Conventional Hawks Still Don't Understand That Trump Is On Their Side

The truth is that Trump governed mostly like a conventional hawk because he doesn’t really disagree with them about most things.

Janan Ganesh asks the wrong question:

A decade has passed since Barack Obama failed to enforce his “red line” against the use of chemical weapons in Syria. But a US president made good on that commitment in the end. Who, upon the election of Donald Trump, thought he would be the one to hit Bashar al-Assad’s air force with cruise missiles on a point of principle?

One problem with this formulation is that Trump didn’t order the illegal attacks on Syria in 2017 and 2018 on “a point of principle.” He did it in large part because it was the opposite of what Obama had done, and also so that he could look “strong” on the world stage. According to some accounts, it was also because his daughter lobbied him to do it. Regardless, no one believes for a minute that Trump ordered the attacks because he cared deeply about an international norm about the use of chemical weapons. It was a classic case of do somethingism where the president ordered military action because he could and no one was going to stop him. The fact that he was doing the thing that Obama had correctly chosen not to do just made it that much more appealing to the man who ran his foreign policy in no small part to negate almost everything his predecessor did.¹