Operation Epic Fury – launched on February 28, 2026, in coordination between the United States and Israel – does not represent an impromptu or impulsive action by the Trump Administration. On the contrary, it is the outcome — not inevitable, but logical and mature — of a strategic trajectory that has been unfolding for over thirty-five years, since the end of the Cold War. It reflects the American attempt to adapt its global role to an international context marked by increasingly intense great-power competition, tightening domestic constraints, and the objective limits of unipolar hegemony.
Analyzing this evolution through a realist lens clearly reveals two main phases in U.S. foreign policy post-1991: the interventionist-hegemonic phase, aimed at building and maintaining a global order shaped by American interests and values, and the phase of national realism, focused on containing costs and prioritizing the defense of national interests. Epic Fury clearly belongs to the second phase, yet it brings to fruition its most assertive and operationally mature elements. This article reconstructs its historical and conceptual origins, comparing approaches, partial successes, and failures — without moral judgments, but with exclusive attention to the mechanisms of power, cost-benefit calculations, and concrete national interests that have guided every decision.
The interventionist-hegemonic phase (1991–2008)
In the decade following the Soviet Union’s dissolution, the United States found itself in the unique position of being a hegemon without peer competitors capable of balancing its influence. The strategic objective became twofold: stabilizing crisis areas and progressively aligning the international system with its own priority values and interests — liberal democracy, open market economies, and the security of energy and commercial routes.
Within this phase, two distinct sub-approaches can be identified, both aimed at the same hegemonic goal but employing different tools and rhetoric.
The first approach, dominant in the 1990s under the administrations of Bush Sr. and Clinton, has often been described in apologetic terms as the role of “global policeman.” In reality, Washington acted simultaneously as ruler, judge, and final enforcer, selectively using international law and multilateral institutions (UN, NATO, ad hoc coalitions) to confer formal legitimacy on its actions and distribute part of the operational costs onto allies.
A prime example is the First Gulf War (1991): a coalition of 35 countries under UN mandate made it possible to expel Iraq from Kuwait, preserving the energy and strategic order in the Gulf. Similarly, interventions in the former Yugoslavia — Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999 — were presented as defenses of multilateralism and the protection of human rights. Yet the criterion applied was strictly selective: the self-determination of Bosniaks and Kosovo Albanians was forcefully supported with NATO airpower and UN resolutions, while that of Bosnian Serbs or Kosovo Serbs was ignored or actively suppressed. International law did not function as a universally binding norm, but as a flexible, instrumental tool in the service of America’s interest in maintaining stability in Europe, preventing power vacuums, and strengthening NATO’s role as the operational arm of the West.
This approach combined a certain dose of rhetorical hypocrisy with practical realism: it reduced domestic political costs through burden-sharing with allies and multilateral cover, allowing the United States to intervene with a relatively low profile. However, it did not resolve the underlying problem of long-term sustainability: every intervention, though militarily victorious, left open questions about maintaining the order it created and the commitment required to consolidate it.
The neoconservative approach of George W. Bush
The second sub-approach, which emerged dramatically after September 11, 2001, was embodied by the George W. Bush Administration and its neoconservative strategists. Here, multilateralism was explicitly sidelined in favor of a more cynical, direct, and ideologically assertive unilateralism. The concept of the “New American Century,” already developed in the 1990s, became the explicit operational framework: the United States had to actively shape the Middle East through regime change, “exporting” democracy by military force. The search for a casus belli became merely incidental, as demonstrated by the case of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
This approach was nonetheless less hypocritical than the previous one — it did not hide behind the UN after the failure of the second resolution — but it brutally exposed the structural limits of hegemony. The Afghan and Iraqi “quagmires” demonstrated that American technological and conventional superiority did not automatically translate into lasting political control over tribal and fragmented societies. At the same time, the indiscriminate opening of trade to China, accelerated precisely in those years, produced devastating side effects: deindustrialization of entire American regions, deep social crises, and growing strategic dependence on a revisionist rival destined to become the main challenger of the 21st century.
The mechanism ultimately jammed because the American public was unwilling to sustain the prolonged costs that a true “colonial” occupation would have required (tens of thousands of troops, hundreds of billions of dollars, thousands of lives). Bush Sr. had already paid politically for the lightning victory in the Gulf with his 1992 electoral defeat; Bush Jr. saw his party lose Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008.
The resurgence of isolationist sentiment
American history is marked by a deep constitutive ambivalence: on one hand, the founding desire to separate from the Old Continent and create a “city upon a hill” (John Winthrop’s 17th-century phrase), codified in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 as the exclusion of Europe from the Western Hemisphere; on the other, the geopolitical inevitability of a global role to protect the security of maritime lines of communication, access to resources, and domestic prosperity.
Both world wars were undertaken by reelected presidents (Wilson in 1916, Roosevelt in 1940) precisely because they had promised to keep the United States out of the conflict. During the Cold War, imperialism was always “reluctant”: defeat in Vietnam did not stem from military insufficiency but from the collapse of the home front between 1968 and 1973. The same pattern repeated with surgical precision in Afghanistan and Iraq: decisive was the lack of political will to adopt a fully “colonialist” approach — prolonged occupation, radical social engineering, costs accepted for decades.
After 2008, American voters consistently rewarded candidates who promised fewer wars and less foreign engagement: Obama in 2008 with the message of withdrawal from Iraq, Trump in 2016 with the slogan “America First,” and then Biden and Trump again, united by the promise to end the “endless wars.”
Yet a structural gap remains difficult to bridge: completely abandoning global primacy would risk eroding precisely those systemic benefits (security of trade routes, extended nuclear deterrence, privileged access to markets and technologies) that have guaranteed American prosperity and security for seventy years. Realism therefore demands a middle path: maintaining supremacy without bearing all the burdens.
The new phase: national realism
A distinct phase thus emerged — not isolationist, but centered on national interest and internal sustainability. Here too, two complementary approaches can be distinguished, both aimed at reducing American exposure without relinquishing the ability to shape strategic outcomes.
The Obama administration (2009–2017) embodied a “light” and indirect multilateralism. The implicit doctrine — summed up in the phrase “leading from behind,” which emerged publicly during the Libya intervention (2011) — consisted of leading without appearing in the front line: systematic burden-sharing with European and regional allies, selective and surgical use of airpower and drones, and categorical refusal of new large-scale territorial occupations.
Operationally, Obama increased targeted strikes tenfold compared to the Bush era: from about 57 under Bush to over 540 documented in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia between 2009 and 2016. The creation of the so-called kill list and the weekly “Terror Tuesday” meetings at the White House institutionalized a system of selective decapitation of jihadist leadership, drastically reducing human and financial costs for the United States.
It was an intelligent, technologically sophisticated response to the post-Iraq domestic constraints, yet it still maintained the ambition of managing the global system through flexible coalitions and discreet leadership. The limits of this approach, however, became apparent when the “red line” on Syria (2013) was not enforced and when post-Gaddafi chaos in Libya demonstrated the risks of low-commitment, prolonged interventions.
“Peace through strength”: Trump’s assertive unilateralism
The Trump approach — in his first term (2017–2021) and especially in the second term beginning in 2025 — represents the unilateral, more brutal and direct variant of the same cost-containment logic. The motto “peace through strength” translates into credible deterrence, speed of action, and asymmetric negotiation. All pretense of nation-building or social transformation is abandoned; priority is given to direct, rapid, high-impact actions against high-value strategic targets.
Tactically, targeted strikes are expanded both quantitatively and qualitatively: moving from mid-level figures to striking top leadership of the adversary state. The killing of Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad (January 2020) was the first glaring example; the capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela (January 2026) and the very recent killing of Ali Khamenei in Iran (February 28, 2026) represent its culmination. The logic is that of the brutal negotiator: holding a gun to the interlocutor’s temple to maximize leverage. The implicit message to adversaries is crystal clear: comply with American demands (in Iran’s case: verifiable denuclearization and reduction of regional projection through proxies) or risk personal elimination. The goal is no longer to transform entire societies, but to impose unsustainable costs on adversary leaders until inducing either a controlled internal collapse or pragmatic accommodation.
The common thread of both variants of the current phase — Obama and Trump — is the bipartisan, categorical rejection of prolonged occupations with “boots on the ground.” The lessons of Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq have been internalized at the elite level: any significant-scale ground intervention generates exponential costs (human, financial, political) and inevitable domestic consensus erosion. Obama relied heavily on drones, special forces, and local partners; Trump has taken the same logic to the level of strategic decapitation of the adversary.
Epic Fury — with over 1,000 targets struck in just 48 hours, including what remains of the Fordow and Natanz nuclear facilities, central IRGC commands, missile bases, and the Supreme Leader himself — represents the technical and conceptual culmination of this thirty-year trajectory: air and intelligence superiority applied without restraint and with surgical precision. The transition from “policeman” to “surgeon” (or to “gangster,” for detractors) is now complete.
Does strategic decapitation work?
It is still too early to deliver a definitive long-term judgment on the effectiveness of the Trump approach. The killing of Soleimani produced a measurable deterrent effect in the short-to-medium term, reducing Iranian proxy attacks on U.S. forces in the region. The operation against Maduro opened maneuvering room in Venezuela, but long-term outcomes are not yet measurable. In the Iranian case, the ideal scenario for Washington remains an internal revolt leading to regime change, but Trump would be perfectly satisfied with the emergence of a new, more pragmatic — and above all, intimidated — leadership fearful of further personal targeted strikes.
The United States does not want a ground war of attrition: its declared and realistic objective is to permanently degrade Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities, inducing either a negotiated accommodation or the collapse of the current regime.
Will it work? Iran is currently responding with hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones, but without the capacity for prolonged symmetric escalation or effective conventional projection against American territory. Only time will provide the definitive answer.
Conclusions
Epic Fury does not open a new cycle but consolidates and strengthens the existing historical one: the United States has abandoned the illusion of global policeman and universal social engineering, opting instead for selective realism based on brute force and adversary decapitation as negotiating leverage. This approach significantly reduces the risks of overextension that marked previous phases, but it has yet to prove its true strategic effectiveness.