Trump and war

Capturing nested threads from Bluesky. These are quotes, not me. But for what it’s worth, I agree with Hilzoy.

Ian Leslie

The Fight: Notes on the Oval Office Debacle, Plus a Rattle Bag

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Second, and relatedly, I get the feeling that many politicians and commentators haven’t quite grasped the strength of Trump’s aversion to war. It’s one of the things that makes him a very unusual president. This is something that crystalized for me in my excellent conversation with Jemima Kelly. As we’ve just seen, Trump is frequently belligernet, aggressive, and angry in person, and instinctively we expect a leader’s personality to align with their attitude to military engagement. But inside the red-faced hawk is a dove, with an almost physical horror of violence.

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Trump is as close to a pacifist as we’ve seen in the White House, more dovish than any US president since Carter. He does not seem interested in the exercise of American military power at all, and is openly cynical about America’s motivations for entering into previous conflicts like Iraq. He is bent on shrinking America’s defence spending. In short, Trump’s attitude to American military power is almost indistinguishable from that of, say, Jeremy Corbyn. Given everything else about him, this has been understandably hard for the rest of the world to get their heads around.

Jamelle Bouie

Trump was literally president for four years during which he wildly escalated drone warfare, tried to provoke a war with Iran, and got into dangerous saber-rattling with North Korea. Now, he is threatening to take Greenland and the Panama Canal by force. What is this horseshit?

Why do so many people refuse to grapple with the actually existing Donald Trump!?!?

Judah Grunstein

I think it’s important to distinguish Trump I from what we’re seeing now, but also to tease out where and how Trump I diverged from US militarized foreign policy, and where it didn’t, to understand why some people see him as a “peace” president.

I’ve tried previously, so here goes again.

First, the primary case for Trump I being a warmonger is, as Jamelle Bouie notes, the escalation of the drone war but also the air war against ISIS in Mosul. There was also the initial escalation in Afghanistan.

As I’ve argued in the past, though, these both occurred early in his first term.

And they came in response to demand from the Pentagon on both counts. To my mind, that reflects the way the Department Of Defense tends to roll every inexperienced first-term president to get its wish list early.

That it also satisfied Trump’s penchant for chest-thumping doesn’t necessarily change that.

Later in Trump’s first term, in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Syria, he tried to remove US forces from longstanding deployments. In Syria, he was essentially blocked by the Pentagon from doing so on multiple occasions, and in Afghanistan he was (rightly) criticized for making the rush to the exits that Biden consummated.

I disagree that he tried to start a war with Iran, mainly because on two occasions Trump backed away from one: the airstrike he called back en route after the downed US drone and the decision to deescalate despite US casualties in the Iranian riposte to Soleimani’s assassination.

The Soleimani assassination was certainly reckless, but there, too, I suspect it was pushed by Pompeo and channeled the US military’s longstanding grudge against him, dating back at least to the Iraq occupation and probably further.

Finally, with regard to US alliances, Trump’s hostility to them coded as “restraint” and retrenchment in a way that would in theory reduce US exposure to moral hazard and unintended escalation, even if in practice he didn’t really move the needle much on forward basing or commitments.

Why do I think this is important enough to now on multiple occasions take what is a very unpopular side of a debate no one in the anti-Trump camp (of which I am a part) even wants to have?

For two reasons.

First, Trump targeted legacy wars in ways that he can opportunistically use to portray himself as anti-war. And he targeted US security commitments in ways that allow him to claim he achieved changed behavior of US allies that decades of lectures about freeriding by Bush and Obama had not. So politically, it’s important to recognize that, instead of just reflexively claiming he was a warmonger. Because any US president who really wants a war against a non-nuclear state can get it.

Second, and more importantly, to blame the areas where Trump’s first-term record was bellicose lets the interests behind the militarization of US foreign policy, particularly in the Pentagon, off the hook. And that leaves the militarization of US foreign policy in place.

To be very clear, I think Trump is a bully who now wields the most preponderant military power any individual in the human history ever has. That’s not a good or comforting combination.

I don’t think he’s a pacifist or even anti-war, but neither do I think he’s a warmonger.

We’re all less safe with him in office, especially given his imperialist agenda this time around.

But while Trump is a problem, he is not the only problem with regard to US militarization.

Louis Evans

At the risk of over-simplifying, I think the postwar hegemonic consensus in the US was that the US should fight (only) “Good Wars” — justified by principle and necessity rather than avarice or aggrandizement, restrained in conduct, pursuing a peaceful settlement of self-determination.

This consensus held across parties, across civilian-military, and across both elite and mass sectors, although of course it was interpreted differently in each place.

Proponents of wars went to great length to cast their wars as Good. The primary critical posture was that some war was in fact Bad.

The left wing criticism was that the military establishment systematically misrepresented which wars were Good; the radical critique was that wars are axiomatically Bad.

Donald Trump (and his faction) represent a different position.

Donald Trump is against Good Wars, and in favor of Bad Wars.

He views Goodness as suckerdom. He views Badness as savvy. He is opposed to principle or necessity, and in favor of avarice and aggrandizement. He is against good conduct in wars and in favor of war crimes.

Those who found themselves outside the consensus recognized that Trump, too, was outside.

But they (often) lack imagination as to how many positions are outside the Good Wars consensus, and as to their relative strength.

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“Good” vs. “bad” is a fuzzy, pejorative, polemical, and basilectal choice here, but I do think it actually points to a core element of Trump’s posture. He is, quite self-consciously, a Heel, and he does international relations as a Heel.

Lots of analysis — pro and con! — embed the idea that he is a Face, but he’s not, and he’s not trying to be.

Adding some final thoughts as this reply helped clarify something I’d been struggling to articulate.

The reason Trump can portray himself and be portrayed as “anti-war” is because he opposed the wars the US historically fought and alliances it formed as part of its global role in the liberal order.

So another way of expressing what Louis Evans says here is that Trump rejects the kinds of wars most people associate with the US because he views the global order and the US role in it as a chump’s game.

But he embraced the use of force in cases that transgressed the traditional US role.

Hilzoy

For my part, I think Trump is neither a warmonger nor a pacifist. Those are the wrong axes. He is a person with the emotional maturity of a three year old who has absolutely no idea of what’s at stake in his decisions and is given to temper tantrums.

If you think he’s a warmonger, it’s probably because he likes to threaten people, and does not draw the line at threatening them with military force; and also because he seems to have no clue what that would mean.

If you think he’s a peacemaker, it’s probably because he sometimes says things to that effect, and also because many of the things that we might have responded to with force before are things that simply do not register with him at all.

He does not react to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine not only because he likes Putin and hates Zelensky, but because he just does not see — at all — what’s wrong with what Russia did.

But ‘pro-war’ or ‘pro-peace’ is just not the right way to assess him.