Donald Trump returned to office as president in January with both democratic legitimacy and a mandate to accomplish what he’d promised during his campaign. One of his promises was clear, consistent, and unmistakable: to put “America First” by ending our involvement in risky and expensive overseas conflicts. Yet Trump’s recent support for Israel’s escalating attacks on Iran—and his intimations that the United States may become directly involved in the conflict—suggests that he is well on the way to betraying his anti-war mandate.
Trump has repeatedly pitched himself as a peace candidate during his political career. In 2016, he ran to Hillary Clinton’s left on foreign policy, arguing that she was “trigger happy” and that foreign adventurism “has produced only turmoil and suffering and death.” Trump returned to this message in his most recent race. He came out of the gate at his first campaign stops in 2023 by promising to restore peace after, he claimed, then-President Joe Biden had brought the world “to the brink of World War III.” When Kamala Harris took up the mantle for the Democrats, Trump warned his rallygoers that, if she was elected, their “sons and daughters will end up getting drafted to go fight for a war in a country that you’ve never heard of.”
His claims were dubious and hyperbolic, but in both of his successful campaigns, Trump correctly recognized what many pundits, politicians, and liberals failed to see: The Democratic Party establishment’s foreign-policy positions are out of step with the views of most Americans. A Pew Research survey released in April found that a majority of Americans (53 percent) do not believe that the U.S. has a responsibility to help Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. According to a March poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, strong majorities of Americans say they want a cease-fire in both the Ukraine-Russia (61 percent) and Israel-Palestine conflicts (59 percent); a May poll by the University of Maryland found that an even stronger majority of Americans prefers negotiation with Iran (69 percent) over striking its nuclear facilities (14 percent).
Biden’s presidency was historically unpopular for any number of reasons, but an important one was his focus on wars in Europe and the Middle East while issues such as immigration and inflation roiled the country. Although Trump’s bombs-away militarism during his first term was far from dovish, one of his few unambiguously positive accomplishments was that he managed to avoid entangling American troops in any new large-scale conflicts. His anti-war rhetoric and no-big-wars track record, combined with Harris’s refusal to break with Biden on foreign policy, her embracing of endorsements from the Iraq War–associated Cheneys, and her identification of Iran (rather than Russia or China) as the United States’ greatest adversary, seem to have led many Americans to view Trump as the candidate more likely to pursue peace. By clear margins, voters trusted Trump over Harris to handle foreign conflicts. Were he to turn around and now involve the country in just the sort of war he’s spent years decrying, he would join his predecessor in allowing international imbroglios to derail the domestic agenda that he was elected, for better or worse, to enact.
The Trump administration is sending mixed signals about its plans. Although the president has suggested that the United States may get involved in the clash between Israel and Iran, other officials quietly insist the U.S. won’t become an active participant unless Iran targets Americans. As for Israel’s claims that Iran is months away from creating a nuclear weapon—claims that Israeli officials have repeated since the early 2000s—the U.S. intelligence community, including Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, dispute that these plans are under way. The president appears unmoved, telling reporters, “I don’t care” what Gabbard said about Iran’s nuclear program. “I think they were very close to having one,” Trump insisted.
Americans have rejected the path to war at the ballot box again and again in the past decade and a half, ever since Barack Obama burst onto the campaign trail in 2007 with a speech in which he called the Second Gulf War “a tragic mistake” and invoked “the families who have lost loved ones, the hearts that have been broken, and the young lives that could have been.” Trump has innumerable faults, many of them disqualifying, but he has also grasped better than many politicians that the American people are exhausted by decades of pro-war, world-policing foreign policy. Trump promised something different, something voters very much wanted: a focus on issues at home rather than conflicts abroad that might drag the United States into another disastrous war.
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