Trump Overcomes His Isolationism

I always thought that the best thing about Donald Trump was his “isolationism,” his skepticism about foreign conflicts and his criticisms of the so-called “war on terror.” For example, debating Jeb Bush in 2016, he said "Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. All right? The war in Iraq, we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives… Obviously, it was a mistake. George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes, but that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East."

Famously, he called the US involvement in the Iraq "the worst decision ever made in the history of our country. We went to war under a false and now disproven premise."

In the 22 years since the Iraq invasion, the strategic situation in the Middle East and in the world has been profoundly transformed, including by an expansionist Iran, related civil wars in Syria, the extremely warlike Netanyahu administration in Israel, a resurgent and expansionist Russia and Turkey, and the de facto alliance of Israel and Saudi Arabia against Iran.

So the blossoming, bunker-busting war with Iran in 2025 is definitely not the same as Bush and Cheney's ground invasion of Iraq in 2003. Iraq and Iran are different, and the fight-back is liable to be different too. I'm not sure that anyone is contemplating a ground invasion of Iran, and such an action likely would end up being a ridiculous or infinite project, with extremely unpredictable consequences.

But it’s certainly not evident that actual regime change is possible without ground forces, and no one is likely to supply those ground forces but the US, especially as Israel is still engaged in Gaza and Lebanon, and redoubling its occupations on the restive West Bank. I hope that the administration isn’t seriously contemplating a ground war.

Furthermore, it seems that the pretense for the Iraq war was entirely manufactured, or that slight hints of weapons of mass destruction (alleged yellow cake and aluminum tubes, for example) were ridiculously overinterpreted by the American intelligence community (at the behest of Dick Cheney, I believe) in order to justify an invasion that George W. Bush wanted, perhaps partly as vengeance for Saddam Hussein's survival of the Desert Storm action by his father.

But few dispute that Iran has a concerted nuclear weapons program. But we need to hope that Netanyahu or, more relevantly, the Mossad, didn't manufacture the urgency which persuaded Trump to deploy B2 bombers and bunker-buster bombs to try to destroy the nuclear program right now. As Trump addressed the nation on Saturday night, he seemed to indicate that Iran was right on the edge of manufacturing and deploying nuclear weapons, that the weapons program had reached a new phase (claims which seem to contradict some of those made by Trump's Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, for example).

The concept of manufacturing or faking up an occasion or excuse for war is an old one, up to and including the Russians shelling their own territory in 1939 and blaming the Finns, then invading Finland. And the US employed such strategies, as in the explosion of the USS Maine in the harbor at Havana in 1898 and the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 that Lyndon Johnson used to embroil American ground forces in Vietnam.

In the cases of the Finns and the yellow cake, historians have reached the conclusion that the excuses for war were almost entirely fictional, though the reasons for which they were believed in the case of Iraq had to do with a combination of violent hostility to the emerging enemy and taking small, motivated hints in the intel with unwarranted seriousness.

In the cases of the Maine and the Gulf of Tonkin, however, the question of whether the occasion for war was a pure fiction or lie remain ambiguous all these decades later. The explosion of the Maine has been plausibly explained as an accident, predictable as she was carrying a large load of bituminous coal, which can ignite spontaneously. But at this point no one can really be sure. The Gulf of Tonkin incident is one of the most obscure segments of the world history of the last century: at this point you can read a library about it and still not be quite sure what happened or why.

Shrouding the origins of a war in obscurity and mythology is a tradition as old as Homer, perhaps because the outcomes of war often or even always swamp its intentions and leave you with the aching question of whether all that death and suffering was really justified. Perhaps we're seeing the latest iteration of that tradition now.

Although I’m a pacifist, I acknowledge that some wars are more justified than others, that some reasons to go to war are better than others. The chaos of the current Middle East and the emerging intelligence about it, and in particular the intimate relation of American and Israel's military and intelligence agencies, makes such concerns particularly acute in this case.

Netanyahu has become a wartime leader whose survival demands ever-expanding wars, and the brutal action in Gaza must finally be winding down. The intelligence that justified dropping the most destructive conventional weapons in our arsenals from planes designed for nuclear war might, hence, be motivated. Perhaps it’s not primarily responsive to the real situation.

How the war in the Middle East proceeds from here is truly unaccountable; we've got no idea. But why, exactly, it got started, and why it's expanding so dramatically right now, are urgent questions. And so is the question of what has become of Trump's isolationism and, hence, what and where will become of America's military and of the Middle East.

—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell