There aren’t many moments in Donald Trump’s political career that could be called highlights. 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.
Critics have called Trump an isolationist. Given the unconcealed delight he takes in dropping bombs on foreign lands (seven countries in 2025 alone), that can’t be right. A better diagnosis is that Trump doesn’t think the United States should seek to superintend global affairs, to take responsibility for the operation of the system. “American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country,” his recently released National Security Strategy explains. “Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.”
At times, Trump has veered oddly close to the left, which has opposed trade deals (“neoliberalism”), military interventions (“warmongering”), the bipartisan foreign-policy consensus (“the Blob”), and the U.S. policing of the planet (“empire”). In his 2016 race against Hillary Clinton, he scored points by spotlighting her support of the Iraq War. “In the end, the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built,” he said last year, “and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”
What distinguishes Trump from the left, of course, are his narrow nationalism and his love of raw force. “I’m the most militaristic person there is,” he has boasted. He relabelled the Department of Defense the Department of War, and appointed a Secretary, Pete Hegseth, who has promised to give “America’s warriors” the freedom to “kill people and break things.” Forget the symphony of power; Trump just wants to crash the cymbals.
Trump’s second term has been cacophonous with threats—to acquire Greenland, ethnically cleanse Gaza, make a state of Canada, throw the world economy into convulsions. This is a self-conscious flight from principles toward what he calls the “iron laws that have always determined global power.”
Hence this past weekend’s assault on Venezuela, in which U.S. forces launched air strikes on Caracas and nabbed the head of state, President Nicolás Maduro. (At least a hundred people were killed, local authorities say.) Trump claims that his goal is to punish Maduro for heading a “vast criminal network” that has brought “colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States.” But this is hard to swallow. The drug that is killing people, fentanyl, is almost entirely produced in Mexico, and the drug Venezuela does play a (minor) part in transporting, cocaine, goes mainly from there to Europe. Also, didn’t Trump just pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran President, who had been sentenced to forty-five years in federal prison for conspiring to import four hundred tons of cocaine into the United States?
