Is Trump the peace candidate?

There are still "peace-Democrats."

These are liberal Democrats who question the 20th century bipartisan consensus that we are the virtuous peacemaker in the world.

The U.S. conquered and occupied the continental U.S. It became a colonizing empire with the conquest of Hawaii and its claims over Spanish possessions after the war with Spain. We picked sides in World War I; we allied with the Soviet Union to defeat the Axis powers in World War II; we intervened covertly in overthrowing governments --including democracies -- around the world. 

San Francisco 1967

Many current "peace-Democrats" came of age during the war in Vietnam. That war aged poorly. It offended American values as news creeped out that we were killing millions of civilians, and using body counts as a way to measure our success. American leaders misunderstood the war, and thought it a fight to contain China, when it was better understood as a war of independence by Vietnam against both Chinese and Western colonialism. Once the U.S. lost the war and departed, Vietnam quickly became what we wanted all along: an independent Vietnam. So many killed, and for what?

Democrats are trying to decide how they lost. Inflation? Biden's delay? The trans issue? Harris' failure to do a Sister Souljah moment to break with wokeness? Maybe some people found reason to think that Trump was the peace candidate.

Jack Mullen is no fan of Donald Trump. But Democrats, especially ones that retain their anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-CIA-interventionist orientation, have some reason to hope that Trump is all bluster and bullying, but not in fact eager to use the American military. Possibly the real Donald Trump, the man skeptical of deep state orthodoxy, is also skeptical of the military-industrial complex and wary that our intelligence agencies will mire us in foreign wars. Possibly "America First" is less xenophobia and racist than it is a calculation that we have problems enough at home and need not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, as John Quincey Adams put it. 

Jack Mullen has written here about two subjects: sports and American foreign policy. He is a Duck fan and a veteran of the Peace Corps. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife Jennifer Angelo.

Guest Post by Jack Mullen

                              America the Superpower

Most post-election analysis of Donald Trump’s victory centers on a wide range of discontent, be it illegal immigration or prices at the grocery store. A sour mood shrouded the electorate to the point that any positive accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration were seen as government business as usual.

Trump’s appeal was not just on domestic issues. He swung hard at foreign policy and hit the mark on forever endless wars that began with our involvement in Vietnam, and despite a small lag in time, resumed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Early in his 2016 campaign, Trump blistered laggard NATO nations who Trump rightly pointed out took for granted American finances and troop deployment in Europe. It doesn’t take a college graduate to figure out that a large chunk of money being poured overseas year was done at taxpayer’s expense.

Defense contractors get fat and sassy with the increasing bipartisan funding that goes unobserved by all except Wall Street. Democratic and Republican Congresses and Democratic and Republican administration rarely raise a peep over defense spending. That is until Donald Trump arrived.

George Washington advised against America’s involvement in foreign wars, but a little skirmish with Mexico in the 1840s, and a trumped-up war with Spanish Empire in the late 1890’s seemed worthwhile. The prolonged war against Native Americans was seen as an extension of America’s Manifest Destiny. These were not overseas wars (sorry Philippines, you are too small to register in most Americans' consciousness). Nineteenth Century America took Washington's advisement to heart.

A strong isolationist current almost prevented the U.S. from entering World War I. Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, resigned in opposition to the large European War that threatened to suck us across the Atlantic. We entered that war, and for better or worse, became a superpower, sometimes a reluctant one, sometimes not.

The dissatisfaction with our military leadership over the last 30 years with our failed wars and the incalculable costs to America’s veterans and their families, most of whom are from red states, helped give Donald a path to regain the White House. Voters were wary of plowing more money into an endless war in Ukraine and the Middle East. The ball now rests in the hands of Donald Trump as the most powerful man in the world.

 

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