Peace President Trump's foreign policy defined?

Julian Borger and Andrew Roth explains how the Peace President turns out to be a warmongering militarist even worse the Dark Lord Dick Cheney:

The shadow of Bush and the regional conflagration he ignited have loomed over the events of the past week, though the inevitable comparisons have gone unacknowledged or been angrily rejected by the White House.

Trump had, after all, campaigned as a leader who would end America’s “forever wars” begun by Bush in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. His Maga movement was built on antipathy to foreign entanglement, and the president himself spent much of 2025 lobbying to be awarded the Nobel peace prize.

In the space of a few months, however, the “peace president” became the first US leader since Bush to lead a regime change war against a major adversary. (1)

I don’t think we can call the Peace President an ideologue. Because that implies some kind of coherent thinking. He’s a talented demagogue who as President is focused – to the extent he can focus on anything for long – with self-enrichment. For him, everyone from US soldiers killed in battle to his own followers are “suckers” and “losers.”

Trump, who allegedly studied economic or business or something in college, probably doesn’t know who John Maynard Keynes was and has undoubtedly never read any of his books. But this famous quote of Keynes does fit the Orange Anomaly well: “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”

Trump’s political mentor, the hardcore rightwing gay Mob lawyer Roy Cohn, was a huge influence on him. And Trump’s militaristic and nationalistic bluster is a clear example of that ugly corner of American political history. It’s not about “staying out of other people’s conflicts” or anything like that. It’s about the US being able to throw its military weight around without regard to law or principles.

The typical “isolationist” gripe about the war in Vietnam fit easily when braindead slogans like, “We never should have been there in the first place. But now that we’re there, we ought to win it!” What they meant by that pretty much came down to more bombing and killing more Vietnamese and killing them faster. Probably the most notorious version of this argument is associated with Air Force Gen. Curtis “Nuke” LeMay:

The quote is usually attributed to Curtis LeMay, the scowling Air Force general who incinerated two thirds of Japan’s cities in World War II and was disappointed when Kennedy wouldn’t let him do the same to Cuba. In his 1968 memoir he suggested that rather than negotiating with Hanoi, the United States should “bomb them back to the stone age,” by taking out factories, harbors, and bridges “until we have destroyed every work of man in North Vietnam.”

LeMay, however, had cribbed it from a June 1967 column by humorist Art Buchwald, who used the phrase to caricature the Goldwater Republican attitude toward Vietnam. The 1964 “Daisy Girl” ad had already tarred Republicans as inveterate bombers, but the joke came from Buchwald’s association of bombing with time travel. [my emphasis] (2)

Fantasizing about big bombs making big booms as the only way to make war is central to make of the rightwing hawkish positions. Although at least some of them manage to present a less bombastic image at times.

                                                  Curtis “Nuke” LeMay (1906-1990)

Joshua Leifer has provided a good succinct description of Trump's worldview, primitive though it may be:

Trump has unequivocally committed to a vision of muscular American global dominance, in which the U.S. acts unrestrained by international law, enforcing its will through the exercise of overwhelming military force.

In truth, Trump's deviation from precedent was always overstated. He campaigned and won – twice – on the promise to repudiate the neoconservatives' foreign policy legacy. In doing so, he dispensed with the moral language of promoting democracy and human rights that had long legitimized U.S. foreign interventions (the neoconservatives themselves having demolished respect for international law most spectacularly with the invasion of Iraq in 2003). Yet Trump never eschewed the basic belief that the United States should remain the dominant global power.

What he has done instead is rearticulate American hegemony in the jargon of a crueler worldview, according to which those with more power have their way with those who have less. "My own morality," Trump said last January, after the attack on Venezuela and abduction of its president. "It's the only thing that can stop me." (3)

Since there is not a lot obvious evidence for his own “morality,” that’s effectively his way of saying that he doesn’t think he is restrained by anything other than uncooperative flunkies.

A big part of the challenge in evaluating Trump's approach to foreign policy comes from the fact that he obviously has no clear strategic foreign-policy vision other than a bullying image of what US power is, combined with his desire to corruptly use his office to further enrich himself and his crime family.

To the extent he was something resembling foreign policy strategy, he’s eager to help Netanyahu’s Israel wreck even more of the Middle East.

Notes:

(1) Borger, J. (2026): From ‘peace president’ to Operation Epic Fury: Donald Trump’s road to war. Guardian 03/07/2026. <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/07/from-peace-president-to-operation-epic-fury-donald-trumps-road-to-war> (Accessed: 2026-08-03).

(2) Cullather, Nick (2026): Bomb them Back to the Stone Age: An Etymology. History News Network 10/06/2006. <https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/bomb-them-back-to-the-stone-age-an-etymology> (Accessed: 2026-08-03).

(3) Leifer, Joshua (2026): In Iran, Trump Finally Told the World What He Really Means by America First. Haaretz 03/01/2026. Gift length: <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/haaretz-today/2026-03-01/ty-article/.highlight/in-iran-trump-finally-told-the-world-what-he-really-means-by-america-first/0000019c-aa9c-d513-ab9e-eefd2d0a0001?gift=f0594fc33d294cb8b1e331d40d42d0ee> (Accessed: 2026-08-03).