Is peace through strength the best deterrent to war?

“Yesterday, we had a incredibly successful visit with many of the world’s top business leaders, the best, the biggest, most successful, and foreign heads of state, and now, we have one of the most important meetings of all, the official formation of what is known as the Board of Peace,” U.S. President Donald Trump announced in January at the yearly Davos convention. “I want to thank the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and their extraordinary work. I mean, they have done an amazing job. We have peace in the Middle East. Nobody thought that was possible.”

“We’ve settled eight wars, and I believe another one’s coming pretty soon,” President Trump put in hopefully. Though sadly, his prediction to an end of Russia’s war on Ukraine hasn’t yet come to fruition.

“The one that I thought was going to be an easy one, it’s turned out to be probably the most difficult,” as Trump himself admitted at Davos. “Last month, 29,000 people died, mostly soldiers in Ukraine and Russia. Think of that 29,000, 27,000 in the month before, 26,000 in the month before that. It’s terrible, but we have meetings where we think we’re making a lot of progress.”

“Today, the world is richer, safer, and much more peaceful than it was just one year ago,” Trump boasted. “We put out all those fires. A lot of people didn’t know, including me, that some of those wars were going on, and some of them were going on for, in one case, 32 years and another case, 35 years and another one, 37 years. We were very happy to stop the war that had started with India and Pakistan, two nuclear nations. I was very honored when the prime minister of Pakistan said, ‘President Trump saved 10 and maybe 20 million lives by getting that stopped just before bad things were going to happen.’”

“As president, I ended those eight wars in nine months, including Cambodia and Thailand, and by the way, many of the leaders are here, Kosovo and Serbia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran. Egypt and Ethiopia, we’re working on that right now.”

It’s been a month since President Trump made those comments and much has changed.

Addressing the Board of Peace this week, Trump seemed a bit less bullish on peace.

“One of the keys to it was when we took those beautiful, magnificent — we just ordered 22 more of them — updated models,” Trump dropped casually into a speech to the Board of Peace. “The B-2 bombers are incredible.”

“I never understood the B-2 bomber,” Trump added in an aside. “I’d watch it — it’s a wing — and I’ve never quite understood that, Johnny. I’d look at it and say, it’s beautiful, but what does it do?”

“It carries very big bombs,” the U.S. President warned. “And it went into Iran and it totally decimated the nuclear potential. When it did — when it decimated that — all of a sudden we had peace in the Middle East, because there was a black cloud hanging over the region. And if that wasn’t done, that cloud would have remained. Countries like Saudi Arabia, countries like Qatar — countries that nobody could have signed agreements with — you would have had that threat.”

“You couldn’t have peace in the Middle East,” Trump complained bitterly. “So now we may have to take it a step further — or we may not. Maybe we’re going to make a deal.”

“You’re going to be finding out over the next probably 10 days,” Trump warned ominously.

Trump had other revelations to make, however.

“At Board of Peace debut, Trump announced global commitments for Gaza,” revealed reporters from Reuters.

Though careful to point out that “Trump’s Board of Peace does not include Palestinian representatives,” and “disarming Hamas remains a challenge,” Reuters was carefully in support of “$7 billion raised for Gaza reconstruction fund,” the fact that the “US pledges $10 million for Board of Peace.”

But the news wasn’t all good, as far as peace is concerned. Or perhaps it was. There is a geopolitical school of thought that holds with the theory that no lasting peace can be achieved in the Persian Gulf and Middle East without dealing with Iran.

President Trump seems to have become a believer in this theory.

That’s why many who would otherwise cheer peace were somewhat disappointed in January when weeks of widespread protests in Iran failed to produce a regime change.

Now, it seems that Trump has not only taken the prospect of a stalemate off the table, he is positioning U.S. military assets in advance of imminent attack.

With the successful ouster of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro in the rear view mirror, being spirited away from his own bed at home by U.S. military forces during the night to face justice in a New York court of law.

Trump has been casually insinuating that the same fate may befall other rouge regimes who support terrorism and narcoterrorism against the U.S. and its allies, massacre their own people, and flout the rules of international law and sovereignty.

“US weighs strikes on Iranian leaders, nuclear sites,” reported the Wall Street Journal on Thursday. “US and foreign officials told the newspaper that options presented to President Donald Trump range from a broad campaign aimed at killing scores of Iranian leaders in a bid to topple the government, to a more limited air operation focused on nuclear and missile targets.”

The military buildup around Iran is no longer abstract. Today feels much as it did right before Russia attacked Ukraine. 

The U.S. has surged two carrier strike groups, hundreds of fighter jets, air defenses, and more than 150 cargo flights of munitions into the region. 

Iran, meanwhile, is hardening nuclear sites and reinforcing missile infrastructure in anticipation of a possible strike. Diplomacy is still technically alive — but barely. This would not be a symbolic raid. It would likely be a sustained joint U.S.–Israeli campaign with regional consequences. 

“Peace through strength” only works if strength convinces your adversary to stand down. The coming weeks will test whether deterrence succeeds — or fails.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)