avoiding trillion-dollar sinkholes, and not sticking our noses into other people’s business.

Regime change is not America First. It is the opposite. Your neighbor’s household is not your business. You might disagree with how they run things. You might be right. It still doesn’t give you the right to walk through their front door and start rearranging their life by force.

The Iranian people have a government they didn’t choose and don’t want. That is a genuine injustice. It is also not ours to fix by destroying everything they do have: hospitals, roads, power grids, safety.

There are ways to help people living under governments they don’t like that don’t involve killing them and leveling their country. We were doing some of that work. Now we’re bombing instead.

The Landing

The Iranian people did not ask us to destroy their country in order to change their government. Nobody knows who will take over when it falls. The record says it won’t be better. It never has been.

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