I have posted similar points in other tweets and posts, but what sparked this rant is the fact early this week I twice ran into similar posts, on Facebook and Gab, which basically made the point that, unlike his warmonger predecessors Bush and Obama, Trump has been a man of peace and has not started a war. On Facebook, I particularly took aim at the disingenuous poster (maybe a troll) at the Classical Liberalism troll. I first of all acknowledged I had issues with Obama's interventionism but simply pointed out that Trump had escalated drone attacks over Obama, with thousands of civilian casualties. The OP came back at me, loosely paraphrased: "Dude: can't you read? Don't you know Obama bombed hospitals, weddings and funerals?" This is a time you seriously want a stupid troll's ass kicked. Of course, Obama wasn't deliberately targeting civilians; we are talking collateral damage in the war on terrorism. This doesn't make the loss of civilian lives and property any less tragic, but the fact that Trump scaled up bombing attacks did not imply that somehow Trump's attacks had no civilian casualties. In fact, I cited a BBC report that Trump rolled back an Obama rule to report civilian casualties (I wonder why...)
Trump may have spoken "America first" and paid lip service to non-interventionism, but it's a clear case of "watch what he does, not what he says", although some of what he does say is pretty damning, e.g., “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.” Trump has simply been more secretive about what he's doing, no longer reporting the facts and figures
Let's provide some illustrative excerpts from the above-cited source:
Trump famously summed up his policy as “bomb the shit out of” the Islamic State....Iraqi forces captured East Mosul from the Islamic State on January 24 [2017], and in February, they began their assault on West Mosul, bombing and shelling it even more heavily until they captured the ruined city in July. A Kurdish Iraqi intelligence report recorded that more than forty thousand civilians were killed in the US-led destruction of Mosul.,,,By October 2017, Raqqa in Syria was even more totally destroyed than Mosul in Iraq. Under Obama and Trump, the United States and its allies have dropped more than 118,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq and Syria in their campaign against the Islamic State...[Trump] approved a major escalation in US bombing that made 2018 and 2019 the heaviest and deadliest years of US bombing in Afghanistan since 2001....Trump made a great show of repositioning US troops in Syria in October 2019, leaving the United States’ Kurdish allies in Rojava to confront the Turkish invasion alone. But there are still at least 500 US troops in Syria, and Trump deployed 14,000 more US troops to the Middle East in 2019, including to a new base in Saudi Arabia. Trump has vetoed every bill passed by Congress to disengage US forces from the Saudi war in Yemen and to halt the sales of US-made warplanes and bombs, which the Saudis use to systematically kill Yemeni civilians. He created a new conflict with Iran by pulling out of the nuclear deal, and in January 2020, he capriciously flirted with a full-scale war on Iran by ordering the assassination of Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi military commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in Iraq....the US military budget fell to $621 billion by 2015. But since then, military spending for procurement, research and development (R&D), and base construction has risen by 39 percent.
Another sore point for us libertarians is Trump's trade wars and use of economic sanctions. We have a saying (sometimes wrongly attributed to Bastiat) that "when goods don't cross borders, armies will". (Of course, economic wars have their own collateral damage on innocent civilians; just take recent sanctions Trump has imposed on Cuba and Yemen.)
The US Treasury department says it has imposed sanctions on some 2,800 individuals, entities, vessels and aircraft under Mr Trump...[After Trump assassinated Iranian official Soleimani] President Donald Trump had chosen to ramp up economic sanctions on Tehran rather than hit back with military action that might have precipitated all-out war. “The goal of our campaign is to deny the regime the resources to conduct its destructive foreign policy,” said Mr Mnuchin...Even as it imposed more economic constraints on Iran, the US has this month also threatened to impose new sanctions on Iraq if it expels American troops, moved to impose restrictions on a senior official from South Sudan for alleged involvement in human rights abuses, and slapped more sanctions on current and former members of President Nicolás Maduro’s government in Venezuela....
So Trump has not lived up to his non-interventionist rhetoric; we're still involved with Bush's and Obama's wars and in many cases hyped withdrawals are little more than redeployed manpower elsewhere in the region. Trump has continued to pursue unconstitutional drone wars. International watchdog entities like Amnesty International attest to ongoing collateral damage, even as Trump tries to censor information about civilian casualties from government sources. In 2018, Trump ordered missile strikes into Syria, a country which poses no military threat against the US and which did not attack the US. Even as Trump has paid lip service to non-interventionist rhetoric, he has pushed for and signed into law massive increases in the DoD budget. Even as he criticized George W. Bush's unnecessary Gulf Wars, he hired Bush Administration neo-cons like John Bolton as his national security adviser. He tore up the Iran deal, scuttled TPP, has bullied NATO nations in an attempt to force them into raising defense expenditures, and bullied Canada and Mexico into USMCA, which did little, if anything to further liberalize trade in North America and improve over the original NAFTA. His cowboy, go-it-alone diplomacy (e.g., unilateral recognition of Jerusalem) has had a destabilizing effect on international affairs while failing to address more fundamental problems, like Palestinian status.
So please don't preach to me about Trump's purported accomplishments in foreign policy. We are in the aftermath of a likely massive Russian cyberattack on the government and major corporations. China is capitalizing on international resentment against American policy under Trump.
