The Idea That Trump Was Antiwar Was Always Delusional

In 2023, JD Vance, then a freshman senator from Ohio, endorsed Donald Trump for president in a Wall Street Journal column headlined, “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.” It suggested that despite his impolitic rhetoric, Trump was a statesman who understood that “the U.S. national interest must be pursued ruthlessly but also carefully, with strong words but great restraint.”

If Vance really believed his own words — with him, it’s always impossible to say — he shared the strangely widespread delusion that Trump was antiwar. So, evidently, did Tulsi Gabbard, who once sold “No War With Iran” T-shirts. Endorsing Trump in 2024, Gabbard, now Trump’s director of national intelligence, said she was “confident that his first task will be to do the work to walk us back from the brink of war.”

The ludicrous idea of Trump as a promoter of peace — a notion his 2024 campaign leaned into — rests on a deep, willful misunderstanding of Trump’s record and character. It is true that he broke with key elements of neoconservative ideology, particularly when it comes to nation-building and promoting democracy. In 2016, he set himself apart from his Republican rivals with his willingness to call the Iraq war a disaster. But what Trump has always hated isn’t conflict but sacrifice, the notion that American power should ever be constrained by a veneer of idealism or care for global opinion.

As he said at a 2015 rally: “I’m really good at war. I love war, in a certain way, but only when we win.” One of his chief complaints about the Iraq war, let’s remember, was that George W. Bush had failed to take Iraq’s oil.

Those on the isolationist right who thought Trump shared their views made the mistake of inferring too much from his domestic policy. When it came to the United States, Trump channeled traditional strains of reactionary nativism: He’s anti-immigrant, hostile to free trade and given to John Birch Society-style conspiracy theorizing. Through him, the once marginalized politics of Patrick Buchanan became a dominant force in the Republican Party.

But Trump was never Buchanan’s heir when it came to foreign policy. His views are too inconsistent, his instincts too fundamentally bellicose. It’s true that Trump has allied himself with some paleoconservatives who are skeptical of foreign entanglements, but that’s largely because he’s attracted to right-wing cranks of all stripes. He’s been just as friendly, at times, with the most fanatical of neoconservatives, particularly on the movement’s anti-Muslim fringe. His ambassador to Israel, recall, is Mike Huckabee, who recently told Tucker Carlson that it would be “fine” if Israel were to take over most of the Middle East.

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.

© The New York Times