Donald the warmonger

Of all the infuriating things about this election, probably the most infuriating for me is the issue of war. I keep hearing would-be voters — in both national polls¹ and one-on-one conversations, on both the political left and right — insist that Donald Trump would be a better president than Kamala Harris when it comes to foreign policy and war in general, or the use (or non-use) of the U.S. military in particular.

At some level, I get where this is coming from. War has been everywhere in both traditional and social media throughout Joe Biden’s presidency, from the withdrawal from Afghanistan to Ukraine, Gaza, and now Israeli strikes in Lebanon and Iran. More to the point, it’s been all over negative headlines. (Americans like our wars like we like our war movies: loud, bloodless, and uncomplicated, with the guys who remind us of ourselves winning in the end.) Whether it’s Biden getting blamed (wrongly) for the defeat in Afghanistan or the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or (rightly) for arming and giving diplomatic cover to Israel for its genocide in Gaza, the fact that U.S. combat units are not currently engaged in any of those wars is less salient to many Americans than the fact that the world feels less safe. With Harris not differentiating herself in any meaningful way from her would-be predecessor on the foreign-policy front, a normal move for antiwar voters in a presidential election would be to turn to the challenger and say: let’s give this new guy a chance.

Except for one problem: We already know what Donald Trump would do with war and the military-industrial complex if given the chance. You may have forgotten this but: He was actually president before. Not only did Trump do a lot of killing in that time, but through his unique blend of belligerence and incompetence, he helped set the stage for most of the major crises roiling the world today.

Trump’s supporters like to say there were “no wars” when he was president. (Trump himself started promoting that line in the primaries.) This is such an obvious lie I don’t even know where to start. He inherited no fewer than four wars in which the U.S. was directly involved: Afghanistan (which included combat in and over Pakistan), Yemen, and Somalia, as well as the war in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and West Africa against the Islamic State. Instead of ending those wars, as Trump promised to do during the 2016 campaign, he escalated all of them. In Afghanistan, he ordered U.S. warplanes to drop record numbers of bombs — not only tripling civilian deaths but killing more civilians than the Taliban. Trump also relaxed rules on both drone and commando strikes. Not only did this lead to a vast increase in the number of drone strikes — principally in Yemen and Somalia — over the numbers posted by Obama (who was known as the “drone president” as a result), but Trump also revoked reporting requirements on civilian casualties that the Obama administration had mandated. This means the true number of civilian deaths Trump caused may never be known.

Trump’s antiwar pose dissolved almost immediately after he took the White House. Just nine days into his presidency, in January 2017, he authorized a commando raid into Yakla, a region of south-central Yemen, to kill the leader of a local al-Qaeda affiliate. The mission was a disaster from the start, undertaken “without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup preparations,” as a Guardian team (including friend of The Racket Spencer Ackerman) reported shortly after. At least 35 Yemenis were killed, including at least six women and 10 children under the age of 13, along with American Navy SEAL William Owens. Among the dead was Nawar al-Awlaki, an eight-year-old U.S. citizen and the daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, a preacher and al-Qaeda organizer who was the first U.S. citizen to be killed by a U.S. drone strike (by Obama, in 2011). The al-Qaeda leader who was the apparent target of the raid escaped unharmed. Trump reportedly approved the raid in an informal conversation over dinner, without consulting the State Department, on the advice of his National Security adviser, the Army general and since-convicted unregistered foreign agent (later pardoned by Trump) Michael Flynn.

Biden deserves all the opprobrium he gets for financing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. But Trump also financed and provided cover for a related mass slaughter, in Yemen. In 2019, he vetoed a congressional war powers resolution that would have ended U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led war against the Houthis. The Yemeni civil war was long considered the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, with well over 377,000 people dead and millions living on the brink of starvation. A few months later, Trump traveled to Riyadh, where he presented to the Saudis an arms package worth $110 billion. Trump’s gift to the Saudis came just months after his ally, Prince Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud, ordered the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. As the Intercept’s Murtaza Hussain observed in 2020, “There can be no doubt that Trump has contributed to making Yemen into what Human Rights Watch has described as the largest humanitarian crisis in the world.”

The strategic purpose of the weapons transfers was to draw Saudi Arabia closer to the United States and Israel in the simmering regional proxy war with Iran — a war whose stakes Trump raised through one of his signature foreign-policy disasters, the destruction of the delicately negotiated Iran Nuclear Deal. Another of Trump’s favorite foreign-policy moments, the bilateral agreements between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco nicknamed the “Abraham Accords,” were also aimed at heightening the U.S.-Israeli-Arab monarchy axis. And of course, Trump directly antagonized (and risked all-out war with) Iran with the January 2020 assassination of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani, which led Trump to send thousands more U.S. troops to the Middle East.

Four years later, the war Trump exacerbated is now out in the open, with Israel bombing Tehran and the Houthis launching missiles at Tel Aviv.² Trump has also signaled his robust support for Israel’s genocide, saying that Netanyahu is “doing a good job” and that “Biden is holding him back.” He has also repeatedly urged Bibi to “finish the job” in Gaza.

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