Donald Trump se prodaja kot predsedniški kandidat, ki je za mir. Predsednik, ki ni začel nobene vojne in predsedniški kandidat, ki naj bi takoj končal vojno v Ukrajini. Dejstva so sicer nekoliko drugačna. Spodaj je dober komentar Richarda Wrighta na to temo, ki pokaže, da se Trump kot predsednik glede konfliktnosti v mednarodnih odnosih in vojaškega angažmaja ni bistveno razlikoval od ostalih dveh ameriških predsednikov v zadnjem desetletju in pol (Obama, Biden). Ni končal nobene podedovane vojne (Afganistan, Jemen, Sirija), še več vojakov je poslal v Afganistan, podpiral je Saudsko Arabijo v vojni z jemenskimi Hutiji, pošiljal orožje v Ukrajino. Začel je s trgovinsko in tehnološko (Huawei) vojno s Kitajsko, izzival Iran z umorom iranskega pogajalca, generala Soleimanija, podpiral Izrael proti Palestincem (kontroverzni prenos ameriške ambasade v Jeruzalem). In danes Trump poziva Izrael, da naj čimprej “dokonča posel v Gazi” in grozi Iranu.

Lahko da se motim, toda glede na videno in napovedano vidim Trumpa kot morebitnega predsednika, ki sicer res utegne (1) hitro končati vojno v Ukrajini (z odtegnitvijo pomoči Ukrajini), vendar (2) hkrati dovoliti in aktivno pomagati Izraelu, da zradira Gazo in zavzame Zahodni breg in v zgodovino pošlje možnost Palestinske države ter (3) hkrati začeti vojno z Iranom. Toda vojna v Ukrajini se bo “po naravni poti” končala najkasneje naslednje leto, ker bo Ukrajini zmanjkalo vojakov, zahodnim državam pa apetita po financiranju vojne. Kar pomeni, da s Trumpom svet bolj malo pridobi, izgubimo pa možnost miru na Bližnjem vzhodu z oblikovanjem Palestinske države v skladu s “predlogom dveh držav” ter potencialno dobimo ogromen vojni epicenter v Iranu in okolici.

Torej, kar se mene tiče in iz vidika geopolitike, se ne bi preveč navduševal nad Trumpom. Kar pa seveda ne pomeni, da bi bila Kamala Harris lahko kaj boljša na tem področju, saj sta oba ujetnika izraelskega lobija in zagovornika konflikta s Kitajsko. Te ameriške predsedniške volitve bodo težko prispevale k večji globalni stabilnosti.

Donald Trump, in an interview this week with podcaster Lex Fridman, sounded a warning: President Biden (and, not incidentally, Vice President Harris) are leading America toward World War III. Conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, and rising tensions in China’s neighborhood, could boil over into a global conflagration—unless, Trump said, he’s elected president in November.

This theme—that the Biden administration is responsible for starting or sustaining conflicts that a President Trump would have prevented or ended—has become the heart of Trump’s national security message on the campaign trail. He says he’ll “end the endless foreign wars” and smooth America’s foreign relations.

Trump struck a similar tone during the 2016 campaign. He declared war on the traditionally dominant warmongering wing of his party and promised to end America’s costly and energy-sapping military entanglements. Do the subsequent four years—Trump’s record as president—support his continued depiction of himself as a force for peace?

Daniel Larison, writing in his newsletter Eunomia, answers in the negative:

Trump had many opportunities to end wars when he was president, but he didn’t do it. Instead of ending them, Trump escalated every war he inherited. He sent more troops to Afghanistan. He loosened rules of engagement for US strikes. He ramped up the drone war. He increased support for the Saudi coalition while it was slaughtering Yemeni civilians. He also refused to end US involvement in the war on Yemen when Congress demanded it.”

To be fair, President Trump did commit the US to withdrawing troops from Afghanistan—and he even tried, every once in a while, to actually withdraw them. But it was Biden who fulfilled that commitment.

Trump is trying to turn this feat against Biden big time. He not only attacks Biden’s handling of the withdrawal—which, indeed, went awry and resulted in the deaths of thirteen US troops—but says this episode emboldened Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine and Hamas to attack Israel.

But as Bill Scher of the Washington Monthly notes, troop withdrawals are usually messy and often bloody, and both Putin and Hamas seem to have conceived their military plans before America left Afghanistan. Hamas’s leadership in Gaza reportedly greenlighted a well-developed version of its plan three months before the August 2021 withdrawal.

And, actually, if you’re looking for an American president whose policies encouraged that greenlighting, Trump is certainly in the running. While western analysts posit various factors that may have convinced Hamas to launch the Oct. 7 attacks, the most commonly cited US policy is Trump’s Abraham Accords. In securing diplomatic recognition of Israel from Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, Trump began the process of normalizing relations between Israel and Arab nations—and such normalization had long been considered the prize Israel would get only after it solved the Palestinian problem, presumably by giving the Palestinians a state. Trump, in trying to give Israel the prize prematurely, was taking away the most powerful non-violent geopolitical lever available to the Palestinians.

As it happens, Biden continued the drive for Arab-Israeli normalization. And, like Trump, he basically ignored Palestinian interests. (To get Saudi-Israeli normalization, Biden’s big goal, Bibi Netanyahu would have had to pledge to pursue a two-state solution, but only the most naive observers could have expected him to follow through.) So if indeed, as many observers believe, ongoing Arab-Israeli normalization loomed large in the strategic calculus of Hamas, Trump and Biden can share the responsibility for that.

The origins of the Ukraine War, too, carry a kind of bipartisan stamp. As CIA director Bill Burns once remarked, Putin’s motivation for invading seems to have had less to do with “Ukraine in NATO”—a distant prospect, as Putin knew—than with “NATO in Ukraine.” Putin (as his big pre-invasion speech made clear) was concerned about a kind of de facto NATOization of Ukraine—which included various forms of NATO-Ukrainian coordination and a growing flow of NATO weapons into Ukraine. Much of this happened on Biden’s watch, but Trump in one sense got the ball rolling; he was the first US president to authorize sending lethal weapons to Ukraine.

The spirit of bipartisan cooperation exhibited by Trump and Biden in their fomenting of conflict and tension extends even further—into the worsening of US-China relations. Trump launched not only a tariff war, but a tech war, trying to cripple Chinese tech giant Huawei. Biden sustained the tariff war and amped up the tech war, sharply restricting China’s access to advanced microchips and chipmaking equipment. As NZN reported two weeks ago, America’s tech war on China has met with, at best, mixed success—and in important respects seems to have backfired.

So what claims can Trump accurately make about his credentials for lessening global tensions and tamping down or preventing wars? Well, he can say that they don’t look much worse than Biden’s.

And even there the word “much” is doing a lot of work. Trump’s assassination of Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani evinced a degree of recklessness that Biden hasn’t matched, and elicited an Iranian retaliatory strike that injured dozens of US soldiers and could well have started a major war. Trump also, of course, pulled the US out of the Iranian nuclear deal, something Biden wouldn’t have done. This soured relations with Iran, strengthened hardliners within Iran, and strengthened Israel’s incentive to start a war with Iran.

Trump’s Iran policies may reflect his well-known eagerness to accommodate even the looniest of uber-hawkish pro-Israel donors (an eagerness that seems to be paying off in this election cycle as it did in the last one). Joe Biden has drawn criticism for refusing to make a forceful attempt to get Bibi Netanyahu to end the killing in Gaza, but if Trump takes office in January, he’ll make Biden look pro-Palestinian by comparison. Trump says Israel should “finish the job” in Gaza, and Larison plausibly calls that “a greenlight for massacres and ethnic cleansing.”

Trump may be right in saying that Biden has brought the world closer to World War III. But if so, that’s partly because Biden has sustained, and in some cases intensified, Trump-era policies. Of course, that observation wouldn’t make a very effective element in a Republican campaign ad—or, for that matter, in a Democratic campaign ad.

Vir: Richard Wright, Nonzero