bUt nO nEw wArS!
"But it was certainly not for lack of trying. Trump might not have started any wars, but he massively inflamed existing ones—and came close to catastrophic new ones.
Let’s review the record. Despite inveighing against “endless wars,” Trump massively escalated the country’s existing wars in multiple theaters, leading to skyrocketing casualties. In Afghanistan, he substantially upped the amount of airstrikes, leading to a 330 percent increase in civilian deaths. In Yemen, he escalated both U.S. counterterrorism activities and support for the devastating Saudi-led war against the Houthis. According to the United Kingdom’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism, there were 2,243 drone strikes in just the first two years of Trump’s presidency, compared with 1,878 in the entire eight years of the Obama administration.
Trump also came very close to tweeting the country into a nuclear war with North Korea in late 2017 and early 2018, a completely self-inflicted incident that seems to have been bizarrely memory-holed. Trump “didn’t merely threaten to attack North Korea if it possessed the ability to strike the U.S.,” wrote the Intercept’s Jon Schwarz. “He ordered the Pentagon to develop new plans, over the resistance of then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis, to do so.” According to former Pentagon official and Asia security expert Van Jackson, who wrote a book about the crisis, “The world was closer … to nuclear war, at that time than any time, since the Cuban Missile Crisis. And it was totally avoidable.”
In 2018, Trump bowed to Washington’s neoconservative hawks and withdrew from a working nonproliferation agreement with Iran, resulting in Iran scaling up both its provocative activities in the region and its nuclear program. According to current U.S. assessments, Iran could now make enough fissile for one nuclear bomb in under two weeks, should it decide to do so. Under the agreement Trump abandoned, it would’ve taken Iran at least a year.
The list goes on: Trump put the U.S. on a path to “great-power competition” with China, incited a failed coup in Venezuela, and increased support for reckless, repressive clients around the world. Indeed, Trump was seen as such a dangerous interventionist that Congress passed the first war powers resolution in history to try to end his support for the Yemen war. Less than a year later, Congress passed a second resolution to brush him back from a potential war with Iran after he OK’d the assassination of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander Qassem Soleimani. Both measures passed with Republican support, making opposition to Trump’s militarism one of the very few areas of bipartisan agreement during his administration."