Trump's Failed Promise To Stop America's 'Endless Wars'


Jul 15 2020 12 mins   7
Donald Trump's pitch to "Make America Great Again" included a commitment to rethinking America's interventionist foreign policy. "After the Cold War, our foreign policy veered badly off course," then-candidate Trump told an audience at the Center for the National Interest in April 2016. "Logic was replaced with foolishness and arrogance, and this led to one foreign policy disaster after another." Trump's promise to unwind America's foreign commitments won the vote of some anti-war libertarians, who argued that, while many of his political views were odious, foreign policy mattered most. "Donald [Trump] is a peacenik, practically, certainly compared to the war-mongering Hillary [Clinton]," libertarian economist Walter Block told the audience at a November 2016 debate over whether libertarians should support Trump, which was hosted by the Soho Forum. On the campaign trail, Trump also attacked Clinton for voting to authorize the invasion of Iraq as a senator, for pushing for U.S. intervention in Libya as secretary of state, and for her hawkish approach to foreign policy in general. "Almost everything [Hillary Clinton] has done in foreign policy has been a mistake, and it's been a disaster," Trump said in an October 2016 debate. In a November 2016 Reason podcast, historian Thaddeus Russell made the case that Trump would prove to be the less interventionist alternative to Clinton. "Whenever there's a dictator or tyrant [America doesn't] like in any part of the world, we are obligated to remove him," Russell said. "Trump is the first president to call bullshit on that very claim…And in doing so, I think he may do great service for actual peace." But now that we're ending his presidential term, do noninterventionists believe Trump actually has moved the world closer to peace? "I think Trump has moved America considerably closer to peace," says Russell. "At the very same time, he's moved us into more wars. So it's a terribly mixed bag." But Russell says that Trump's rhetoric alone still was an important victory for the noninterventionist cause. "He called into question the need for America to invade countries, to change their regimes and to stay there…Specifically, he called into question the Iraq war." Trump isn't the first modern president to promise an end to foreign entanglements on the campaign trail only to double down on those commitments once in office. Candidate Barack Obama called the Iraq War "dumb" and promised to end it. Obama temporarily withdrew troops from Iraq on Bush's pre-negotiated timetable, but then re-intervened a few years later after ISIS filled the power vacuum. He also expanded the war on terror into several new countries and began personally ordering covert drone strikes, one of which killed a 16-year-old American, and another that killed at least 13 people headed to a wedding. Even George W. Bush, who as president started the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ran against nation-building on the campaign trail. "I just don't think it's the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, 'We do it this way. So should you,'" Bush said in a 2000 debate. Scott Horton, a popular anti-war podcast host and author of a book on the history of the war in Afghanistan, says modern presidents often campaign against war because it's a popular position in the abstract. "The American people want peace," says Horton. He agrees with Russell that Trump's rhetorical attack on the foreign policy establishment, and specifically on Jeb Bush and the Iraq war, helped the anti-war cause. "He really got the…Tea Party, Republican voters of America to finally admit that they were wrong to have supported George Bush," says Horton. But he says Trump is too impulsive to be reliably anti-war. "The problem with Donald Trump, of course, is that he's a millimeter deep," says Horton. "He has some instincts, but he doesn't have…thinking really on these things." Trump's wars with the media, Democrats, and protesters [...]