Many are now demanding that President Donald Trump act abroad in the way they think he had promised and campaigned—which can be mostly defined as how closely he should parallel their own version of MAGA.
But Trump’s past shows that he never claimed that he was either an ideological isolationist or an interventionist.
He was and is clearly a populist-nationalist: i.e., what in a cost-to-benefit analysis is in the best interests of the U.S. at home and its own particular agendas abroad?
Trump did not like neoconservatism because he never felt it was in our interests to spend blood and treasure on those who either did not deserve such largesse, or who would never evolve in ways we thought they should, or whose fates were not central to our national interests.
So-called optional, bad-deal, and forever wars in the Middle East and their multitrillion-dollar costs would come ultimately at the expense of shorting Middle America back home.
However, Trump’s first-term bombing of ISIS, standing down “little rocket man,” warning Russian President Vladimir Putin not to invade Ukraine between 2017-21, and killing off Qasem Soleimani, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and many of the attacking Russian Wagner Group in Syria were certainly not Charles Lindbergh isolationism but a sort of Jacksonian—something summed up perhaps as the Gadsen “Don’t tread on me” or Lucius Sulla’s “No better friend, no worse enemy.”
Trump’s much-critiqued references to Putin—most recently during the G7, and his negotiations with him over Ukraine—were never, as alleged, appeasement (he was harder in his first term on Putin than was either Barack Obama or Joe Biden), but art-of-the-deal/transactional (e.g., you don’t gratuitously insult or ostracize your formidable rival in possible dealmaking, but seek simultaneously to praise—and beat—him.)
Similarly, Winston Churchill initially saw the mass-murdering, treacherous Josef Stalin in the way Trump perhaps sees Putin, someone dangerous and evil, but who if handled carefully, occasionally granted his due, and approached with eyes wide open, could be useful in advancing a country’s realist interests—which for Britain in 1941 was for Russia to kill three-quarters of Nazi Germany’s soldiers and, mutatis mutandis, for the U.S. in 2025 to cease the mass killing near Europe, save most of an autonomous Ukraine, keep Russia back eastward as far as feasible, and in Kissingerian-style derail the developing Chinese and Russian anti-American axis.
Trump was never anti-Ukraine, but rather against a seemingly endless Verdun-like war in which after three years neither side had found a pathway to strategic resolution—a war from the distance fought between two like peoples, one with nuclear weapons, and on the doorstep of Europe.
Usually, Trump prefaced the war as a nonsensical wastage of life, at staggering human cost that his supposedly more humane and sophisticated critics never mentioned all that much.
At best, one could say Trump really did lament the horrific loss of life, and at the least, as a builder and dealmaker, wars for him rarely made any practical business sense, i.e., it seems wiser to build things and mutually profit than to blow them up and impoverish all involved.
Add it all up, and what Trump is doing vis-à-vis Iran seems in line with what he has said and done about “America First.”
He sees Israel’s interests in neutering the nuclear agendas of the thuggish and dangerous Iran as strategically similar to those of our own and our allies—but not necessarily tactically in every instance identically so. Thus, Trump wants the Iranian nuclear threat taken out by Israel—if feasible. And he will help facilitate that aim logistically and diplomatically.
If it is not possible for Israel to finish the task, in a cost-to-benefit analysis he will take it out—but, again, only after he is convinced that the end of Iran’s nukes and our intervention far outweigh the dangers of a superpower intervention, attacks on U.S. installations in the region, a wider, ongoing American commitment, spiraling oil prices, or distractions or even injury to his ambitious domestic agenda.
Trump is willing to talk to the Iranians, rarely insults their thuggish leaders, and wants to show that he always preferred exhausting negotiations to preemptive war.
That patience allows him to say legitimately that force was his last choice—as he sees all the alternatives waning.
Thus, Iran’s fate was in its own hands, either to be a nonnuclear rich state analogous to the Gulf States but no longer a half-century rogue terrorist regime seeking to overturn and then appropriate the Middle East order and to threaten the West with nukes.
Tactically, Trump thinks out loud. He offers numerous possible solutions, issues threats, and deadlines (some rhetorical or negotiable, others literal and ironclad). He alternates between sounding like a U.N. diplomat and a Cold War hawk, and sometime pivots and reverses himself as situations change.
All this can confuse his allies, but perhaps confounds more his enemies.
In sum, he believes as far as enemies go, public predictability is dangerous—unpredictability even volatility being the safer course.
Add it all up, and there is a reason Putin did not invade Ukraine during Trump’s first term; why for the first time in nearly 50 years the Middle East has some chance at normality with the demise of the Iran’s Shia crescent of terror; and why Europe and our Asian allies may be more irritated by Trump than by Obama and Biden, but also probably feel that he is more likely to defend their shared Western interests in extremis, and will lead a far stronger and more deterrent West than his predecessors, one that will prevent war by assuring others that it is suicidal to attack the U.S.
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