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The idea that Trump or MAGA is in any sense “anti-war” is something between an absurdity and a misunderstanding. Kate and I had a good discussion of it in this week’s podcast. At one level it’s a simple fraud. Trump claimed he’d always been against the Iraq War at a time when the U.S. had been bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan for years. It was a helpful attack line and it was completely false. Trump wasn’t in politics in 2002 or 2003 and to the extent he said anything, like a lot of people, he was for it when it was popular and against it when it wasn’t.
During his presidency he signed off on the assassination/targeted attack that killed Qasem Soleimani; he heavily involved the U.S. in the Saudi war in Yemen; he maintained or expanded the U.S. fight against ISIS in Iraq/Syria. Those are at least a continuity with the Obama years and in key respects an expansion of it. The one arguable exception is the deal Trump made with the Taliban to leave Afghanistan — a bad deal which Joe Biden was saddled with and followed through on and was endlessly criticized for, by Trump more than anyone else. Afghanistan captures Trump perfectly — his one notionally “anti-war” position was continuity by definition. And he turned against it as soon as he was unpopular. Trump has gotten “anti-war” mileage out of his opposition to Ukraine aid. But that’s pro-Russia rather than anti-war.
So the entirety of Trump’s anti-war-ness is a fiction and one he’s been remarkably adept at selling to a huge swath of the political and journalistic community. He came into politics at a moment of profound public fatigue with unending military commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq and simply passed himself off as against what everyone was sick of. That’s just a subset of most of the rest of Trump’s politics: he’s the diehard against whatever is unpopular and vice versa, rinse and repeat ad finitum, or until the public mood changes.
But there’s not quite nothing to Trump’s claims of being “anti-war.” What he’s against is military commitments. As I mentioned on the pod with Kate yesterday, Trump can hardly be “anti-war” since he’s not even anti-war within the United States. He’s already done his first military deployment — to Los Angeles. War is fundamentally about violence and aggression. That violence and aggression can be tethered to a necessary or righteous goal. But the thing itself is violence and aggression. And violence and aggression are the essence of MAGA politics. As it is at home, Trump’s whole foreign policy is about force, bullying and aggression, even when it’s in “peaceful” or non-kinetic domains like trade. The issue is military commitments. Because commitments by definition restrict freedom of action. And that is another centerpiece not just of Trumpism but of Trump’s personality. He’s for things until they’re unpopular. Tariffs are Liberation Day until the public and the bond traders get too weird and then they’re gone. He’s carrying out a mass deportation that is of a scale that almost amounts to ethnic cleansing … until the agro-business guys get a bit tetchy and then he’s not. Freedom of maneuver, the totally unbounded will of a single man, Donald Trump, is the essence of the man and his politics. It’s the through-line to his dismantling of the nation’s historic alliances. The entire game is the freedom of his will and everyone else reacting to that will.
You put these together with his hyper-valorization of “his” military, his big defense budgets and his own track record and what you come up with is that Trump loves what you might call one-night-stand wars, spasms of dominating violence that end and then it’s over. Or it’s over until he decides he wants to do it again. No obligations or commitment, no check-ins or meeting for coffee a few days later. Done and done.
It’s still wholly unclear to me what Trump is going to do now. But the overwhelming force and apparent limitedness of it is the attraction. If it’s focused on destroying the nuclear research and production facility at Fordow you do it and you’re out. And you get the big win after the Israelis gambled and won and already dealt with most of the risk. Needless to say, the people who start and enter wars don’t always get to say when they end. But that’s small print, a contractor debt Donald Trump would be happy to pass off on someone else or just never pay. But that’s the attraction. And that’s Donald Trump on war. Donald Trump quite literally loves war, just on his terms. It’s all about him and his will.