President Trump Is a Warmonger |
Earlier this month, the Trump administration released its new National Security Strategy, or NSS. Normally, such documents are poor predictors of what’s likely to happen in the real world. They are more like branding tools that communicate the attitudes of a given administration while rarely offering a detailed or accurate picture of its likely policies.
The reason documents like the NSS are of limited import is simple enough: foreign and military policies aren’t set by documents but by power and ideology. Typically enough, the current U.S. approach to the world flows from struggles among representatives of contending interest groups, some of which, like the military-industrial complex (MIC), have a significant advantage in the fight. The weapons industry and its allies in the Pentagon and Congress wield a wide array of tools of influence, including tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions, more than 1,000 lobbyists, and jobs tied to military-related facilities in the states and districts of key members of Congress. The MIC — which my colleague Ben Freeman and I refer to in our new book as the trillion-dollar war machine — also has considerable influence over the institutions that shape our view of the world, from the media to DC think tanks, Hollywood, the gaming industry, and our universities.
But the power and influence of the war machine are not going completely unchallenged. The grip of militarism and the institutions that profit from it are indeed being challenged by organizations like The Poor People’s Campaign: A Call for Moral Revival; Dissenters, a youth antimilitarism group based in Chicago; antiwar veterans organizations like About Face, Common Defense, and Veterans for Peace; longstanding peace groups like the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Peace Action; networks like People Over Pentagon and Dismantle the Military-Industrial Complex; the ceasefire and Palestinian rights movements on U.S. campuses and beyond; and groups working for racial and economic justice, gay and trans rights, immigration reform, the demilitarization of the police, or compensation for environmental damage caused by nuclear weapons testing and other military activities. As such organizations coalesce, bringing together tens of millions of us whose lives and prospects are impacted by this country’s ever-growing war machine, let’s hope it might be possible to create the power needed to build a better, more tolerant, and more peaceful world, one that meets the needs of the majority of its people, rather than endlessly squandering precious resources on war and preparations for more of it.
So why pay attention to that new strategy document if what really determines our safety and security lies elsewhere? There are several reasons to do so.
Second, that strategy paper reflects the unnerving intentions and worldview of the current administration, which, of course, has the power to determine whether this country is at war or peace.
Finally, it suggests just how the Trump administration would like to be perceived. As such, it should be considered a weapon in the debate over what kind of country the United States should be.
Touting the “President of Peace”
From the start, the submission letter that accompanies the new strategy document is pure Donald Trump. In case you hadn’t noticed, the current occupant of the Oval Office would have us believe that everything — every single thing! — he does is bigger, better, and more beautiful than anything that ever came before it. And that’s definitely the case, in the first year of his second term, when it comes to his view of what this country’s national security policies should actually be. As the letter puts it:
Needless to say, we’re expected to attribute that alleged American revival to the brilliance and tough-guy attitudes of the president and his team. But any reasonable American should instantly have doubts about that. After all, one of the Trump administration’s proudest accomplishments, as the new document notes, has been getting “radical gender ideology and woke lunacy out of our military.” Or, to put it slightly differently, under the guise of its crusade against DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), the administration has effectively dismantled programs designed to reduce racism, misogyny, and anti-gay and anti-trans violence in the ranks of the military.
Whether the programs aimed at reducing entrenched discrimination in those ranks were ever sufficient is certainly doubtful, but that discrimination in the military needs to be addressed should have been and should still be beyond question. To cite just one example, a 2024 study by political geographer Jennifer Greenberg conducted for the Costs of War Project at Brown University found that there were more than 70,000 cases of sexual assault in the U.S. military in 2021 and 2023 (the years covered by her analysis). Her report also noted that, “on average, over the course of the war in Afghanistan, 24 percent of active-duty women and 1.9 percent of active-duty men experienced sexual assault.” Pretending that widespread sexual violence doesn’t exist in the U.S. military or dismissing it as an example of “radical gender ideology and woke lunacy” should be considered, at best, a policy equivalent of criminal negligence. And it’s certainly not a great look for the person who desperately wants to be known as the “president of peace.”
But our commander-in-chief is nothing if not persistent (and predictable). In his introduction to the new strategy document, I’m sure you won’t be shocked to learn that President Trump takes the opportunity to pat himself on the back for allegedly ending “eight raging conflicts” in his first eight months in office — including those between Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, India and Pakistan, and Israel and Iran.
Of course, residents of many of those countries can be forgiven for not being aware of President Trump’s purported role in bringing relative peace to their regions or, in some of those cases, for failing to note that the peaceful situations he claims to have brought about don’t even exist. And they would be right to be skeptical. After all, this is the same president who has decimated the U.S. diplomatic corps and dismantled Washington’s main economic and humanitarian aid organization, the U.S. Agency for International Development — hardly the actions of a president of global peace.
Trump’s rhetoric in his introductory letter contrasts with some of the more sober passages in the document itself. His ranting and self-praise, however, are undoubtedly of more relevance when it comes to understanding the world that we’re actually in than the words in the body of that strategy’s blueprint. If his time in office tells us anything, it’s that his administration’s policies are heavily influenced by his personal desires and resentments, whether or not they square with existing laws, procedures, or policy pronouncements.
The Donroe Doctrine: A 19th Century Strategy for the 21st Century World
The aspect of the newly announced military strategy that has........