Despite pledging not to engage in conflict overseas, the US president has sharply escalated attacks
Donald Trump has overseen nearly as many air strikes in the first five months of his second term as Joe Biden launched in his entire presidency.
The US president’s onslaughts on Houthi militants in Yemen and jihadists in Somalia have been more ferocious than Mr Biden’s, and he has ordered strikes on Iraq, Syria and most recently, Iran.
After campaigning on a pledge to end American involvement in military conflicts, he has sharply escalated the country’s air campaigns, according to the data from Acled (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data), which maps conflicts.
Mr Trump has overseen 529 air strikes since his inauguration, compared with 555 over the entire four years of the previous administration.
Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia were already being targeted by the previous administration, but Mr Trump opened up a new front with strikes on Iran’s nuclear programme.
“The US military is moving faster, hitting harder, and doing so with fewer constraints,” said Prof Clionadh Raleigh, chief executive of Acled, highlighting the intensity of the bombing campaigns.
Mr Trump insists that his intense approach ensures “peace through strength”, an expression often attributed to Ronald Reagan.
“We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars we end and, perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into. It’s called peace through strength,” Mr Trump said in a speech during his inaugural ball.
He has not struck Libya or Afghanistan, and air strikes are often seen as a more clinical alternative to putting US boots on the ground as Barack Obama did.
But the new data have been published amid tensions within Mr Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) base over whether he should be pursuing foreign military interventions at all.
Prominent Maga figures, including Tucker Carlson, last month complained that striking Iran ran against Mr Trump’s “America First” isolationist promises.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, a high-profile Maga loyalist and critic of intervention, said there was a “very big divide” in Mr Trump’s base over the issue and that she was “sick of” foreign entanglements.
She said last month: “I got elected on the exact same campaign promises that President Trump got elected on. We promised no more foreign wars, no more regime change.”
Yet polling at the time of the strikes showed Mr Trump’s base in fact strongly backed him, with 84 per cent of Maga supporters agreeing with the strikes, including 70 per cent who strongly supported them.
That compared with 72 per cent of traditional Republicans supporting the strikes, with 49 per cent strongly supporting them.
Prof Raleigh said the new data showed that America was not “stepping back” under Mr Trump.
She said: “Trump’s preference for engagement begs the question: does this contradict his promise to end America’s wars – or are the foreign strikes how he wishes to keep that promise?
“The recent air strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites have been framed as a major turning point in US foreign policy. But if you take a step back, they don’t stand out – they fit.
“In just five months, Trump has overseen nearly as many US air strikes as were recorded across the entire four years of the previous administration.
“The US military is moving faster, hitting harder, and doing so with fewer constraints. Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and now Iran are all familiar terrain, but this isn’t about geography – it’s about frequency.”
The great majority of Mr Trump’s strikes have been in Yemen, where in March he dramatically escalated the US air campaign against Iran-backed Houthi militants menacing Red Sea shipping.
The militants have proven stubbornly resilient to US firepower and last week sank two ships, despite having been hit by 470 strikes since January, according to the Acled data. This came at a cost of more than $1 billion to the US military.
Mr Trump has also ramped up strikes in Somalia, where US forces have been hitting the local Islamic State group and also al-Shabaab.
In March, the White House announced that it had killed an Isis attack planner in Somalia.
Mr Trump said jubilantly: “Our Military has targeted this Isis attack planner for years, but Biden and his cronies wouldn’t act quickly enough to get the job done.