One of President Donald Trump’s core political positions has always been that US allies should pay more for the benefits they receive from US military power. This has included demanding that South Korea and Japan pay more for the presence of US troops on their soil, and suggesting that the US would only honor its mutual defense obligations under NATO for countries that are not “delinquent” in their defense spending.
Lately, however, he appears to be going even further — mulling the idea of turning the US military into a kind of force for hire.
Politico recently reported that Trump administration officials have been considering ideas to encourage still-reluctant shippers to return to the Strait of Hormuz, despite their concerns that it still isn’t safe after the US-Iran ceasefire deal. (This was before Iran announced on June 20 that it was reclosing the strait, throwing the entire arrangement into doubt.) The ideas reportedly included a “VIP pass” system where shippers would pay the US to receive a naval escort through the strait.
On an even more expansive note, Trump suggested in an interview with the New York Times’ David Sanger last week that if Iran does not abide by the terms of its deal with the US, one step he might consider would be making the United States “the guardian of the Middle East” in return for 20 percent of the region’s revenues — effectively a regional police force paid in oil money.
Over the weekend, Trump expanded on that idea in a Truth Social post, pushing back on reports that Iran would charge tolls for ships transiting the strait, writing, “There will be NO TOLLS in the Hormuz Strait for 60 days during the Cease Fire Period, and there will be NO TOLLS after the 60 day period has expired, unless they are imposed by and for the United States of America, should the deal not be completed, for services rendered as the Guardian Angel to the countries of the Middle East for purposes of both past, present, and future reimbursement of costs.”
This is, as Sanger noted, a departure for a president who long questioned both the need to maintain expensive large-scale military deployments in the region and the need to get the US military involved in foreign wars. But it’s also strange given that the need to keep oil flowing out of the Persian Gulf is one of the biggest, if not the biggest of reasons, why the US has such a large military presence in the region in the first place. From the 1980 “Carter Doctrine,” through the Reagan administration’s Persian Gulf tanker war, through Desert Storm and up through 9/11 and the War on Terrorism, US military power helped keep the oil flowing not because it was being paid by local emirs — but because doing so was seen as a vital national interest of the United States.
The new vision sounds less like a global guardian than a state-backed mercenary force.
Turning America’s military into a force for hire
At one time, Trump appeared to view the ideal model for America’s global military primacy as a sort of protection racket, where countries would pay handsomely for being under the US security umbrella. He now seems to have something more fleeting and transactional in mind: A system where the US is a global troubleshooter for hire.
This “have gun will travel” model of American power feels like a natural evolution of Trump’s current approach to foreign policy. It’s transparently obvious at this point that the president isn’t any sort of isolationist; he’s a right-wing globalist who is comfortable intervening — including with military force — to deal with foreign crises, even when American interests aren’t obviously at stake. But unlike his liberal internationalist or neoconservative predecessors, he’s suspicious of alliances and binding security commitments. (The mutual-defense deal the US inked by executive order with Qatar last year feels less like a sign of how seriously this administration takes the security of Qatar than of how unseriously it takes deals like this.)
Rather than the traditional network of alliances and security guarantees that have long undergirded America’s global military might, Trump’s ideal vision sometimes seems to more resemble the deals Russia inked in recent years to provide security services for various governments in Africa, first via the now-defunct military contractor Wagner Group, and now via more directly state-run paramilitaries. That’s a very different way of thinking about the role of American power in the world.
The “enshittification” of American power
The evolution from the Carter Doctrine — which held that any attempt “to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America” — to Trump’s suggestions of turning the US military into what sounds on paper like a mercenary force for Gulf monarchies, can be seen as emblematic of what the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman have called “the enshittification of American power.”
The term is borrowed from science fiction writer Cory Doctorow’s description of how online products — particularly social media sites — decline in quality over time as they pivot from providing useful and enjoyable services to their users to extracting value from them. Likewise, the United States has spent decades selling its allies on a model that ties their security and stability to American military primacy. And now that they’re locked in, Washington is jacking up the user fees.
In the Carter and Reagan eras, it was seen as self-evident that the US benefited from the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf. In the Trump era, the president wants to make sure we get a cut of the action.
But as Trump seeks to monetize American military primacy, potential “customers” could be starting to wonder what they’re getting for the money. Countries in the Gulf were already reconsidering their traditional reliance on the US as an ally before Trump launched a war that led to missile attacks on their cities and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. It didn’t help that the war ultimately ended with the Iranian regime still in power, and much of its missile and nuclear programs still intact. (In recent days, Trump has gone as far as to say that it’s only fair for Iran to have ballistic missiles when so many of its regional rivals do.) It may be hard to market your services as a “guardian angel” when these are the results. Now, there are ongoing talks about developing a regional security framework that includes the Gulf countries and Iran, but not the United States.
It’s also far from clear whether the US has the firepower for a global troubleshooter role. The Iran war, a relatively short conflict with a far weaker adversary, taxed US stocks of missiles and interceptors to the point that the military had to divert resources from other global hot spots. On Wednesday, Trump gathered the heads of US defense contractors at the White House to pressure them into ramping up production.
And in an age of AI-enabled warfare, the US military is increasingly locked in to the services of companies like SpaceX, which raised the price of internet connectivity for US kamikaze drones during the war with Iran, and Anthropic, which pushed back on how its products were being used on the eve of the conflict. In their 2025 Wired magazine article on the enshittification of American power, Farrell and Newman use Starlink as a prominent example of how countries become locked into US-dominated military platforms. The Ukrainian military’s dependence on Starlink for battlefield connectivity, for instance, became a liability when Musk cut service in 2022 at a time when Ukraine was rapidly retaking territory. (Musk reportedly feared nuclear retaliation by Russia.) But it’s becoming clear that the US is also vulnerable to this kind of leverage from its private contractors.
Moreover, even as counterterrorism has faded somewhat as a US security priority, it’s clear from this recent conflict that the US still has a hard time winning asymmetric wars against weaker adversaries that have the advantage of geography and more will to fight. The US can’t eliminate the security threat from adversaries like Iran, though it can punish and degrade them — hence Trump’s repeated threats to return to airstrikes if the country steps out of line again.
The notion that the US will need to play an ongoing “guardian” role to keep the Middle East stable is a long way from the “everlasting peace” Trump was promising a year ago after the signing of a ceasefire deal in Gaza. This moment is not a high point for the US-Israel relationship, just a few months after the two countries broke new ground by going into combat side-by-side for the first time. But still, Trump does appear to have somewhat embraced Israel’s logic of “mowing the grass” — the idea that rather than getting locked into long, drawn-out wars to defeat asymmetric adversaries, it’s better to simply launch periodic missions to degrade and knock them off balance.
The “guardian” role Trump seems to have in mind may be less a police force than a landscaping service — replacing the goal of long-term security for both the US itself and its allies, with short-term profit.
