President Donald Trump has never had a problem with war.Ben Hickey
Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.
The right likes to pretend that President Donald Trump is antiwar. This has always been more useful delusion than fact, but there was once a half-truth buried in there. During a 2015 Republican primary debate, Trump broke with GOP orthodoxy by calling the second Iraq War a “big, fat mistake.” At rallies, he promised to stop “using our military to create democracies in countries with no democratic history.”
“Adventurism” has become the buzzword that MAGA wields to contrast themselves with previous regimes, even as they fight the same conflicts and forge new ones.
For the right-wing intellectuals who take cues from isolationist Pat Buchanan, this rupture was an opportunity. These men had long recommended that the United States stop trying to export democracy and import immigrants. Trump gave them a vessel; they gave him substance.
In his 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election,” writer and future White House national security strategist Michael Anton made the most famous argument for Trump as antiwar. Norms did not matter, Anton wrote. The West was dying. Trump was an anti-globalism antidote to decline. Under him, the US would no longer wage “endless, pointless, winless” wars, Anton pseudonymously promised. He would focus on America first.
However suspect the logic of an antiwar Trump, it has persisted for more than a decade. When then-Sen. JD Vance pledged his support for the president, after once wondering whether he was the next Hitler, he said it was because Trump had “started no wars.”
But casting Trump as “Donald the Dove” was always ridiculous. In 2016, Trump’s opposition to the Iraq invasion was simply that we’d lost a war. He supported invasion in the early 2000s and, to this day, is mainly upset we didn’t take the oil on the way out. Trump’s barbs at his 2016 opponent made clear the actual problem he saw. The issue with US foreign policy was not war, but, as Trump groused, that “Hillary Clinton favors what has been called ‘military adventurism.’”
“Adventurism” has become the buzzword that MAGA wields to contrast themselves with previous regimes, even as they fight the same conflicts and forge new ones. The US lost when it invaded countries like Vietnam and Iraq because those campaigns were based on flimsy pretexts with abstract, unattainable goals and sold to the public as virtuous missions. In December, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained the Trump administration strategy to Fox News as “not isolationism,” but also “not adventurism,” which he defined as when “there’s a problem in the world and the only solution to it is for the United States to send military assets to go solve it.” If only the US waged leaner and meaner wars, without sentimental moralizing, it would win. This is why Trump, who claims he’s stopped at least eight wars, is now overseeing what he and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insist on calling the Department of War.
The idea, outlined in a National Security Strategy (NSS) memo released in December, is that America should win the fights we choose, and should choose those fights based solely on our “core national interests.” The document defines these “interests” so broadly—“freedom of navigation,” preventing an “adversarial power from dominating the Middle East,” ensuring the power of US quantum computing—that one struggles to imagine a reason that would not qualify. But this haziness has not stopped right-wing proclamations of a new age of restraint. “No more undefined missions. No more open-ended conflicts,” now–Vice President Vance told Navy cadets last May. “We ought to be cautious in deciding to throw a punch, but when we throw a punch, we throw a punch hard, and we do it decisively.”
Despite such talk, Trump has acted less like a shrewd realist and more like a bully. Immediately after retaking office, he threatened to take back the Panama Canal and annex Canada and Greenland. Last June, American B-2 bomber planes struck Iran. He’s ratcheted up drone strikes in Somalia. And on Christmas Day, he ordered airstrikes on Nigeria.
Then, the big one: Early this year—after military buildup in the Caribbean and more than 100 deaths from boat strikes—the US made good on threats to go after Nicolás Maduro, attacking Venezuela and capturing the president. The reasoning wasn’t human rights, or even specious claims that Venezuela was flooding the US with drugs. Trump was explicit: It was to get oil.
There were no more bromides about democracy. Instead, it was “peace through strength” with “kinetic” strikes. “In rejecting ‘adventurism,’ the Trump administration is saying mainly that it wants to avoid protracted wars,” explained Stephen Wertheim, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a historian of US foreign policy, told me. But this approach, he said, “leaves in place enormous scope for military activities below that threshold” that “may end up entangling” the US all the same. Without a wholesale reckoning with American attempts at global primacy, US foreign policy will be in permanent crisis, Wertheim said.
The NSS, which Anton reportedly authored, makes plain the contradictions in MAGA’s critique of adventurism. The document says the rest of the world should be our concern only if a nation “directly threaten[s] our interests.” But if our national “interests” are defined as being “the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful country,” protected by “the world’s most powerful, lethal, and technologically advanced military,” who shouldn’t expect a fight?
Trump suggests the way to square this circle is to shrink the map. The NSS describes a restoration of “American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere,” or what Trump calls the “Donroe Doctrine.” But Venezuela made clear what that means. We ousted Maduro over erroneous claims about national security, and to seize oil. Suddenly, the new GOP’s antiwar foreign policy sounds a lot like old GOP pro-war foreign policy—except in Latin America, not the Middle East. When FBI Director Kash Patel declares we must treat narcotraffickers like “the al-Qaedas of the world,” that is not a critique of adventurism. It is adventurism coming home.
In 2025, federal agents in military gear dropped from a helicopter to raid an apartment building in Chicago. Days later, Hegseth was asked, half-jokingly, by Fox News whether a young soldier is more likely to deploy to the Middle East or the Midwest. “Well, I’ll tell you this,” Hegseth answered. “The era of reckless adventurism around the globe is over.”
Under Trump, the wars will continue—from Chicago to Caracas. It’s not a reckless adventure; it’s all part of the plan. Until Trump says it isn’t.
