Moreover, a war meant to strengthen US global power weakened it — by deepening the transatlantic rift within NATO, overstretching the US military and creating a global impression that Trump had blundered into a costly war with no plan to end it.

Trump did achieve his objective to weaken NATO, which he had been pursuing well before this war, by constantly admonishing its allies and threatening to leave. But because of the belligerent way Trump acts about everything, of course the US doesn’t have the trust for countries to just blindly jump into random military adventures. That’s the real power, in many cases more useful than kinetic power that Trump squandered for US military forces.

He doesn’t consider tradeoffs systematically or plot out complicated maneuvers several steps in advance. Trump follows his instincts ; he assumes that superior US power will force opponents to back down.

Far as I can tell he just looks at what authority he has and sees how he leverage it to solely his benefit. If the author wants to call that his instincts, sure, but I attribute his total lack of planning to narcissism. Maybe in his first term, he had enough competent people in the top brass to execute a workable war strategy. Now, his war cabinet is now a Fox & Friends clownshow, and the most powerful guns, military tech, ships and planes can only partially compensate for the Russian-style incompetent sycophantic executive leaders.