For all one’s doubts about Trump, his main appeal is that of restraining Washington’s war machine. As my friend Ron Maxwell, producer of two great war movies, writes, “Trump may be the only off ramp from non-stop wars of choice we’re likely to see in our lifetimes.”
The establishment Republican leadership that Trump is challenging is virtually addicted to perpetual war, while Democrats are so afraid of being called wimpy that they too end up supporting more wars. Just consider how many nations Obama now bombs. Yet Hillary Clinton would be even worse; it was she who pushed Obama into attacking Libya and was an architect of his Syria policy. Now she supports R2P—Responsibility to Protect—a doctrine that leads to new wars whenever any foreign government oppresses its own people. She also supports unilateral American attacks even though the UN document specifically states that only the United Nations Security Council may order such interventions.
Although Trump’s foreign-policy talk is all over the map, he dared to attack the Republican establishment’s consensus support for the Iraq War and, alone among major Republicans, talked of restraint in launching new wars. The vicious attacks upon him by Washington’s dominant hawkish neoconservatives corroborate the belief that Trump opposes new imperial wars. Trust their judgment about whom they oppose. Trump also was attacked by the discredited Republican 121 “foreign policy elites,” those who created, propagandized, and helped sustain our disastrous wars. This reaction to Trump shows how much Washington elites fear him.
Trump’s sheer joy for life, his instinct for “making deals” with enemies, and his desire for rapprochement with Russia would all check the establishment’s dangerous belligerence. He’d least of all want to risk nuclear war. Support for him among younger evangelicals has also fractured our own “Armageddon Lobby,” those who constantly want more Mideast wars because they believe they help bring about the “end times.”
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