Donald Trump’s pitch to Make America Great Again
included a commitment to rethink our interventionist foreign policy.
We went from mistakes in Iraq, to Egypt, to Libya
to President Obama's line in the sand in Syria.
Each of these actions have helped to throw the region into chaos.
Trump’s promise to unwind America’s foreign commitments
won the vote of some anti-war libertarians
who argued that, while many of his policy views were odious,
foreign policy mattered most.
Donald is a peacenik practically, certainly compared to the warmongering Hillary.
On the campaign trail, Trump attacked Clinton for pushing for U.S. intervention in Libya
as secretary of state,
and her 2002 vote in the Senate for the Iraq war.
Any vote that might lead to war should be hard but I cast it with conviction.
Almost everything she's done in foreign policy has been a mistake and it's been a disaster.
Trump would prove to be the less interventionist alternative to Clinton
argued historian Thaddeus Russel in a 2016 interview with Reason.
Whenever there's a dictator or tyrant we don't like in any part of the world
we are obligated to remove them.
Trump is the first President to call bullshit on that very claim.
It all began with the dangerous idea that we could make western democracies
out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a western democracy.
And in doing so I think he may do great service for actual peace believe it or not.
But has Trump lived up to the non-interventionist hype?
I think Trump has moved America considerably closer to peace
at the very same time he's moved us into more wars, so it's a terribly mixed bag.
Russel says that Trump's rhetoric alone advanced the non-interventionist cause.
He called into question the need for America to invade countries,
to change their regimes and to stay there as occupation forces.
Specifically he called into question the Iraq war.
Obviously the war in Iraq was a big fat mistake.
We spent 2 trillion dollars, thousands of lives, we don't even have it,
we should have never been in Iraq, we have destabilized the middle east.
And that was really important and historic and I'm really grateful for that.
Unfortunately of course no one took him seriously,
or they took him extremely seriously and tried to bring him down.
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 Iraq a stupid war that he would end and never replicate.
We have to use our military wisely
and we did not use our military wisely in Iraq.
Obama did temporarily withdraw troops from Iraq on Bush’s pre-negotiated timetable,
but intervened again 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 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 roll into a country say
'we do it this way, so should you.'
We know the American people want peace.
Scott Horton, a popular antiwar podcast host
and author of a book on the history of the War in Afghanistan,
agrees with Russell that Trump’s rhetorical attack on the foreign policy establishment
helped the anti-war cause.
It was necessary for him to destroy the legacy of George W. Bush
in order to help to defeat Jeb Bush.
he really got the right, the, the vast American sort of tea party, Republican voters of America
to finally admit that they were wrong to have supported George Bush.
But he says Trump is too impulsive to be reliably antiwar.
The problem with Donald Trump of course, is that he's a millimeter deep,
the guy, you know, he has some instincts, but he doesn't have thinking really on these things.
He doesn't actually really care.
It's just a matter of sort of what feels stupid to him or not.
It seems stupid to pour a bunch of money into the Afghan pit.
But is it something for him to have real conviction about and prevent from happening? No.
Trump’s wars with the media, Democrats, and protesters draw daily press coverage.
But just because America's actual wars aren't on the news every night
doesn't mean they are any closer to ending.
Trump hasn't invaded any new countries.
But he has ramped up the nearly 19 year long, 2 trillion dollar Afghanistan war
that's cost the lives of tens of thousands of Afghanis and more than 3500 US and NATO troops.
My original instinct was to pull out and historically I like following my instincts.
Once they get in there, all the incentives are to keep the thing going.
Trump added thousands more troops in 2017
and dropped more bombs and missiles in 2019 than in any previous recorded year.
The consequences of a rapid exit are both predictable and unacceptable.
If you look at Barack Obama and Donald Trump, both, they come in their first year in power
and immediately they're met with this full court press by the military for an escalation.
Instead of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria,
he vowed to stop publicly reporting their numbers.
We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities.
The Trump administration did strike a deal with Taliban leaders in late February
to wind down the war within 14 months
if they pledged to prevent terrorist groups like al qaeda from operating in the country.
And the Pentagon announced a reduction in forces
and withdrawal from five Afghanistan bases on July 14th.
The fact that Trump was willing to break with Bush and Obama's policy
go ahead and negotiate directly with the Taliban was a clue that he was really serious.
But Horton says that deal could be scuttled
by allegations that Russia paid bounties to Afghanis who killed US troops,
which prompted Republican Liz Cheney to partner with several House Democrats
to place conditions on the Afghanistan exit.
The way it's negotiated is okay, we'll withdraw over the next year.
If Trump is unelected in the fall,
then it would be the new Biden government, presumably, uh, to come in
and be in charge of implementing that withdrawal through next may
And so that's plenty of time, really, not just for Biden, but even for Trump, if he's reelected
to go ahead and back down.
Once he safely reelected, assume one thing blows up over there.
And then all they have to say is, you know what circumstances have changed,
whatever it is, and stay.
Horton points out that Trump has increased U.S. involvement in Yemen and Somalia.
These are two of America's most horrible Wars and no one pays any attention to them whatsoever.
Hundreds of thousands of people have died mostly because of the famine and the difficulties.
and it is a war designed deliberately to inflict as much punishment as possible
on the civilian population of the country,
deliberately targeting water, electricity, sewage, hospitals, and farms.
Anything that is to support the infrastructure of civilian life in that country.
It's a deliberate medieval siege campaign.
And Trump has continued and escalated the war on terror,
which could make the U.S. susceptible to getting involved in even more conflicts around the globe.
Any regime in the world that has a problem with any of their subjects,
all they have to do is call them terrorists and ask the Americans for help.
And the Americans will come running.
Iran can not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.
Trump also undid Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran
and ordered a targeted assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani,
whom he accused of plotting an attack on an American base.
We took action last night to stop a war.
But after Iran fired back, Trump deescalated.
We did not take action to start a war.
The previous year, he’d called off an airstrike planned as retaliation for a downed drone.
Administration is going to have to respond to this
or lose a lot of credibility and standing in the region and around the rest of the world.
Look at the narrative and the agenda in the media.
Horton says media figures often criticize Trump
when he avoids military action or pulls out troops as he did in northern Syria.
The announcement is seen as another blow to US allied Kurdish fighters.
Well this is exactly what everyone feared, a free-for-all
in what was one of the most stable parts in Syria.
What he's done is greenlighted Turkey, greenlighted Russia.
And praise him when he takes military action such as firing missiles into a Syrian airfield
following reports of a chemical attack.
I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen, I am guided by the beauty of our weapons.
Donald Trump became the President of the United States, I think this was actually a big moment.
How dare Donald Trump try to end any of America's Wars, try to get out of Syria twice.
And they went out full jihad against him to force him to stay.
And he backed down both times.
One group of scientists believe Trump has pushed the world closer to nuclear war
citing his withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal and two Russian nuclear treaties
as reason to move the atomic doomsday clock closer to midnight.
And Russell worries about the increasingly belligerent rhetoric
on both sides of the aisle towards China,
which Trump has escalated tensions with through his trade war
and reported placement of low-yield nuclear weapons in the region.
Going to war with China seems like an extremely bad idea.
I'm actually more worried about the Democrats longterm.
Hmm, why is that?
They want to surround Russia militarily and enforce Putin to resign,
back down, offer major concessions
basically do business with the United States as we see fit.
That's the long term danger but that's not so much from Trump.
For me the best aspect of the foreign policy of Trump
is he has revealed the mind of the foreign policy establishment.
The way that the establishment thinks about foreign policy and really government workings
and the workings of the state generally.
And the worst aspect of the Trump foreign policy?
Worst aspect of the Trump foreign policy is that he's a mass murderer, just like the rest of them.
In the end Trump had the power as commander in chief to start bringing American troops home.
But he failed to formulate a coherent strategy for doing so.
We spent $8 trillion over 20 years fighting all these Wars
and doing nothing but empower our governments, adversaries the Iranians and their friends
and our real enemies, Al Qaeda and their friends all around the region.
And meanwhile, you're telling me, we're short on hospital beds
we're short on masks and gowns for nurses
while you guys are still bombing Iraq for now, the 30th year straight
it doesn't have to be this way.
It never should have been this way.
We screwed up, got the whole 21st century off on the wrong foot,
but we didn't need to, we could call the whole damn thing off now.
Everybody knows that.
And just forge that new consensus and just stick with it.
It should be easy because we're right.