Trump Challenges Pro-War Foreign Policy Elite, by Doug Bandow

Posted on September 18, 2020 | Leave a comment

Just using the term “crazy endless wars” makes Trump the most antiwar president in decades. From Doug Bandow at theamericanconservative.com:

Calls from experts to continue our current endeavors all fall flat. Intervention is the problem, not the solution.

President-elect Trump with retired Marine Corps General James Mattis, who would soon become Secretary of Defense, November 19, 2016. (By a katz/Shutterstock)

Donald Trump’s practical record might suggest otherwise, but his rhetoric has been the most anti-war on record. Last week he chastised Joe Biden for sending “our youth to fight in these crazy endless wars” as vice president. He also complained that top Pentagon officials “want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs, that make the planes and everything else, stay happy.”

In practice, he has done little to turn his words into policy. U.S. troops are still fighting every war they were fighting when he took office in 2017. Before reducing forces in Afghanistan, Trump did an Obama—increasing the number first.

Moreover, the president brought the U.S. uncomfortably close to war against Iran, largely, it seems, at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Israel. Worse, Trump played a dangerous game of geopolitical chicken with nuclear-armed North Korea, creating serious concern that he might inadvertently trigger what could become the Second Korean War. The latter would have been far bloodier than all the military actions taken by Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama combined.

Nevertheless, no other president has similarly criticized America’s promiscuous war-making, denounced U.S. aggression, admitted that Washington has abused its power to kill, and questioned the Pentagon’s endless subsidies for wealthy allies. Although the Blob, the ever-interventionist foreign policy establishment, routinely dismisses his observations, its members have been forced to address such critiques for the first time. Which has horrified, even angered those who evidently believe that they have the mandate of heaven to rule the world.

Unsurprisingly, the president’s latest comments were ill-received. And he unfairly maligned the military leadership, which tends to be more cautious than politicians. During the Reagan years Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz clashed over the use of military force, with the former urging restraint.

Continue reading→

This entry was posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military, War and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply