The U.S. Institute of Peace, a monumental white building across from the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, has an undulating glass roof in the shape of a dove, with wings that appear to be flying high above and beyond the exterior walls. The institute was founded by Congress during the Cold War to be an independent think tank dedicated to resolving international conflicts. Last spring, it was seized by the Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, with the help of the D.C. police, even though the building isn’t government-owned. The staff—including hundreds of leading specialists on global crises, who advised all branches of government—were fired. The takeover coincided with the startling decision to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and downsize the State Department. Just a few days before Christmas, about thirty ambassadors were recalled from their posts over vague accusations of insufficient loyalty to President Trump’s “America First” priorities. Keith Mines, a career diplomat and former vice-president for Latin America at U.S.I.P., told me that “pulling out our whole diplomatic architecture” was a “stunning” change and would severely limit American capabilities during instability abroad. (In full disclosure, I was a senior fellow at U.S.I.P. for fifteen years, but left to join another think tank months before it was taken over.)

Now, in just the first week of the New Year, both allies and adversaries have expressed increasing alarm over Trump’s bellicose bravado and mercurial threats after the shocking U.S. military operation to extract Nicolás Maduro, the former Venezuelan leader, and his wife from Caracas. The leaders of Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay, and Spain jointly denounced the U.S. intervention as a violation of international law. “Such actions set an extremely dangerous precedent for regional peace and security and for the rules-based international order,” they wrote in a statement, while Europeans publicly fretted about Trump going rogue and no longer being bound by convention.

Trump’s rhetoric in 2026 seems to hover between fuzzily belligerent and crudely provocative. The neocolonial “Donroe Doctrine,” a term used by Trump in the press conference after Maduro’s capture, is a clumsy reference to the Monroe Doctrine of the nineteenth century, which was originally intended to keep European nations from intervening in the Western Hemisphere. “It’s such a stupid phrase,” Mines said. Two centuries later, Trump’s updated version aims to flush out any foreign presence in the Americas, as outlined in the national-security strategy, a report on the White House’s foreign-policy and defense priorities, released in November. Mines explained that the policy “kind of gave us carte blanche, I guess in the Administration’s mind, to do whatever we felt like in Latin America.” He cautioned that “within Latin America, it’s going to be a really hard sell. I mean, we basically traded all the carrots for sticks, and that’s just not something that’s ever effective in Latin America.”

Trump has also invoked primitive vulgarities about his hemispheric campaign. Hours after the Maduro operation, the White House posted a black-and-white photo of the President, looking stern with his lips pursed; the backdrop included Air Force One and the Beast, his armored limousine. The caption read “No Games. FAFO,” the acronym for “Fuck around and find out.”

Suddenly, the President sounds like he’s launching a blitz to create a huge buffer zone stretching from the Arctic, down the northern Atlantic coast, south to the Caribbean, and across into the eastern Pacific. The day after Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela, Trump threatened the Colombian President, Gustavo Petro. The South American country is “run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One, en route to Washington from his long holiday at Mar-a-Lago. “He’s not going to be doing it very long, let me tell you.” Questioned in the same press conference on whether the U.S. might launch an operation within Colombia, Trump replied, “Sounds good to me.” He also predicted that Cuba “looks like it is ready to fall,” since it has long been heavily reliant on oil from Venezuela. He said that the U.S. would “have to do something” about Mexico, too, because the government has been unable to curtail the cartels or prevent drugs from pouring across the border. The U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, the largest warship in the world, carrying thousands of U.S. forces, will remain in the Caribbean Sea, just north of the South American coast, indefinitely, and, in an interview with the New York Times on Wednesday, Trump said that U.S. oversight of Venezuela could last for years.

“The risk of US policy overshoot is high—especially now that Trump has a successful raid under his belt,” Ian Bremmer, the founder and president of the Eurasia Group, wrote in his weekly newsletter. Trump “will be tempted to double down on what has worked so far and push further,” whether by sanctioning a foreign leader, meddling in an election, underestimating how much allies will compromise, or boosting his endorsed candidates in the impending elections in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Peru. In the process, Trump “risks planting seeds of anti-Americanism and pushing conflict, traffickers, and cartels into new places,” which has happened “on almost every continent where America has overextended itself,” Bremmer wrote.

Europe is equally uneasy. On its eastern front, the war in Ukraine is still raging nearly four years after Russia’s invasion. Trump has increasingly been handing off responsibility for supporting and arming Ukraine to Europe. Meanwhile, on Europe’s western flank, Trump this week renewed his quest for Greenland, the self-ruling and mineral-rich island that is part of Denmark. “It’s so strategic right now,” Trump told reporters. “Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place.” He added, “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.” The timeline may be short. “We’ll worry about Greenland in about two months—let’s talk about Greenland in twenty days,” Trump said. Hours after Maduro was captured, Katie Miller, the wife of deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, posted a map of Greenland covered by the American flag. “SOON,” the caption read. Her husband has been an architect of the Venezuela intervention and an outspoken advocate for annexing Greenland, by force if necessary, he said this week.

The fate of the largest island in the world could upend transatlantic ties, in turn undermining the most important political and military alliance in the world. Denmark is one of the original members of NATO. After Trump’s comments, Mette Frederiksen, the Danish Prime Minister, warned about the consequences: “If the U.S. chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops, including NATO and thus the security that has been established since the end of the Second World War.” On Tuesday, a joint statement by seven European countries asserted that Greenland’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, as part of Denmark, were protected by the U.N. Charter. Nicholas Burns, a former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, called picking a fight over Greenland “a colossal mistake.” Douglas Lute, a retired three-star general and another former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, predicted that European allies “will be increasingly reluctant to depend on the United States, as they have for nearly eighty years, and not only because Trump and his Administration are focussed on the Western Hemisphere but because what the President says cannot be trusted.”

And, in the Middle East, the President notified Iran—on his Truth Social account, the day before the operation in Venezuela—that U.S. forces were “locked and loaded” and ready to intervene if the theocracy used lethal force when responding to peaceful anti-government demonstrations that had erupted across the country. Over the weekend, the State Department’s Farsi account posted another warning superimposed over a black-and-white photo of Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the C.I.A. chief, John Ratcliffe, as they watched the raid on Venezuela. In huge red letters, in Farsi, the message read, “Don’t play games with President Trump.” It added, “President Trump is a man of action. If you didn’t know, now you know.” The U.S. threats followed Trump’s meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, last week at Mar-a-Lago, when the two leaders jointly vowed to again strike Iran if its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs are rebuilt.

In December, the State Department rebranded the U.S. Institute of Peace by tacking on “Donald J. Trump” in big silver letters above the entryway. A White House spokesperson said the peace institute’s rebranding “beautifully and aptly” honored a President “who ended eight wars in less than a year” and was a “powerful reminder of what strong leadership can accomplish for global stability.”

Except Trump has not really “ended” wars anywhere, he has only spun fragile ceasefires as examples of lasting peace. One of the wars the President claims to have ended was the long-standing conflict between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The President presided over the signing of a peace treaty between the two countries last month. But the reprieve lasted only a few days. And, in the past month, hundreds of people have reportedly died in new fighting along the Rwanda-Congo border.

Former senior American and European officials scoff at Trump’s claims of being the President of peace. Lute, who served as the deputy national-security adviser under the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations, chuckled when I asked him how many wars Trump has ended. “Zero,” he replied. “He may give himself credit to have paused eight conflicts, but I don’t count any of these as resolved.” Trump has even upped the numbers. “Now it’s eight and a quarter,” Lute noted. “He has this new math on Cambodia and Thailand, which he said he had to sort of solve again. So, he’s giving himself another point-two-five.”

Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza is far from fully resolved, despite a Trump-brokered agreement last fall. “It’s not very clear what happens first and what happens next,” the Norwegian Foreign Minister, Espen Barth Eide, said at the Doha Forum in December. Without imminent progress, all parties risked a return to war “or descent into total anarchy,” Eide said. In May, Trump notably claimed to have ended hostilities between India and Pakistan, a conflict that dates back to 1947 over control of predominantly Muslim Kashmir by predominantly Hindu India. The President said that he used trade concessions as incentives to get both countries to end a four-day skirmish in the Kashmir region, last spring. After a ceasefire was announced, the government of Pakistan, which had already nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize, thanked him, but India claimed to know nothing about any concessions. “They’re not shooting at one another,” Lute said. “But that doesn’t stop the underlined conflict between India and Pakistan.” The ceasefire did not address the long-standing issue of Kashmir, and troops of both countries remain deployed along the volatile border.

By attacking Venezuela, the President has established a precedent for other leaders—notably Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, and Xi Jinping of China—who want to take military action against countries in their respective regions. There is a growing debate among scholars about whether the world could be divided into three spheres, with the U.S., Russia, and China each creating their own “First” policies backed by the use of force. Lute warned, “We seem to be moving in that direction, but it certainly won’t be a smooth transition, and I think it portends a lot of instability and violence.”

Last month, the State Department justified changing the peace institute’s name to honor “the greatest dealmaker in our nation’s history.” Marco Rubio posted on X, “President Trump will be remembered by history as the President of Peace. It’s time our State Department display that.” Yet, over the past year, Trump has commissioned more than six hundred and twenty air strikes in seven countries across three continents, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project. Venezuela is only the latest target. Some military campaigns have lasted weeks; others, months. Between February and December, the U.S. struck targets in Somalia more than a hundred times. In Iraq, the U.S. and coalition forces hit ISIS fighters and sites in February and March. In Yemen, Operation Rough Rider hit Houthi rebels several times between March and May. In June, Operation Midnight Hammer unleashed bunker-busting bombs for the first time on three nuclear facilities scattered across Iran. Since September, Operation Southern Spear has struck some thirty-five boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth accused of transporting “narco-terrorists,” killing more than a hundred people. In Syria, Operation Hawkeye Strike carried out dozens of strikes over nine days in December. On Christmas Day, the U.S. hit alleged ISIS sites in Nigeria, killing multiple militants. By comparison, President Joe Biden ordered seventy-one fewer air strikes during his entire four-year term.

In his Inaugural Address a year ago, Trump pledged that his Administration would “measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end—and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” His proudest legacy, Trump said, would be “peacemaker and unifier.” He has already blown that goal. ♦