TOI Correspondent from Washington: For nearly a decade, US President and MAGA supremo Donald Trump fashioned his political identity around a simple, potent pledge: end America’s “endless wars.” He derided the foreign policy establishment as reckless interventionists and insisted he alone could resist the military-industrial complex. “I am the most militaristic person there is, but I don’t want to use it,” he often said, branding himself a “peace president.”
Yet as 2026 unfolds, Trump’s second term tells a sharply different story — one marked by muscular interventions in Venezuela and now Iran, open threats against Greenland, Mexico, and Canada, and a worldview that fuses red-blooded nationalism with high-stakes brinkmanship.
