ADVENTURISM

The MAGA critique of globalism never meant the end of war.

- Eamon Whalen

THE RIGHT LIKES to pretend that President Donald Trump is antiwar. This has always been more useful delusion than fact, but there was once a half-truth buried in there. During a 2015 Republican primary debate, Trump broke with GOP orthodoxy by calling the second Iraq War a “big, fat mistake.” At rallies, he promised to stop “using our military to create democracies in countries with no democratic history.”

For the right-wing intellectuals who take cues from isolationist Pat Buchanan, this rupture was an opportunity. These men had long recommended that the United States stop trying to export democracy and import immigrants. Trump gave them a vessel; they gave him substance.

In his 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election,” writer and future White House national security strategist Michael Anton made the most famous argument for Trump as antiwar. Norms did not matter, Anton wrote. The West was dying. Trump was an anti-globalism antidote to decline. Under him, the US would no longer wage “endless, pointless, winless” wars, Anton pseudonymously promised. He would focus on America first.

However suspect the logic of an antiwar Trump, it has persisted for more than a decade. When then-Sen. JD Vance pledged his support for the president, after once wondering whether he was the next Hitler, he said it was because Trump had “started no wars.”

But casting Trump as “Donald the Dove” was always ridiculous. In 2016, Trump’s opposition to the Iraq invasion was simply that we’d lost a war. He supported invasion in the early 2000s and, to this day, is mainly upset we didn’t take the oil on the way out. Trump’s barbs at his 2016 opponent made clear the actual problem he saw. The issue with US foreign policy was not war, but, as Trump groused, that “Hillary Clinton favors what has been called ‘military adventurism.’”