Finally we have a presidential candidate who will pull the United States back from militarism and endless war. At least that’s what former Democratic US Representative Tulsi Gabbard said in endorsing Donald Trump last month. What she said might be enough to win my vote for Trump — if only I could believe it.
“He not only didn’t start any new wars, he took action to de-escalate and prevent wars,” Gabbard said in her endorsement speech. She said Trump sees war “as a last resort” and would “exhaust all means of diplomacy” before bombing or invading other countries. As president, she asserted, Trump would “walk us back from the brink of nuclear war” and “have the courage to meet with adversaries.”
At this moment, with horrific conflicts raging in several parts of the world and tensions between the United States and its adversaries reaching explosive levels, that is a tantalizing vision. Opinion surveys suggest that growing numbers of Americans no longer want the United States to dominate the world. There are votes to be won by promoting a more peaceful foreign policy. Trump realizes this. Perhaps that’s one reason he smiled so beatifically as he listened to Gabbard describe him as a peacemaker.
That description, though, is hard to swallow in light of Trump’s record. Rather than deal with Iran through “means of diplomacy,” for example, he ripped up the 2015 nuclear deal and ordered the assassination of a senior Iranian military commander. Rather than continuing the Obama administration’s nonconfrontational stance toward Russia, he approved the sale of heavy weapons to the Ukrainian government in 2017. Instead of trying to nudge Israelis and Palestinians toward compromise, he took provocative steps like moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Trump created a Space Force aimed at militarizing the earth’s atmosphere, bragged about dropping the world’s most powerful nonnuclear bomb on Afghanistan, kept American troops in Iraq and Syria, and happily sent American weaponry to countries accused of serious human rights violations. He ordered far more drone strikes on foreign targets than either his predecessor or his successor, and he ended President Obama’s policy of reporting civilian deaths caused by such strikes. Especially vivid was his decision to name some of Washington’s most extreme warmongers to direct his foreign policy.
Mike Pompeo, Elliott Abrams, and John Bolton have spent careers promoting conflict and scorning diplomacy. They are the polar opposites of Tulsi Gabbard, who has spent much of her career advocating against US military actions abroad. So which course would Trump choose as president — their militancy or Gabbard’s restraint? Given his mercurial mindset, there’s no way to know.
The difference between a Secretary of State Gabbard and a Secretary of State Bolton is so vast as to be mind-boggling. Bolton and his ilk have never seen an American war they didn’t like and favor a no-compromise approach to hostile countries. When Gabbard represented Hawaii in Congress, she sponsored the No More Presidential Wars Act, which would have made it an impeachable offense for a president to send troops into combat without congressional approval. She calls US sanctions on other countries “an instrument of modern-day economic warfare” and opposes “counterproductive wars of regime change.”
These two views of the world, and of America’s place in it, have almost nothing in common. Only a candidate with as muddled a world view as Trump’s could imagine trafficking with both. Only voters willing to make a dangerous gamble would support Trump in the hope that he will reduce global tensions.
One argument for making that gamble might be the surprisingly hawkish tone Kamala Harris has taken in her campaign. While Trump seeks to promote war and peace at the same time, Harris talks mostly about war. In her speech at the Democratic convention, she said nothing about the possibility that the United States could promote global initiatives in public health, food security, or environmental protection. She did, however, promise that the United States would maintain “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” confront “Iran and Iran-backed terrorism,” and “always assure that Israel has the ability to defend itself.”
Most distressing was her explicit rejection of diplomacy with hostile countries. “I will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators,” she thundered. Presidents Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama all met with leaders of hostile countries. Harris suggests that she will refuse to do so. That dramatically reduces prospects for resolving foreign conflicts.
The platform on which Harris is running is considerably more militant than the one Democrats adopted four years ago. In 2020, the Democrats said they would work to end “forever wars” and cancel the “blank check” America gives to Persian Gulf sheikdoms. In the 2020 platform, Democrats pledged not to “race to war with Iran.” In 2024, they denounced Trump for showing “fecklessness and weakness in the face of Iranian aggression.”
Despite those words, and given that party platforms are often forgotten after elections, it is reasonable to hope that as president, Harris would be less warlike than Biden has been. She might be more sensitive to the great loss of American influence in the world over the last eight years. Yet like nearly everyone in Washington, she believes in American hegemony and fiercely rejects the idea of a “multipolar world” that might replace it.
As for Trump — who knows? Unless he suddenly begins singing from Gabbard’s hymnal, it’s foolish to see him as a peace candidate. Gabbard endorsed him based on hope. His record makes that hope seem far-fetched.
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Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
