During his presidential campaigns, Donald Trump pledged to end “forever wars”, abandon “nation-building” interventions and focus instead on reviving a US economy that, in his telling, had been deindustrialised by a floodtide of imports. Though Trump’s electoral victories cannot be attributed to any one thing, his “America first” narrative certainly struck a chord.
But Trump’s use of force to seize the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, his full-bore support for Israel’s demolition of Gaza and his bombing of Iran’s nuclear enrichment installations show that he’s no less willing than his predecessors to resort to military interventions.
