Is Donald Trump the Most Frugal War President the United States Has Had This Century?

As of October 16, according to a Pentagon estimate reported by Reuters, the figure had reached 47.1 billion dollars. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal are now demanding that CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper disclose one more line: the cost of the American bases wrecked by Iranian missiles and drones in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan, a cost that was left out of the 47 billion altogether. The midterms are days away, and "Trump's war gets more expensive every week" has become his opponents' favorite line.

The question worth asking is a different one: more expensive compared to what? A number without a scale is just a number. Is 47.1 billion dollars a lot or a little? To answer that, you have to put America's other wars next to it. And this is where things get interesting.

The Costs of War project at Brown University calculated that the wars the United States fought after September 11, 2001 cost Americans more than 8 trillion dollars. Of that, 2.3 trillion went to Afghanistan and Pakistan and 2.1 trillion to Iraq and Syria. Even the Pentagon's own far more modest bookkeeping showed 1.6 trillion in direct outlays. Joe Biden, defending the withdrawal from Afghanistan, used a figure that is easier to picture: more than 300 million dollars a day, for 20 years.

Now do the division. 47.1 billion dollars for 8 months of war with Iran comes to roughly 150 days of Afghanistan at that war's average burn rate. In other words, in 8 months of fighting a country of 90 million people with a missile program and a navy of its own, America spent what Afghanistan used to swallow in 5 months without a single major battle. Add the administration's request for 67.1 billion dollars in supplemental Pentagon funding, add the unnamed cost of the bases, and you still will not reach a single year of Iraq.

Look, too, at what the 47.1 billion is made of. Direct operating costs come to 11.9 billion. The rest, 35.1 billion, is the cost of restocking munitions and replacing lost aircraft and drones. Put differently, three quarters of the bill is not money that burned in the desert but money that comes back to the warehouses as new missiles and planes. The Afghan ledger ran the other way: the lion's share went to upkeep. Bases, contractors, logistics, the guards who guarded the contractors who ran the bases, and an Afghan army that was built, armed and paid for 20 years and fell apart in a few weeks in August 2021.

And then there is the price that is not counted in dollars. By the Pentagon's official tally, 21 American service members have been killed since the war with Iran began and 865 wounded. In Afghanistan more than 2,400 Americans died. In Iraq, about 4,500.

So, whatever anyone says, Donald Trump is the most frugal war president the United States has had this century. And it is no accident, once you look at how he fights.

The strikes on Iran began on February 28. By April 8, 6 weeks later, a ceasefire had been announced with Pakistan as mediator. Then came the talks in Islamabad, the memorandum of June 17, its collapse, and the resumption of fighting on July 8. But look at the form the fighting took when it resumed. Not an invasion, not a landing, not "we will build them a democracy". A naval blockade of Iranian shipping by roughly 20 surface ships worth about 1.5 billion dollars in total. A blockade is the oldest and cheapest form of war mankind has devised: the ships already exist, the crews are already on the payroll, and the enemy pays every day for every tanker that never leaves port. In October, as the Financial Times reported, Trump blocked Netanyahu's plan for a multi-day operation to resume strikes on Iran. No ground operation, no occupation, no "transitional government" under American guard. None of the things that turned Afghanistan and Iraq into a perpetual patient in uniform.

Here I have to return to a concept of my own, because without it Trump's behavior looks like a whim, and with it, like a system. In my book The Economics of Losses I show that war is the most convenient expense line for those who manage other people's money, because its cost cannot be verified. Nobody can say what a year of war really costs: every recount produces a new sum, and the Pentagon has just demonstrated this with an Iran bill that grew by a quarter in 3 months and still does not include the bases. A victor disbands the army and closes the war accounts, which is why neither victory nor peace suits those who feed on war. What suits them is a war that drags on and never ends. Afghanistan was the perfect specimen: the state lost, and the contractors who serviced its contracts for 20 years were paid to the last cent.

Trump does exactly the opposite. He shuts an operation down at the very moment when, by every rule of the genre, the contractors' banquet should begin. More than that, he attacks the contractors in public. In January he accused the defense corporations of late deliveries and reproached them for dividends and share buybacks, and then signed an executive order allowing the defense secretary to apply "remedies" to those who fail to fix identified problems. Whether he can tame the disposers, the people for whom the destruction of the commons has become a source of income, is a separate question. But he plainly knows who they are and where their trough stands.

Here the objection arrives at once: what about the 1.5 trillion dollar defense budget request for 2027, the largest in history? What kind of frugality is that? The answer lies in what the money is being asked for. The war in Afghanistan was the cost of holding something that was not yours: garrisons, convoys, payoffs to warlords, an army that did not belong to America. The 2027 request is shipyards, 12 critical types of munitions, the Golden Dome missile shield, drones, new frigates. One can argue about the merit of every item on that list, and the disposers will take their cut from each, the defense complex has never given anything away for free. But this money at least leaves ships and factories on American soil behind it, not a palace in Kabul that the Taliban will occupy a year later. Trump is stingy where money vanishes without a trace and generous where it stays on the balance sheet. For a man who spent his life in real estate this is natural logic: an asset and running costs are different lines.

Now the main point. Why is he economizing at all? America never economized on war, it is not in its habits. The answer is in the numbers of the fiscal year that has just ended. The federal deficit for 2026, according to Treasury data, came to 1.99 trillion dollars. The government collected a record 5.4 trillion and spent a record 7.4 trillion. Interest on the national debt passed 1.1 trillion a year and is now larger than the entire defense budget. A state that pays more for its past than for the defense of its present: that is the autumn of the hegemon, in Giovanni Arrighi's terms. Add that in February the Supreme Court struck down Trump's main tariff package and the Treasury had to refund importers 144.6 billion dollars it had already collected. With a balance sheet like that, every billion not burned in the desert is a billion that will not have to be borrowed at the highest interest rates in a decade.

The classic path of a hegemon entering its autumn is well known. When the center can no longer earn by producing, it lives off finance, and when finance is no longer enough, it begins to eat itself and its colonies. The United States has one peculiar colony that it has never acknowledged and never will. That colony is Russia, a crypto-colony that repeats the American template all the way down to self-cannibalization: in The Russian Myth I argue that Moscow started the war in Ukraine in part to write off 640 billion dollars of reserves that could not be returned to its economy. The logic of autumn would have suggested the familiar scheme to Washington: let the crypto-colony burn out, collect what can be collected from the ashes, and squeeze the rest of the deficit out of its own states through taxes, inflation and cuts to everything that does not shoot. Every empire at this stage has done so, and that is usually how they ended.

Trump is looking for a different scheme. Its essence is that others pay, and pay voluntarily, while the state takes a share of the profit where it used to receive only the bill. Look at the PURL mechanism: Europeans and Canadians buy American weapons for Ukraine with their own money. In a year, 29 countries have contributed 6.7 billion dollars, and the plan for 2026 is 15 billion. American plants run, Ukraine gets Patriots, the American budget spends nothing. Look at the new NATO benchmark of 5 percent of GDP for defense: Europe arms itself, and to a large extent from American corporations. Look at May's tour of the Gulf: 600 billion dollars in promised investment from Saudi Arabia, 1.2 trillion from Qatar, 1.4 trillion from the Emirates. Most of it is paper and intentions, but the direction of the money is clear: not out of America, but into it.

And the most interesting part of all. The US government has started taking stakes in companies it used to simply subsidize. 9.9 percent of Intel in exchange for 8.9 billion dollars in grants that were already promised under the CHIPS Act. A stake in MP Materials, which mines rare earths. 5 percent of Lithium Americas. 10 percent of USA Rare Earth. 15 percent of Nvidia's and AMD's revenue from chip sales to China as the price of permission to make those sales. Wall Street already calls it "the Trump portfolio" and "the American sovereign wealth fund". The formula of the Economics of Losses, as I derived it in the book, reads: privatization of profits and nationalization of losses. What the Trump administration is doing is the first attempt in decades to reverse that formula: if the state carries the risk, it takes a share of the profit. Ownership instead of oversight, equity instead of subsidy, income instead of write-offs. Whether it works remains to be seen. The Intel shares carry no voting rights, and the critics have a point when they call it state capitalism. But a man who acts this way clearly understands what kind of economy he lives in and where that economy is heading.

And it seems he is not the only one. In the second quarter of 2026 the world's central banks bought 288.9 tonnes of gold, a record for a second quarter in the history of the data, and for the fourth year running they are holding a pace of about 1,000 tonnes a year. Gold in central bank reserves has overtaken US Treasuries for the first time since 1996. In January an ounce cost almost 5,600 dollars. Poland, China, India and Brazil buy the metal the moment the price dips. The Gulf monarchies are putting trillions into American artificial intelligence rather than into new oil fields. Europe is arming at its own expense for the first time since 1945. All these players are doing the same thing: moving out of dollar debt into things you can hold in your hand, and getting ready for winter. Trump is doing the same from inside the hegemon, and that is the most unusual thing about his position. He does not deny the autumn. He is trying to survive it.

Now for what is missing from the Pentagon's bill. America's cheapest war is not free, its price has simply been moved out of the budget. Brent crude closed at 115 dollars a barrel on October 26. Gasoline in the United States is up 38 percent since inauguration day, and inflation over the same period is 5.4 percent. In Mississippi, Trump said he was prepared for higher oil prices. There is the new scheme in its purest form: the war the Pentagon wages for 47 billion is paid for by every driver from Ohio to Kyiv at the pump. The hegemon does not spend. The hegemon sends the world an invoice. Whether American voters accept that invoice on November 3 is the question of the coming week. The longer question is whether those who are used to feeding on expensive wars will let Trump go on fighting cheap ones. Because winter is coming, and the man in the White House seems to have understood it. What remains to be seen is whether it has been understood by those who ought to feel the cold first.