In 2023, JD Vance, then a freshman senator from Ohio, endorsed Donald Trump for president in a Wall Street Journal column headlined, “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.” It suggested that despite his impolitic rhetoric, Trump was a statesman who understood that “the U.S. national interest must be pursued ruthlessly but also carefully, with strong words but great restraint.”
If Vance really believed his own words — with him, it’s always impossible to say — he shared the strangely widespread delusion that Trump was anti-war. So, evidently, did Tulsi Gabbard, who once sold “No War With Iran” T-shirts. Endorsing Trump in 2024, Gabbard, now Trump’s director of national intelligence, said she was “confident that his first task will be to do the work to walk us back from the brink of war.”
The ludicrous idea of Trump as a promoter of peace — a notion his 2024 campaign leaned into — rests on a deep, willful misunderstanding of Trump’s record and character. It is true that he broke with key elements of neoconservative ideology, particularly when it comes to nation-building and promoting democracy. In 2016, he set himself apart from his Republican rivals with his willingness to call the Iraq War a disaster. But what Trump has always hated isn’t conflict but sacrifice, the notion that American power should ever be constrained by a veneer of idealism or care for global opinion.
As he said at a 2015 rally: “I’m really good at war. I love war, in a certain way, but only when we win.” One of his chief complaints about the Iraq War, let’s remember, was that George W. Bush had failed to take Iraq’s oil.
Those on the isolationist right who thought Trump shared their views made the mistake of inferring too much from his domestic policy. When it came to the United States, Trump channeled traditional strains of reactionary nativism: He’s anti-immigrant, hostile to free trade and given to John Birch Society-style conspiracy theorizing. Through him, the once marginalized politics of Patrick Buchanan became a dominant force in the Republican Party.
Neocon mutation
But Trump was never Buchanan’s heir when it came to foreign policy. His views are too inconsistent, his instincts too fundamentally bellicose. It’s true that Trump has allied himself with some paleoconservatives who are skeptical of foreign entanglements, but that’s largely because he’s attracted to right-wing cranks of all stripes. He’s been just as friendly, at times, with the most fanatical of neoconservatives, particularly on the movement’s anti-Muslim fringe. His ambassador to Israel, recall, is Mike Huckabee, who recently told Tucker Carlson that it would be “fine” if Israel were to take over most of the Middle East.
Indeed, Trump’s foreign policy has often been less a repudiation of neoconservatism than a mutation of it. The former leftists who dreamed of spreading democracy at the barrel of a gun, after all, were only one part of the neocon movement. Neoconservatism was also fueled by contempt for diplomacy and multilateral organizations like the United Nations, and a sense that a decadent America would be reinvigorated by international aggression.
Jonah Goldberg captured this ethos in 2002, when, writing in National Review, he paraphrased neocon grandee Michael Ledeen: “Every 10 years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Ledeen would go on to write a book with Michael Flynn, who became Trump’s first national security adviser.
Trump’s first term was marked by a huge surge in drone strikes: According to the BBC, he ordered 2,243 in his first two years in office, compared with 1,878 in former President Barack Obama’s eight years. He reversed the long-standing U.S. policy of treating Israel’s settlement building as illegitimate under international law, one of many sops to the American right.
Lesson learned
It’s true that Trump did not start any new wars, though, in retrospect, that seems like luck as much as design. In 2020, when Trump ordered a drone strike on Iran’s top military commander, Qassem Soleimani, The Washington Post reported that the decision “came as a surprise and a shock to some officials briefed on his decision, given the Pentagon’s long-standing concerns about escalation.” If that assassination didn’t spiral into a wider conflict, it may well have been a result of Iranian restraint, with some reporting suggesting that Iran provided the United States advance warning of its retaliatory strikes in Iraq.
The lesson Trump learned from his first term, it seems, is that there’s no real cost to his belligerence, and so he has ratcheted it up. Trump, according to Axios, “authorized more individual airstrikes in 2025 than President Biden did in four years.” Given the lack of meaningful resistance he faced from his base, it’s not surprising that he has become even more reckless. Across many different realms, Trump’s pattern is basically the same: He goes as far as he can until someone stops him.
At a petulant, bombastic news conference Monday morning, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth argued that America was fighting “on our terms, with maximum authorities. No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise.” This has always been the real Trump doctrine. Not no wars, but no rules.
Michelle Goldberg is a columnist at The New York Times.
Leave a Reply