Trump’s ‘quasi-dove’ era is over. Iran strikes expose his hawkish turn

Analysis Trump’s ‘quasi-dove’ era is over. Iran strikes expose his hawkish turn David Smith in Washington Deploying the world’s most powerful military seems to exert an almost erotic fascination for Donald Trump This was originally published in This Week in Trumpland; sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday It was a claim uttered repeatedly on the 2024 campaign trail: “I’m the only president in 72 years that didn’t start a war,” Donald Trump said in Sioux City, Iowa . Fact checkers cried foul and pointed out that Jimmy Carter , president from 1977 to 1981, did not start any wars either. But Trump won the election anyway. The winner of the Fifa peace prize, the chair of the Board of Peace and the self-declared “president of PEACE” just bypassed Congress to start a war on Iran that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and is spreading across the Middle East. It is the most severe test yet of the oft-articulated theory that Trump, who as a young man received five deferments from the Vietnam draft – four for university and one for “heel spurs” – has a deep-seated allergy to war and represents a break from hawkish presidents of the past. In a New York Times column about the 2016 election, Maureen Dowd wrote that on foreign policy “it’s Hillary the Hawk against Donald the Quasi-Dove”, arguing that “like Obama, he thought the invasion of Iraq was a stupid idea”. She observed that Trump “says that in most cases he would rather do the art of the deal than shock and awe”. Others have also taken the view that the first commander-in-chief elected with no prior political or military experience is more a creature of New York boardrooms and Florida soirees than the army mess hall and that his appetite for the kinetic would end with his golf swing. Add to that the politically expedient ideology of America First with its promise that there would be no more imperialist ambitions or forever wars. When he entered politics, Trump was supposed to be the disrupter, the swamp-drainer,...