President Donald Trump seems unable to stop from going to war, consequences be damned.

After protests across Iran turned deadly in January, President Donald Trump promised Iranians that “help is on the way.” On Feb. 28, the U.S. and Israel launched what immediately became a devastating war on Iran. American and Israeli warplanes began dropping bombs on a country of 93 million people. Trump soon put out a video address, telling Iranians that “the hour of your freedom is at hand.” Around the time that video appeared, Iranians in the city of Minab were sorting through the corpses of more than 165 people killed in an airstrike on an elementary school for girls.

What kind of help, exactly, did Trump mean?

What Washington calls help is often disastrous and the U.S. has a long history of offering (and refusing) to help Iran. During the Abadan Crisis of 1951-54, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalized the country’s oil industry, which had been under near-complete British control for decades. The UK responded with a crushing economic embargo. Mosaddegh appealed to President Dwight Eisenhower for help, but he declined to step in.

The CIA then toppled Mosaddegh’s government, with British backing. In effect, that coup – one of at least 72 the U.S. facilitated or attempted to facilitate in the Cold War years – opened the path for Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, to reinstall his monarchical autocracy.

Trump bragged of supposedly ending eight wars.

In 1979, a revolution unseated the Shah, but the Islamic Republic that followed only continued his practice of mass repression. Later, when Iran and Iraq went to war in 1980, the U.S. clandestinely gave each side enough support to ensure neither could win.

Trump has long styled himself as anti-war, but since returning to office in 2025, he has relaunched the long, lethal American tradition of military intervention abroad.

“We will 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,” he said during his inaugural speech. Over the next year, though, he proceeded to bomb seven countries and kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. All the while, he bragged of supposedly ending eight wars.

One Trump insists he ended was Israel’s two-year assault on the Gaza Strip. By the time a U.S.-brokered ceasefire came into effect there in 2025, Israeli attacks had, according to the Gaza health ministry, killed more than 70,000 people. The truce, however, proved to be one-sided. As of March, the UN estimated more than 600 Palestinians had been killed and more than 1,600 wounded in Gaza since the ceasefire was implemented.

Many Trump voters hoped he would avoid foreign entanglements. Instead, he has deepened the U.S. involvement in conflicts abroad, while deploying federal troops domestically to fight what he’s called an “invasion from within.”

The war machine now chugs ahead, here and elsewhere.

PATRICK STRICKLAND is a journalist and the managing editor of Inkstick Media. This story first appeared on TomDispatch.com