Trump's Plunder Doctrine Revisited

His chief complaint about U.S. wars in this century is that they weren’t rapacious and exploitative enough.

Ed Luce gets Trump’s foreign policy very wrong:

Fascist leaders tend to lust after other countries’ territory. By that measure Donald Trump is not a fascist. One of his most enduring appeals to the Maga base has been his rhetoric against America’s so-called forever wars. Put simply, Trump loves trade wars but is generally scornful of military ones.

One rather large flaw in this analysis is that Trump’s opposition to the forever wars has always been rhetorical and nothing more than that. He has had no problem continuing and escalating the wars he inherits from his predecessors. He increased U.S. involvement in every war he inherited in his first term: Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Iraq and Syria. He launched illegal attacks on the Syrian government. He ended no wars, and he rejected Congress’ attempt to force him to halt U.S. support for the Saudis’ war on Yemen. If Trump is “scornful” of these wars, he does a good job of concealing that scorn.