This article appears in the June 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
Stephen Miller’s giddy grin takes up half the screen as Fox News host Jesse Watters allows him to expound on the success of the United States and Israel’s war on Iran.
“President Trump is saying, ‘We the United States, have the world’s not just most powerful military, most powerful navy,’” Miller says about halfway through his monologue, as the White House twinkles in the dusk behind him and a third split screen shows footage of jets launching off an aircraft carrier. “Whoever controls the seas is able to control the outcomes in any foreign-policy showdown … If Iran chooses the path of a deal, then that’s great for the world, that’s great for everybody. If Iran chooses the path of economic strangulation by blockade, then the world will pass Iran by.”
The April 14 appearance came amidst a double blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and followed more than a month of U.S. and Israeli bombing that killed dozens of Iranian officials and hundreds of civilians, endangered U.S. allies in the Gulf region, reignited Israel’s devastating war on Hezbollah and southern Lebanon, drove up fuel prices stateside, and threatened supply shocks for multiple components and finished goods globally.
A 92-second clip from the appearance encapsulates a striking dynamic in the second Trump administration’s approach to foreign policy: In some sense diplomacy still exists, hence the talk of a “deal,” but it is increasingly backed by the threat of overwhelming military force.
The idea that might makes right as one of “the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time,” as Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper shortly after U.S. military forces kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, encapsulates this administration’s worldview. From Donald Trump’s threats to other countries on social media to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s press briefings about the war on Iran (or as Hegseth reminds us, Operation Epic Fury), projecting violence abroad in some form is usually the answer.
Miller has fueled, architected, and at times instigated America’s practice of foreign policy at gunpoint.
The policy of belligerent imperialism has more than one origin point, and it is nothing new in the context of American empire. Indeed, U.S. behavior on the world stage over the past 18 months is both uncanny and nihilistic; we are once again prosecuting a baseless and unsuccessful war in the Middle East, only this time no one even bothered to try and sell it to the public. If the Monroe Doctrine opened the door for intervention—both covert and outright—in Latin America, the Trump corollary drove a tank through the wall and set up loudspeakers shrieking “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” on loop.
But Miller, as one of the president’s closest advisers and a major power player in the administration, has fueled, architected, and at times instigated America’s practice of foreign policy at gunpoint.
“Generally, an administration has a freer hand on foreign policy than domestic,” Jake Johnston, director of international research at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said in an interview. “The administration has been constrained in some things domestically, but they’re not really on foreign policy. And so you can sort of push the boundaries. You can break norms. You can violate international laws. You can create a precedent or undermine the ability to check anything the administration does.”
But reality seems to have caught up with the administration’s bombast and bombers in Iran. As of now, there’s no agreement to prevent Iran from building its own nuclear weapon, and the Iranian regime is diminished but far from dismantled.
Though the clear lesson here is that military power cannot solve every disagreement, that doesn’t mean the administration won’t try it again—maybe in Cuba or Greenland—despite the consequences.
MILLER, 40, WAS A SENIOR POLICY ADVISER and speechwriter in the first Trump administration; he has built on that foundation to become homeland security adviser and deputy chief of staff in this one. As an aide to former Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the first prominent Republican official to support Trump’s presidential campaign, his primary policy victory was defeating comprehensive immigration reform in 2013. This obsession immediately informed Miller’s first policy framework once Trump became president, known colloquially as the “Muslim ban.”
Trump’s executive order, formally titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” restricted travel from Iran, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, and Sudan, all majority-Muslim countries. That first shot, which triggered protests at airports across the country, was ultimately unsuccessful, but an altered version of it was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2018. Though Miller was reportedly not involved in drafting the final version, the policy idea is emblematic of what he considers the purpose of the federal government: to keep those he deems outsiders out by any means necessary. That included using a public-health statute to ban entry at the southern border during COVID, and ending Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from countries ravaged by war or natural disaster.
Trump’s and Miller’s ideologies are aligned, but the means by which Trump has centralized power, called the “unitary executive theory,” plays a key role here, too. “You need a superior and unfettered executive to wield the violence of the state against undesirables,” according to a former Foreign Service officer who served multiple international tours with the State Department and whose name is being withheld to avoid retribution.
Miller’s interpretation of his current role as homeland security adviser is expansive; he doesn’t just work to thwart terror attacks or direct policy for the Department of Homeland Security. He also turns domestic security policy—like terrorizing noncitizens and industrial-scale deportations to places like El Salvador and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)—out onto the world.
“For Stephen Miller, foreign policy isn’t international policy, it’s policy for foreigners, whether they’re inside the United States or outside of the United States,” the former Foreign Service officer said in an interview.
The best way to understand that dynamic, the former Foreign Service officer said, is through U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and the Caribbean; specifically, the repeated airstrikes on small boats that the administration claims are tied to “narco-terrorist gangs.”
Miller reportedly floated the idea to attack boats of migrants headed to the U.S. back in 2018, according to a book by Miles Taylor, who was chief of staff at DHS during the first Trump administration. “Tell me why can’t we use a Predator drone to obliterate that boat?” Miller reportedly asked the then-commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, according to Taylor’s account. When told that such action would clearly be against international law, Miller reportedly told the commandant, “I don’t think you understand the limitations of international law.” Miller has denied Taylor’s account.
Yet proposals that skirt the edges of international law didn’t come out of nowhere. The U.S. under George W. Bush created legal mechanisms following the September 11th attacks to torture hundreds of people in CIA black sites and then at Guantanamo Bay. The Obama administration’s targeted drone strikes were assassinations by another name. The Biden administration further eroded international norms and subverted its own policies by financing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, in violation of the Leahy Law, which prohibits foreign military assistance to nations that violate human rights.
“Seems like Miller is sort of taking what he was already willing to do during the first term and then combining that with what Israel has been doing in the way it has just been completely ignoring any kind of international law, Geneva Conventions, any of it in its conduct in Gaza and Lebanon, to then influence U.S. foreign policy,” Annelle Sheline, a research fellow in the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said in an interview.
In other words, Miller and the Trump administration have been able to steamroll what was left of international law; they just had to figure out how to do it.
According to The Guardian and The New York Times, Miller was directly responsible for at least the initial strikes on Venezuelan boats back in September. Even if Trump was technically the last word on the strikes, as the White House says, they could not have happened without Miller’s input. He came up with the legal structure that ultimately justified those strikes—using the Alien Enemies Act to position Venezuelans as affiliated with the Tren de Aragua cartel, which the administration previously designated as a foreign terrorist organization. (The Alien Enemies Act was also the justification to deport hundreds of Venezuelans living in the U.S. to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, where many reported enduring serious abuse.)
The “secretary of state can declare an organization a foreign terrorist organization, based on nothing but vibes,” the former Foreign Service officer said. “Then the next step is you say that they’re trafficking drugs in order to do terrorism. That doesn’t have to be true, you just have to suspect it, and ‘suspect’ is a state of mind, right? You can start doing lethal operations against those individuals, and call them enemy combatants.”
Of course, just because there is a legal architecture and justification for the strikes, that doesn’t mean they are actually legally justifiable, as Brian Finucane, senior adviser for the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group, noted in an interview.
“The administration is trying to cloak these strikes in the mantle of counterterrorism, in the mantle of armed conflict, but that’s completely false framing,” Finucane told the Prospect. “There is no armed conflict, unlike with the war on terror, where the U.S. was engaged in actual armed conflict with organized armed groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS.”
When the administration attacks these small boats, Finucane said, “we have premeditated killing outside of armed conflict, which implicates U.S. criminal statutes on murder, murder on the high seas, conspiracy to commit murder outside the United States, and murder under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And I say this as someone who advised on legal counterterrorism operations under both the Obama and Trump 1.0 administrations.”
According to The New York Times, Miller’s desire to use boat strikes as a deterrent assisted other foreign-policy priorities. It dovetailed with President Trump’s interest in Venezuelan oil and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s desire for regime change in Venezuela and, eventually, Cuba. The White House denied parts of the Times’ reporting.
But most of all, the boat strikes and subsequent kidnapping of Maduro and Flores created a replicable—at least in theory—model for the second Trump administration’s foreign policy: Shoot first and deal with the consequences later.
ON MARCH 5, MILLER MADE AN APPEARANCE at the Doral, Florida, headquarters of U.S. Southern Command, the military AOR (area of responsibility) that contains much of Latin America and the Caribbean. The occasion was the first Americas Counter Cartel Conference, and defense and security officials from 17 Latin American and Caribbean countries were in the audience.
Miller was there to tell attendees that the U.S. was taking a new approach to drug cartels operating throughout the region: military force, regardless of domestic or international law, and whether the governments themselves pursued it or not.
Just days before that conference, the U.S. and Ecuador launched a joint attack on targets in Ecuador as part of an operation to defeat the drug cartels that have rapidly gained power and influence in the country, particularly in coastal areas and port cities.
Drug trafficking has certainly become a major security problem for Ecuador in the past decade, as has the precipitous rise in cartel-related violence. Ecuador now has the highest homicide rate in the region, and President Daniel Noboa has taken an increasingly hard-line approach to the problem, ramping up internal repression and now allowing U.S. forces to conduct airstrikes within its territory.
Beyond the fact that the initial March campaign appears to have targeted a dairy farm, not a narco-terrorist training facility as initially claimed, the efficacy of this kind of approach isn’t really clear. Aggressive, violent, and inhumane immigration policies like sending Afghan refugees to the DRC or Venezuelans to CECOT might deter individual people from coming to the U.S., but the logic doesn’t apply to cartels, as Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Prospect.
“Trying to copy and paste that same deterrence logic to businesses is where it breaks down, because the cartels are organized crime, are businesses,” Freeman said in an interview. “So you aren’t deterring them from operating by blowing up boats, because they have a lot of other assets. I don’t think they’re impoverishing the cartels.”
Miller’s Hobbesian worldview has accelerated the demise of America’s image as a credible and useful partner.
According to Freeman, whose expertise is organized crime in Latin America, limiting illicit financial flows would go much further toward that end, something the Trump administration has abandoned. “The biggest [factor] … is actually all the clearing away of any regulation or oversight on cryptocurrencies. A lot of money laundering [is] happening through Tether now. A lot [is] also happening through these opaque Chinese money-laundering networks.”
If Miller is to be believed, the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, also called the Shield of the Americas, intends to forcefully attack the problem rather than address any root causes or essential tools of the illicit drug trade. And, according to the former Foreign Service officer, that may have been only part of the point in the first place.
“[Miller’s] desire was to have the president be able to do something kinetic,” like a bombing campaign, he said. “What Miller was saying was that the president has the authority to do extrajudicial killings of certain populations, and there’s no limit on that right, and he knows who he wants those populations to be. That was the original objective, I believe, of the boat strikes.”
PART OF THE WAY MILLER AND TRUMP’S other close advisers are able to convince the president to support their priorities is that there just aren’t that many people to get in the way. And according to diplomatic sources the Prospect spoke with, those who disagree with the administration’s foreign policy are reluctant to speak out.
In May of last year, just after Marco Rubio took over as national security adviser, the National Security Council cut about a hundred jobs; in previous administrations, the agency has been tasked with coordinating international policy among government agencies and providing specific foreign-policy expertise, particularly in unstable areas or regions where there are active or potential conflicts. According to contemporaneous reporting, many of those experts were dismissed and sent to other postings in the government.
The administration has also gutted the State Department, laying off hundreds of staffers last summer and threatening to push out more via a new set of performance evaluations. Those who remain, according to American Foreign Service Association President John Dinkelman, fear speaking out against this administration’s policies.
“A lot of what we do is based on our ability to tell the truth, as we see it, to leadership, and historically, that has been without fear of any ramification or recrimination or retribution,” Dinkelman said in an interview.
“Unfortunately the environment, not just in Washington but throughout the Foreign Service, is one of—how shall I say this—covering your back, because bad news now is not welcome. Unfortunately, the tendency to shoot the messenger has now become an attribute in the management style of our Foreign Service. So you can understand how that would cause an entire system to basically freeze up with people not so much interested in reporting back to Washington the bad news that might get them in trouble, but rather, either not reporting at all, or worse, misreporting that things are OK when they really aren’t.” The result is that committed, career Foreign Service officers find that they cannot effectively do their job and resign, which is probably part of the administration’s goal in the first place.
Trump also removed around 30 career diplomats from their posts late last year, many of whom served in challenging posts or areas where there is now outright conflict. Replacement ambassadors have not been named or confirmed, leaving chargés d’affaires in place. In the diplomatic world, rank matters, and a chargé d’affaires simply doesn’t have the gravitas required to conduct negotiations effectively.
“[There are] more than 100 countries out there where our senior diplomats … don’t have all the tools that they need in the form of diplomatic rank or accreditation,” Dinkelman said. “There’s no reason for that.”
That environment leads to lower-level officers passing the buck up when it comes to issues on the ground, consolidating foreign-policy decisions at the top because they fear the consequences of making the “wrong” decision.
“There’s functionally no foreign policymaking process anymore, in a way that involves any counterweight to these personalistic relationships with the president,” the former Foreign Service officer said.
Nowhere has that been more obvious than in Iran. After the success of the Maduro kidnapping, the administration became convinced that a regime change operation in Iran would be just as simple, so in the midst of indirect negotiations to limit Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon, the U.S. started moving more materiel and military personnel to the region. It was the Miller doctrine in action: maximum aggression, with the belief that America can take whatever it wants.
“You would think going into negotiations with Iran that that’s the time to act again from a place of strength,” said another former Foreign Service officer who served multiple foreign tours and whose name is being withheld to avoid retribution. “We’ve had this maximum pressure campaign. The Iranian people are rising up. The proxies have retrenched or been destroyed, like it’s the perfect opportunity to go in there, get some concessions, come up with a good deal.”
Instead, despite battering Iran with around a thousand Tomahawk cruise missiles—worth about $4 million each—and killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and multiple members of Iran’s political and military leadership, the U.S. is actually empowering the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Mafia-like military apparatus that wields enormous power over the Iranian regime, the second former Foreign Service officer said. “The leverage calculus started to shift very quickly when Iran was able to withstand so much pounding from high-intensity, very expensive, and very much in-demand weapon systems and wreak a decent amount of destruction across the region with much lower-cost versions. They very severely shifted the leverage away from the United States because it had, all of a sudden, expended a huge proportion of its military power for very little result.”
Indeed, as of this writing, Iran is not allowing free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the crucial global shipping lane, and began charging vessels to navigate those waters. Rather than negotiate, the Trump administration initiated a blockade, hoping to squeeze the regime and all of Iran’s citizens into surrender.
Though U.S. and Israeli attacks have certainly caused damage in Iran, they haven’t actually achieved any of the Trump administration’s stated objectives. Instead of regime change, access to Iranian oil, and an end to nuclear enrichment, the war has alienated American voters, Iranian citizens, and nearly all of America’s allies and partners.
The war on Iran endangered much of the world, physically, economically, or both, for no obvious reason. That’s the difference between force and outright bullying; the latter implies some level of cruelty and incompetence, neither of which are qualities one seeks in an ally. Most long-term allies and partners, frustrated by threats to NATO by attacking Greenland and monthslong tariff wars, have refused to support the U.S. operation or efforts to secure safe passage along the Strait of Hormuz. America will have to go it alone.
MILLER’S HOBBESIAN WORLDVIEW has accelerated the demise of America’s image as a credible and useful partner, inasmuch as that existed following the war on terror and former President Joe Biden’s support for the Gaza genocide. The damage that he and the rest of the administration have done on the global stage will take years and enormous effort to undo.
But the foreign policy and domestic policy feed and reinforce each other; consider the fact that Kristi Noem, right after she was dismissed as homeland security secretary, was appointed the U.S. special envoy for the Shield of the Americas.
“The way I view [Miller’s] influence on foreign policy, it’s not really about the foreign policy, it’s about how foreign policy can be used domestically,” Johnston said. “It’s not really about the hemisphere at all, per se, other than its effect on the U.S. It helps him advance his agendas domestically,” particularly mass deportations.
Approaching the midterms and looking forward to 2028, Americans will need to seriously consider how to remedy the damage that Miller and this administration have wrought on us, and the rest of the world, Sheline said.
“My hope is that … there will be some kind of demand for accountability, a more robust system of international law,” Sheline told the Prospect. “Because the alternative is, we just kind of throw out the Geneva Conventions, or other aspects of international law, and then it’s like, OK, so do we want to live in that world?”
This article appears in Jun 2026 issue.
