Don't Forget That Trump Is a Hawkish Militarist

Trump wants to be a corrupt emperor of a vast and sprawling empire. He has no interest in being the president of a limited constitutional republic that minds its own business.

Gideon Rachman repeats a familiar, untrue claim:

Like the groups that opposed its involvement in the first and second world wars, Trump’s instinct is to stay aloof from foreign conflicts. He is suspicious of what Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president, called “entangling alliances”.

If this were true, Trump’s foreign policy would have looked very different. He was so suspicious of entangling alliances that he signed off on adding two new countries to NATO, increased U.S. support for the Saudi coalition in Yemen, and then refused to end that support when Congress demanded it. Under Trump, the U.S. attacked the Syrian government twice, assassinated a high-ranking Iranian general and nearly started a war with Iran, intensified the drone war, increased the bombing of Somalia, escalated the war on ISIS, escalated the war in Afghanistan, and came closer to direct conflict with North Korea than it had been in decades. For someone supposedly so inclined to stay aloof from foreign conflicts, Trump spent all four years deepening U.S. participation in existing ones and making new conflicts more likely.

Jonathan Katz went through Trump’s record at length to remind everyone of just how much of a militarist and hawk he was and still is:

You may have forgotten this but: He was actually president before. Not only did Trump do a lot of killing in that time, but through his unique blend of belligerence and incompetence, he helped set the stage for most of the major crises roiling the world today.

When we look at Trump’s record, it’s also important to remember how many economic wars he waged. Broad sanctions can be and have been just as devastating to the targeted countries as military interventions. Sometimes economic wars are far more destructive than direct military attacks because they strike the entire population and cause widespread harm for years and even decades. Trump’s economic wars against Venezuela, Iran, Syria, and North Korea attacked and impoverished more than a hundred million people. In every case, they failed on their own terms to achieve the administration’s stated goals and sometimes they resulted in more of the activities they were supposed to be discouraging. Thanks to Biden, all of these policies remain in place and continue to inflict senseless destruction on the lives of innocent people around the world.

It is very useful to Trump when he is given credit for a non-interventionist and antiwar worldview that he absolutely does not have. Because many analysts and pundits keep promoting the falsehood that Trump is opposed to military interventions and foreign entanglements, he is better able to cloak his militrism and hardline policies. Painting Trump as a throwback to a century ago is convenient for liberal internationalists because then it lets them lean on their old crutches of bashing “isolationism” and selling their foreign policy as the only game in town. It also allows them to pretend that there are vast differences between their foreign policy and Trump’s so that they can ignore how much continuity there is between Trump and Biden.

I can understand why Trumpists want voters to perceive Trump as an opponent of intervention. Most Americans are sick of U.S. involvement in foreign wars, and if enough voters can be duped into thinking that Trump will end that involvement that gives him an unearned advantage that might get him back into power. It is less clear why determined opponents of Trump play along by spreading the same falsehoods about what Trump believes.

Even the most hardened ideologues have to realize by now that Trump has no problem with U.S. dominance or even with its many alliance commitments. He said America First, but he governed like a hardline hegemonist. He wishes to abuse the power that the U.S. has, but he has no desire to scale back the U.S. role in the world. Trump wants to shake down allies, but he isn’t interested in ending the alliances. As long as he can find some way to exploit U.S. entanglements abroad for his own benefit, he will have no problem bogging the U.S. down in as many morasses as he can find. Just look at how he catered to the Saudis when he was president and try telling me that this is someone that shares Jefferson’s wariness about foreign entanglements. Trump wants to be a corrupt emperor of a vast and sprawling empire. He has no interest in being the president of a limited constitutional republic that minds its own business.

When Trump and Vance claim that they are on the side of peace, they are lying. If they were on the side of peace, they would not support Israel “finishing the job” in Gaza, and they wouldn’t want to launch attacks inside Mexico. They wouldn’t support an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, either. As we all know, they support all of those things, and they will likely support using force in other situations as well. Trump has been running on an openly hawkish platform and he has been attacking Biden for ending the war in Afghanistan. This is not the peace candidate you’re looking for.

This is obviously not an argument in favor of Trump. His foreign policy was disastrous and appalling, and I fully expect more of the same if Trump is elected again. Voters should not be misled into thinking that voting for Trump is a vote for peace or against interventionism. Trump is only too happy to keep the warfare state intact and to grow it with massive infusions of funds. Don’t believe anyone that tells you something else.