It’s hard to believe now, but Donald Trump once promised to be an antiwar president. “I’m not going to start a war,” he said when he won reelection. “I’m going to stop the wars.”
Instead, wars under Trump are becoming more deadly and expansive. Trump continues to arm Israel and defend its prime minister despite the country’s well-documented genocide in Gaza. Russia’s war with Ukraine—which Trump said repeatedly that he would end within “24 hours” of taking office—has been as bloody as ever.
And Trump is expanding the post-9/11 “forever wars” in three crucial ways.
The first is escalating U.S. military operations in the Middle East and East Africa. The first country the U.S. bombed when Trump returned to the White House was Somalia, and Washington has bombed the East African nation repeatedly since. The Pentagon carried out what it boasted was the “largest airstrike” in history on the country in May.
Trump also bombarded Yemen earlier this year—only to unceremoniously call it off when it was clear that the U.S. was failing in its military goals. And of course, the U.S. joined Israel’s unprovoked, devastating 12-day bombardment of Iran this summer—fulfilling the fantasies of the same hardline hawks and neoconservatives in Washington Trump once criticized.
Second, Trump is using the framework of the “war on terror” to bring a new era of U.S. militarism to Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.
The Caribbean has been part of the “war on terror” since the very beginning. Starting in 2001, the U.S. began making new use of its military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba—which at that point had been in Washington’s possession for over a century—as an extralegal prison notorious for torture and indefinite detention without charge. This travesty continues, despite repeated Cuban demands to return the land.
The U.S. abduction of Muslims around the world to detain and torture them at Guantanamo lowered the global floor for the treatment of people in detention. The dehumanizing designation of these men as “terrorists”—despite a single conviction for anyone detained in the entire history of Guantanamo Bay—has been central to their mistreatment.
Others took notice—particularly Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador and self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator.”
Bukele built one of the largest prisons on Earth and named it the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism. Having gotten away with arbitrary and indefinite detention in the name of targeting gangs and combating “terrorism,” Bukele has enthusiastically imprisoned the migrants Trump has deported from the United States without due process, often in horrific conditions.
Like Bukele, Trump is running with the tactic of tagging individuals and forces as “terrorists” to justify military violence against them. His designation of Mexican drug cartels and Venezuelan and Salvadoran gangs as “terrorist organizations” enables the U.S. government to enact a set of measures against the groups—including carrying out military attacks. Trump also announced a similar designation for Haitian gangs.
Finally, Trump is aggressively expanding the domestic aspects of the “war on terror.”
Trump’s recently passed budget bill increases ICE‘s budget from $9.3 billion last year to an average annual of $37.5 billion—greater than the entire military budgets of most countries on Earth. Having deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles to crack down on protests challenging the deportations, the White House then approved the deployment of 700 more Marines to three more states to assist ICE.
Most recently, Trump announced the deployment of the National Guard to the streets of Washington, D.C., supposedly in the name of cracking down on crime. Declining violent crime rates in D.C. and other cities suggest that sending troops has more to do with flexing authoritarian muscle and forcing homeless people out of sight than solving a problem.
Any expectation that Trump would bring a new era of reduced wars is being dashed by the brutal, opposite reality. As resistance to Trump’s policies mounts across the board—from his immigration raids to his safety net cuts—it is critical to also challenge his militarism. Our demands for justice must include a future where we end these wars once and for all.
Khury Petersen-Smith co-directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Azadeh Shahshahani is a human rights attorney and the legal and advocacy director of Project South.
The views expressed in this article are the writers’ own.
The post Trump Promised an Antiwar Presidency. He’s Delivered the Opposite appeared first on Newsweek.
