Much like adolescence, when a man becomes president, he goes through some intense changes.
Any previously expressed fears about excessive executive power and “the imperial presidency” tend to dissipate. After all, the power of the presidency is now in the hands of someone he trusts completely: himself. Belief in the War Powers Act, and its restrictions upon the president’s authority to use military force, usually disappears.
A president often grows more hawkish as his term progresses.
As the Cold War ended, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, warning that President George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy failed to justify American engagement abroad and was “reactive, rudderless and erratic.” He also hit Bush’s reluctance to use trade sanctions against China. Clinton went on to approve “Most Favored Nation” trade status for China, and the governor who aimed to prioritize domestic issues ended up using his War Powers Act authority more than any other president. Clinton’s most notable military operations included an air campaign against the Serbs in Kosovo, the bombing of the El Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and a failed operation to bomb Osama bin Laden.
Throughout the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush criticized the Clinton administration’s foreign policy for nation-building missions involving deploying U.S. military forces in places such as Haiti and Somalia. At least three times in a debate with Vice President Al Gore, Bush emphasized the need for the U.S. to be a “humble” nation. You can think of many words to describe Bush’s foreign policy, but “humble” is not one of them. Whatever foreign policy Bush intended to enact, the 9/11 attacks changed his philosophy.
Barack Obama rose through the Democratic Party in part because of his early opposition to the Iraq War — a perception that was the dovish antithesis to Bush. Obama did withdraw the majority of U.S. troops from Iraq. But he also sent 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan in 2009, deployed military assets for airstrikes and supported international intervention in Libya in 2011, authorized the mission in Pakistan that killed bin Laden in 2011, and sent troops back into Iraq to fight the Islamic State, alongside Special Operations forces in Syria in 2015. He also had a “kill list” of terrorists to be executed through drone strikes; he authorized 542 drone strikes that killed an estimated 3,797 people. At least one, Anwar al-Awlaki, was an American citizen — and a committed al-Qaeda Islamist militant.
(No wonder the Nobel Peace Prize selection committee was reluctant to give the award to Trump. The last American president who got one killed a lot more people after receiving his award than before.)
And then there’s Donald Trump, who famously claimed he always opposed the Iraq War (he really didn’t) and lashed out at Bush for that decision but also insisted that if he had been in charge, he would “take the oil.” Often in the same speech, Trump would pledge to end “forever wars” and also pledge to bomb the s-word out of the Islamic State.
President Joe Biden brought the troops home from Afghanistan, but also authorized airstrikes in Syria, strikes against the Houthis in Yemen and the Red Sea, a drone strike that killed Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul, and transfers of U.S. military weapons to Ukraine to fight the Russians.
Fast forward to 2024, and Trump is running again, with his hawkish Reaganite running mate Mike Pence replaced by the distinctly noninterventionist JD Vance, which the Republican Party touted as “the pro-peace ticket.” Well, perhaps Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is resting in peace.
Today, Trump has Vance, and fellow noninterventionist Tulsi Gabbard as his director of national intelligence. Maybe those two internally oppose the U.S. effort to topple the mullahs’ regime, but I notice no one is resigning in protest.
More likely, the last few presidents believed what they said on the campaign trail. After all, they didn’t think of themselves as raging warmongers like the guy they sought to replace. They genuinely believed that because they were reasonable, they surely could get enemies of the U.S. to see reason, too. And then they sat down behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office and gradually realized the world was a far more dangerous place than it appeared during those campaign rallies.
The public doesn’t know precisely what’s in the presidential daily brief; they’ve only been declassified up to Jan. 20, 1977. But we can take a good guess at the gist, which is that lots of bad people around the world are trying to harm Americans. Just about every day, some new threat, some new weapons system is being developed, some new extremist faction is convinced they can get what they want by blowing up an airliner or a U.S. Embassy or a car bomb in Times Square.
If you see that sort of intelligence every day … how dovish can you remain? Would you rather be the president accused of being a warmonger, or be remembered as the president who hesitated as the threat grew closer? This many consecutive presidents being more hawkish than they intended suggests it’s not just a pattern in the character of the men who get elected. It’s just the nature of a violent world where many malevolent men think the answer to their problems is to attack Americans.
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