{"id":507,"date":"2026-06-26T10:38:01","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T10:38:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=507"},"modified":"2026-06-26T10:38:01","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T10:38:01","slug":"trump-wants-the-us-military-to-be-rent-a-cops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=507","title":{"rendered":"Trump wants the US military to be rent-a-cops"},"content":{"rendered":"
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One of President Donald Trump\u2019s 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 \u201cdelinquent\u201d in their defense spending.<\/p>\n

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Lately, however, he appears to be going even further \u2014 mulling the idea of turning the US military into a kind of force for hire.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019t 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 \u201cVIP pass\u201d system where shippers would pay the US to receive a naval escort through the strait.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On an even more expansive note, Trump suggested in an interview with the New York Times\u2019 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 \u201cthe guardian of the Middle East\u201d in return for 20 percent of the region\u2019s revenues \u2014 effectively a regional police force paid in oil money.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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, \u201cThere \u200bwill be NO TOLLS in the \u200bHormuz Strait for 60 days during the Cease Fire Period, and there \u200bwill be NO TOLLS \u200bafter the 60 day period has expired, \u200cunless \u2060they are imposed by and for the United States of America, should the deal not \u200bbe \u200bcompleted, for \u2060services rendered as the Guardian Angel to \u200bthe countries of the \u200bMiddle \u2060East for purposes of both past, present, and future reimbursement \u2060of \u200bcosts.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019s also strange given that the need to keep oil flowing out of the Persian Gulf is one of the biggest, if not the <\/em>biggest of reasons, why the US has such a large military presence in the region in the first place. From the 1980 \u201cCarter Doctrine,\u201d through the Reagan administration\u2019s 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 \u2014 but because doing so was seen as a vital national interest of the United States. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The new vision sounds less like a global guardian than a state-backed mercenary force.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Turning America\u2019s military into a force for hire<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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At one time, Trump appeared to view the ideal model for America\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This \u201chave gun will travel\u201d model of American power feels like a natural evolution of Trump\u2019s current approach to foreign policy. It\u2019s transparently obvious at this point that the president isn\u2019t any sort of isolationist; he\u2019s a right-wing globalist who is comfortable intervening \u2014 including with military force \u2014 to deal with foreign crises, even when American interests aren\u2019t obviously at stake. But unlike his liberal internationalist or neoconservative predecessors, he\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Rather than the traditional network of alliances and security guarantees that have long undergirded America\u2019s global military might, Trump\u2019s 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\u2019s a very different way of thinking about the role of American power in the world.<\/p>\n

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The \u201censhittification\u201d of American power<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The evolution from the Carter Doctrine \u2014 which held that any attempt \u201cto gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America\u201d \u2014 to Trump\u2019s 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 \u201cthe enshittification of American power.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The term is borrowed from science fiction writer Cory Doctorow\u2019s description of how online products \u2014 particularly social media sites \u2014 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\u2019re locked in, Washington is jacking up the user fees.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But as Trump seeks to monetize American military primacy, potential \u201ccustomers\u201d could be starting to wonder what they\u2019re 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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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 \u201cguardian angel\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019s 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\u2019s becoming clear that the US is also vulnerable to this kind of leverage from its private contractors.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Moreover, even as counterterrorism has faded somewhat as a US security priority, it\u2019s 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\u2019t eliminate the security threat from adversaries like Iran, though it can punish and degrade them \u2014 hence Trump\u2019s repeated threats to return to airstrikes if the country steps out of line again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The notion that the US will need to play an ongoing \u201cguardian\u201d role to keep the Middle East stable is a long way from the \u201ceverlasting peace\u201d 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\u2019s logic of \u201cmowing the grass\u201d \u2014 the idea that rather than getting locked into long, drawn-out wars to defeat asymmetric adversaries, it\u2019s better to simply launch periodic missions to degrade and knock them off balance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The \u201cguardian\u201d role Trump seems to have in mind may be less a police force than a landscaping service \u2014 replacing the goal of long-term security for both the US itself and its allies, with short-term profit.<\/p>\n

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See More:<\/span><\/p>\n
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  • Defense & Security<\/li>\n
  • Donald Trump<\/li>\n
  • Iran<\/li>\n
  • Politics<\/li>\n
  • World Politics<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    A mercenary vision of American power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":506,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"yoast_head":"\nTrump wants the US military to be rent-a-cops - American Living Report<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=507\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trump wants the US military to be rent-a-cops - American Living Report\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A mercenary vision of American power.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=507\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"American Living Report\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-26T10:38:01+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"8 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=507#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=507\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/7b970e3bc484fe2e26860a4380d70de8\"},\"headline\":\"Trump wants the US military to be rent-a-cops\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-26T10:38:01+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=507\"},\"wordCount\":1612,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=507#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/9643aa29675bf88d9da48535fef1d2fb.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Interesting\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=507#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=507\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=507\",\"name\":\"Trump wants the US military to be rent-a-cops - 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