Since the start of 2026, President Donald Trump has taken the wheel of American military power and pressed hard on the accelerator – from a military operation targeting Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in January, to threatening NATO ally Denmark over Greenland, and now a war against Iran begun with Israel in late February. A week later, Trump told CNN that “Cuba is gonna fall pretty soon.”
The Iran war has already spread far beyond Iran’s borders. Iranian drones and missiles have struck Israel and countries throughout the Persian Gulf. Israel has expanded the war into Lebanon. The United Kingdom is scrambling to evacuate citizens and protect its base in Cyprus. The Strait of Hormuz – long a geopolitical concern because it is a chokepoint for global oil – is effectively closed.
The problem is that Trump and his advisers have declared war on a crucial tool of war-fighting: diplomacy. In the first year of his second term, Trump has seriously damaged U.S. diplomatic capacity and sidelined what diplomatic tools remain. That will make it harder for the United States to manage every conflict it now faces, including the Iran War. It will also make it immeasurably more difficult to pick up the pieces when the fighting stops.
Trump planned to gut U.S. diplomacy from the beginning
In his 2024 campaign, Trump made no secret of his intent to attack the federal bureaucracy (what he often calls the “deep state”). His targeting of U.S. diplomatic capacity began almost immediately after he returned to office in January 2025. Elon Musk’s DOGE, abetted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, abruptly ended the U.S. Agency for International Development. Mass layoffs followed across the foreign policy bureaucracy. The Trump administration laid off more than 1,300 people at the Department of State alone.
Things seem little better in U.S. embassies, including in countries central to the Iran War. As of October 2025, the U.S. had 85 vacant ambassadorial posts, including in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. In December 2025, Trump recalled more than 30 career ambassadors, including in Egypt, saying that he wanted diplomats who would promote the America First agenda. The recall added to the vacancies and further reduced the presence of experienced diplomats in top posts. Political scientists have amassed significant evidence that ambassadors are important for international cooperation and avoiding conflict, with debates over whether career foreign service officers, country experts, or political appointees are more effective. Vacancies at the ambassador level, however, are associated with more conflictual outcomes.
Trump has gone beyond vacancies or the longstanding issue of putting political appointees in ambassadorial posts, however. He has used loyalists operating outside the State Department for sensitive negotiations. When Rubio traveled to Riyadh to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in February 2025, Trump sent Special Envoy Steve Witkoff – a real estate developer whose initial portfolio was the Middle East and not Russia’s war in Ukraine – as a prominent team member rather than experienced Russia hands. The trip brought Russia in from the diplomatic deep freeze imposed after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, without any concession from Vladimir Putin.
Diplomatic bullying as foreign policy
Trump soon made bullying foreign leaders on live television a central tool of statecraft. He and Vice President JD Vance berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office while Rubio sat silently on the couch. He humiliated South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in what Ramaphosa called an “ambush.” Trump threatened to “take” Greenland and created a spectacle at Davos to “resolve” a crisis of his own making. The United States could have gotten almost any security concessions from Denmark through ordinary negotiations, at far lower cost.
For Putin, however, Trump rolled out the red carpet at a military base in Alaska last August.
Face-to-face meetings between foreign ministers, Oval Office visits, and leader summits are scarce and valuable resources that most leaders deploy carefully. Instead, Trump and Rubio have rapidly spent down their supply of this diplomatic currency. Trump’s diplomatic spectacles have yielded little in the way of concrete benefits – and many have come at the cost of fomenting anger and mistrust among allies.
Sidelining diplomacy makes everything harder
Why does all of this matter for the Iran War? It’s clear that Trump and Rubio did not take basic diplomatic steps before initiating the strikes against Iran.
Friends and allies are useful in wars. In the previous Gulf Wars, the United States gave considerable diplomatic attention to its partners and to coalition-building. Before the 1991 Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker assembled the broadest possible international coalition to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. The U.S. also made a concerted effort to pressure Israel not to join the fight, and provided Israel with Patriot missiles instead. Before the 2003 Iraq War, President George W. Bush – at Secretary of State Colin Powell’s urging – expended considerable effort to obtain congressional authorization and U.N. backing.
This time, the Trump administration apparently did not warn Persian Gulf countries – many of whom host U.S. military bases and had welcomed Trump warmly – that the U.S. and Israel were about to attack. The broad Iranian retaliation surprised many, including the United States, which was unprepared for the widespread use of Iranian drones. The shock across Gulf capitals at the U.S. inability to protect countries to which it had made security commitments will reverberate long after the war ends. Trump has even berated the United Kingdom – America’s closest ally – for initially denying U.S. access to British bases, even as the U.K. struggles to protect its Cyprus base and its citizens in the region.
Alliance tensions in wartime are normal. Starting conflicts without basic alliance management is not. When the fighting ends, these countries – which host U.S. forces on military bases and provide significant help to the U.S. in the region – may have lost confidence in the United States. And the U.S. now lacks the tools to rebuild these relationships.
Diplomacy is a tool of war
This is a problem, because diplomacy – especially among allies – can make war more likely to succeed. Political scientists recognize that the ability of democracies to attract allies is one reason they win most of the wars they fight. General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in World War II, knew this well and spent much of his time on wartime alliance management.
The Trump cabinet seems to believe this kind of traditional diplomacy is unnecessary, or perhaps a form of weakness. Trump prefers making direct deals with adversaries, which research shows can prolong war if one side is not serious about making peace and simply wants to buy time.
But diplomacy is not the opposite of war – it is part of international conflict. Diplomacy can impose real costs on adversaries. The U.S. and its allies reached a nuclear deal with Iran in 2015 only after imposing punishing multilateral sanctions that cut the country off from the global economy – a diplomatic achievement requiring sustained statecraft.
Diplomacy is also crucial to managing militarized conflict. Coercive diplomacy works only if the adversary believes you’ll follow through on threats – for which military buildups and alliance partners are useful – and can be reassured that you will not attack if they meet your terms. Once war starts, diplomacy can mitigate the fog of war (battlefield confusion, mistakes, refugee flows) and enable side deals like prisoner swaps and continued trade. Even Russia and Ukraine reached a deal to allow Ukraine to continue to export grain through the Black Sea after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Russia left the deal after one year, but Ukraine gained valuable time and has since found alternative routes to export grain.
Diplomacy is not just taking meetings
All of this requires actual experts in place who know the region and the issues – who understand what an adversary is and isn’t offering, who know which back-channel call to make when things go wrong, who can play hardball without blowing up the process, and who can provide credible reassurance to allies and adversaries when necessary. Instead, Trump relied on his son-in-law and a real estate developer, and the abrupt end to the U.S.-Iran negotiations in Geneva led to speculation that these talks were simply a veneer prior to unleashing military force. Now, at Rubio’s urging, the administration is apparently pivoting to Cuba with no visible diplomatic groundwork.
We know that diplomacy matters, so these waters are charted. And the United States has thrown an essential navigational tool overboard.
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