BOOTS ON THE GROUND

There aren't many moments in Donald Trump's political career that could be called highlights.

- —Daniel Immerwahr

But one occurred during the 2016 Republican primary debate in South Carolina, when Trump addressed the prickly issue of the Iraq War. It had been a “big, fat mistake,” he charged. And the politicians who started it? “They lied.”

The audience hated this. Trump's fellow-debaters Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio argued that George W. Bush—Jeb’s brother—had kept the country safe. Trump plowed on loudly through the booing. It was as if an “angry Code Pink-style protester” had crashed the Republican debate, the journalist Michael Grunwald wrote.

Trump hadn't stood against the Iraq War from the start, as he has frequently claimed. (When asked, in the run-up to the invasion, whether he supported it, he replied, “Yeah, I guess so.”) But by 2004 he truly was opposed. He scoffed at the notion that the war would achieve anything. What was the point of “people coming back with no arms and legs” and “all those Iraqi kids who've been blown to pieces?” he asked. “All of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong.”

Skepticism came easily to Trump, who had long been hostile to mainstream foreign policy. He made his political début, in 1987, by taking out full-page ads in several papers to complain of Washington's “monumental spending” on defense for allies like Japan and Saudi Arabia. The foundations of U.S. supremacy since 1945—the aid packages, alliances, trade pacts, and basing arrangements that make up what the former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates calls the “symphony of power”—have all seemed to Trump like a colossal waste.