The extraordinary altercation on Monday between Trump campaign aides and an Arlington National Cemetery official over political photography on sacred military ground is playing out in a hyperpartisan moment when war records and former President Donald J. Trump’s respect for military service are already up for debate.
But the conflict at Arlington Cemetery’s Section 60, reserved for those recently killed in America’s wars abroad, points to a deeper issue for Mr. Trump and his core foreign policy identity: The 2024 presidential campaign between the former president and Vice President Kamala Harris is the first in 24 years to unfold without an active American ground war.
Mr. Trump’s rise in 2016 signified a major break from the foreign policy orthodoxy of both major parties, which believed in a U.S.-led internationalism and the projection of force abroad, whether it was the wars launched by George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq or the conflicts embraced by Democrats to thwart ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and Bosnia and to end a dictatorship in Libya. That year, it was the Republican, Mr. Trump, who spoke of ending war, and the Democrat, Hillary Clinton, who bore the unpopular mantle of military aggression with her vote authorizing the invasion of Iraq and her muscular diplomacy as secretary of state.
Mr. Trump has used the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan during the Biden administration to resurrect his critiques of the “forever wars” that in part powered his movement. Now, he warns of a looming “World War III,” promises to end the war in Ukraine before he is inaugurated and brags that his relationships with authoritarian leaders like Xi Jinping of China, Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Kim Jong-un of North Korea will restore stability and allow him to focus on securing domestic tranquillity.
Mr. Trump is the candidate of peace through strength, said Brian Hughes, a Trump campaign senior adviser, while Ms. Harris is “the candidate of war because as ‘the last person in the room’ with Biden before the Afghanistan debacle, we are closer than ever to a world war than any other time in the last 50 years.”
But to Mr. Trump’s political opponents, his arguments are having trouble sticking in part because voters do not believe his warnings of imminent American warfare.
“The problem for Trump is that this is yet another issue where he ran promising the voters something, he had four years to do it, and he didn’t get it done,” said Conor Lamb, a former Marine and former Democratic House member from western Pennsylvania. “He said he was going to end the forever wars in 2016. We were still in Afghanistan in 2020 when he left. And he’s still on it.”
Democrats have tried to make Mr. Trump’s attitude toward the military and veterans an issue since the former president suggested in 2015 that John McCain was a war hero only “because he was captured.”
Yet amid accusations that he called the war dead “suckers” and “losers,” that he skipped a visit to an American military cemetery in France because of rainy weather and that he chastised his top military general for choosing an Army captain who had lost a leg in Afghanistan to sing “God Bless America,” Mr. Trump has held on to the allegiance of many veterans and active service members as the embodiment of peace through strength at home and the withdrawal of forces abroad.
Those allegiances are again being tested — and this time, the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan no longer rage as a foil.
In two short weeks, the former president has faced blowback three times on issues of war, peace and military veterans. On Aug. 15, Mr. Trump described the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which honors civilians, as being “much better” than the Medal of Honor, because service members who receive what is the nation’s highest military honor are often severely wounded or dead.
Six days later, the Trump campaign released a letter from Republican lawmakers with military service accusing Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee, of inflating his military service, only to face accusations that some of the signers, including Representatives Ronny Jackson and Troy E. Nehls, both of Texas, had themselves distorted their military records.
Then on Monday, when the Trump campaign tried to bring a campaign photographer into Arlington’s Section 60, venerated by many veterans, an altercation ensued. Cemetery officials said they had “reinforced and widely shared” to the Trump campaign that federal laws prohibits campaign activities by photographers “or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign.” Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, accused the cemetery official who tried to block access of “clearly suffering from a mental health episode.”
The altercation came on a day when Mr. Trump was meant to castigate Mr. Biden — and by extension, Ms. Harris — for the suicide bombing three years earlier that left 13 American troops dead during the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Chaotic and bloody as it was, that withdrawal had been set in motion by Mr. Trump, and neither his campaign nor Ms. Harris’s has suggested that ending that war, the longest in American history, was a mistake.
The role that the post-9/11 wars played in Mr. Trump’s rise cannot be overstated, said Dan Caldwell, a public policy adviser at Defense Priorities, a nonpartisan research group focused on what it calls realism and restraint in foreign policy. He pointed to a study by professors at the University of Minnesota and Boston University, which found that the counties in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that moved most from Barack Obama in 2012 to Mr. Trump in 2016 were disproportionately affected by military deployments, deaths and injuries.
“It is a critical part of the rise of Trump and Trumpism,” Mr. Caldwell said. “You cannot separate the rise of Trump from our failed wars after Sept. 11.”
Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters in the politicized community of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans say nothing has actually changed since the formal drawdown of troops.
Joe Kent, a former Army special forces and C.I.A. paramilitary officer running for Congress in Washington State, rejected, as “blatantly false and misleading,” the idea that the post-9/11 wars were over. Three American soldiers were killed in the Middle East in January; two Navy SEALs died fighting the Houthis that same month, and attacks on bases in Iraq and Syria are continuing, he said.
Representative Eli Crane, Republican of Arizona and a combat-tested Navy SEAL, credited Mr. Trump with transforming the definition of patriotism from the casual projection of U.S. military force abroad to the careful marshaling of military might for core domestic interests. And, he said, Mr. Trump’s work is not finished.
“I really don’t look at it as a veteran myself through the lens of, ‘Hooray, we don’t have a declared war with conventional troops in combat right now,’” he said. “I look at it with a forward-leaning lens: We certainly are fighting a war. We’re fighting a proxy war in Ukraine, and it has potentially catastrophic outcomes.”
Democrats are more than willing to have that fight. On Wednesday, Representative Mikie Sherrill, Democrat of New Jersey and a former Navy helicopter pilot, called Mr. Trump’s actions in Arlington “an absolute disgrace.” Representative Jake Auchincloss, Democrat of Massachusetts and a former Marine, went further, writing on social media that they were “part of a pattern” and that Mr. Trump was “a draft-dodger who called American war dead ‘suckers & losers’, attacked a Gold Star family & POW, & wants to cut veterans’ benefits.”
Jon Soltz, an Army Iraq War veteran and the chairman of the liberal political action committee VoteVets, said the world had changed since Mr. Trump’s rise in 2016. More troops died in combat under Mr. Trump’s command than Mr. Biden’s, he said. And the Democratic Party under Ms. Harris is not ceding ground on patriotism.
“This is a new Democratic Party,” Mr. Soltz said. “The veterans are over here now, and we’re not playing that game.”
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