Trump Promised an Antiwar Presidency. He’s Delivered the Opposite.
It’s hard to believe now, but Donald Trump once promised to be an antiwar president. “I’m not going to start a war,” he said when he won reelection. “I’m going to stop the wars.”
Instead, wars under Trump are becoming more deadly and expansive. Trump continues to arm Israel and defend its prime minister despite the country’s well-documented genocide in Gaza. Russia’s war with Ukraine—which Trump said repeatedly that he would end within “24 hours” of taking office—has been as bloody as ever.
And Trump is expanding the post-9/11 “forever wars” in three crucial ways.
The first is escalating U.S. military operations in the Middle East and East Africa. The first country the U.S. bombed when Trump returned to the White House was Somalia, and Washington has bombed the East African nation repeatedly since. The Pentagon carried out what it boasted was the “largest airstrike” in history on the country in May.
Trump also bombarded Yemen earlier this year—only to unceremoniously call it off when it was clear that the U.S. was failing in its military goals. And of course, the U.S. joined Israel’s unprovoked, devastating 12-day bombardment of Iran this summer—fulfilling the fantasies of the same hardline hawks and neoconservatives in Washington Trump once criticized.
Second, Trump is using the framework of the “war on terror” to bring a new era of U.S. militarism to Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.
The Caribbean has been part of the “war on terror” since the very beginning. Starting in 2001, the U.S. began making new use of its military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba—which at that point had been in Washington’s possession for over a century—as an extralegal prison notorious for torture and indefinite detention without charge. This travesty continues, despite repeated Cuban demands to return the land.
