{"id":980872,"date":"2023-02-03T09:59:46","date_gmt":"2023-02-03T09:59:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2023\/02\/j-d-vance-wrong-donald-trump-antiwar-president-foreign-policy\/"},"modified":"2023-02-03T10:02:48","modified_gmt":"2023-02-03T10:02:48","slug":"j-d-vance-is-wrong-donald-trump-was-no-antiwar-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/02\/03\/j-d-vance-is-wrong-donald-trump-was-no-antiwar-president\/","title":{"rendered":"J. D. Vance Is Wrong. Donald Trump Was No Antiwar President."},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

J. D. Vance, the faux-populist senator from Ohio, says that Donald Trump \u201ckept the peace\u201d as president. He has a short memory.<\/h3>\n\n\n
\n \n
\n Ohio senator J. D. Vance speaking in Columbus, Ohio. (Sarah L. Voisin \/ the Washington Post<\/cite> via Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

In an op-ed<\/a> this week for the Wall Street Journal<\/i>, Ohio senator J. D. Vance praises Donald Trump\u2019s record as president and endorses Trump\u2019s bid for the 2024 Republican nomination.<\/p>\n

No surprises there. Vance wouldn\u2019t be in the Senate today if Trump hadn\u2019t endorsed him \u2014 or if pro-Trump billionaire Peter Thiel hadn\u2019t bankrolled his campaign. And there\u2019s very little daylight between Vance and Trump on issues ranging from the right-wing panic over \u201cCritical Race Theory\u201d to their shared<\/a> opposition<\/a> to a $15 minimum wage.<\/p>\n

But Vance\u2019s pitch for Trump is all about foreign policy. According to Vance, Trump broke from the \u201chawkish\u201d policies of his predecessors and \u201ckept the peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s absurd.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

Cherry-Picking Trump\u2019s Record<\/h2>\n \n

Vance says that Trump \u201cstarted no wars despite enormous pressure from his own party and even members of his administration.\u201d An attentive reader might wonder how such people made it into his administration in the first place if Trump was such a dove.<\/p>\n

Did someone force Trump to appoint hardcore neoconservatives like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo as national security adviser and secretary of state? Were their selections some sort of accident? Or might these ultra-hawks have indicated something about Trump\u2019s foreign policy preferences?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take a look at his record.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that no full-fledged wars started during Trump\u2019s term, just as none started during Barack Obama\u2019s second term. But what about what Trump did<\/i> do?<\/p>\n

Vance brings up the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords between Israel and Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as if this brought peace to the Middle East. But neither Bahrain nor the UAE has ever been at war with Israel. As far as I can tell, Israel has never even approached military conflict with either one.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, on the Israeli\/Palestinian conflict, Trump fulfilled a major item on the neocon wish list. After the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel unilaterally annexed Palestinian territory in East Jerusalem and proclaimed the newly \u201creunited\u201d city its indivisible capital. Several decades of US presidents, none of them friends of the Palestinian cause, drew the line at recognizing this illegal annexation \u2014 and implicitly taking East Jerusalem off the table in any future US-brokered peace talks \u2014 by moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. Trump leapt over that line<\/a> his first year in office, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel\u2019s capital.<\/p>\n

In what world is torpedoing peace prospects in Palestine made up for by ending the non-existent conflict between Israel and Bahrain?<\/p>\n

Vance says that Trump \u201copened diplomatic talks with North Korea after a half century of stagnation.\u201d And it\u2019s true that the talks happened. It\u2019s also true that they didn\u2019t go anywhere. There\u2019s been no peace treaty or even informal normalization. In fact, neither the United States nor North Korea has even been willing to make a No First Use<\/a> commitment on nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

Vance also seems to have forgotten what spurred those talks in the first place. They occurred because the US and North Korea came closer to the brink of war than they\u2019d been in a very long time, largely due to Trump\u2019s attitude toward the North Korean leader he called \u201cLittle Rocket Man.\u201d Not only were Trump and Kim Jong-un regularly exchanging terrifying threats on Twitter, but Trump reportedly<\/a> asked the chairman of his Joint Chiefs of Staff for a \u201cplan for a preemptive military strike on North Korea\u201d early in his presidency.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m glad Trump calmed down. But it\u2019s more than a little odd to award him points for the change of heart without docking any points for the initial belligerence.<\/p>\n

And these three data points \u2014 the change of heart on North Korea, the Abraham Accords, and the absence of any full-fledged new wars \u2014 are the sum total of Vance\u2019s case for Trump as a peacenik.<\/p>\n

They definitely weren\u2019t the sum total of his foreign policy.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n

The Rest of the Record<\/h2>\n \n

Joe Biden has been in office for a little over two years. Has he<\/i> started any new wars?<\/p>\n

On first glance, he hasn\u2019t. In fact, Biden finally tore off the Band-Aid of America\u2019s \u201cforever war\u201d in Afghanistan \u2014 something Trump was never quite willing to do, though he often talked about it.<\/p>\n

Perhaps Vance\u2019s answer would be that, even if the United States hasn\u2019t officially entered Russia\u2019s brutal war in Ukraine, Biden has in effect stepped in by funding and arming the Ukrainian military. Indeed, Vance opens his op-ed by talking about Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky\u2019s \u201chero\u2019s welcome\u201d in Washington, DC.<\/p>\n

But if we\u2019re going to include proxy wars in the tally, the claim that Trump didn\u2019t launch any new wars goes out the window. As hard as it is to remember now, a major GOP talking point about President Obama being \u201cweak\u201d was that Obama refused to send heavy weaponry to Ukraine for its war against Russian-backed separatists starting in 2014. Trump reversed<\/a>\u00a0that policy during his first year in office.<\/p>\n

Speaking of proxy wars, Trump vetoed a Bernie Sanders\u2013led resolution to end US military assistance to Saudi Arabia in the Saudis\u2019 murderous war in Yemen. So far that war has killed well over four hundred thousand people and triggered<\/a> an \u201cimmense humanitarian crisis.\u201d But maybe that doesn\u2019t count.<\/p>\n

Neither, apparently, does the US-backed coup in Bolivia<\/a> or the attempted coup to install Juan Guaid\u00f3<\/a> as president of Venezuela.<\/p>\n

How about the drone war? Trump lifted<\/a> even the weak rules restricting the use of drones imposed during the Obama years. It\u2019s hard to be sure how many innocent people lost their lives as a result, because Trump also revoked<\/a> an Obama-era rule requiring intelligence officials to report civilian deaths from drone strikes conducted \u201coutside of active war zones.\u201d We do know that the number of such strikes dramatically increased<\/a> after Trump took office.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n

The Iran-Sized Hole in Vance\u2019s Narrative<\/h2>\n \n

All this would be bad enough, but the most striking absence in Vance\u2019s op-ed is Iran.<\/p>\n

The Obama administration \u2014 despite an otherwise underwhelming record \u2014 hammered out a landmark nuclear deal with Iran. Trump backed out of that deal and imposed crushing new sanctions on Iran. And he massively ramped up tensions by assassinating<\/a> Iran general Qassem Soleimani.<\/p>\n

Crediting Trump with not starting any full-fledged wars is a bit like praising a little boy who goes around a dry forest setting off firecrackers because none of them ultimately sparked a run-away forest fire. It\u2019s true that some of Trump\u2019s most war-crazed lieutenants wanted him to set off more firecrackers than he did. But to give Trump as much credit as Vance does for not taking this advice ignores that Trump knew exactly how firecracker-happy they were when he appointed them.<\/p>\n

If your case for Trump the Dove goes something like this:<\/p>\n

Sure, he pulled out of the nuclear deal, assassinated Soleimani, brought the US to the brink with North Korea, escalated US involvement in the proxy war in Ukraine, made Israeli\/Palestinian peace more distant than ever, ensured continued US military support for the Saudi war in Yemen, and dramatically ramped up the drone war, but just think of all the belligerent actions he didn\u2019t take!<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2026you\u2019re doing it wrong.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s get real.<\/p>\n

Trump was a hawk.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n\n\n

This post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an op-ed this week for the Wall Street Journal, Ohio senator J. D. Vance praises Donald Trump\u2019s record as president and endorses Trump\u2019s bid for the 2024 Republican nomination. No surprises there. Vance wouldn\u2019t be in the Senate today if Trump hadn\u2019t endorsed him \u2014 or if pro-Trump billionaire Peter Thiel hadn\u2019t bankrolled his [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1826,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/980872"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1826"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=980872"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/980872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":980873,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/980872\/revisions\/980873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=980872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=980872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=980872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}