“You know, we had no wars [for] four years,” President-elect Donald Trump remarked during his acceptance speech on election night. “They said, ‘He will start a war.’ I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”
During both of Trump’s campaigns to claim the White House, one of his most potent rhetorical weapons was pointing to the bloodthirsty forever wars overseen by his Democratic predecessors and the carnage caused by their Middle East policy. In 2016, he defined Hillary Clinton’s legacy as Secretary of State as “death, destruction and weakness.” This fall, his mailings to Muslim voters depicted Kamala Harris laughing in front of images of Gaza, saying, “We did it, Joe!”
Trump’s open critique of Democrats’ expensive, bloody and ultimately counterproductive Middle East interventions has been refreshing to many Americans, including Muslim and Arab voters, perhaps even more today than four years ago.
But the idea that his own hands have been clean is a fallacy. The Trump White House followed the same course as its predecessors and successors, dropping bombs on thousands of civilians across the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. He cozied up to Israel’s Netanyahu and Saudi’s Muhammad Bin Salman and bent over backwards to facilitate their human rights violations. He withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, ordered the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and brought the U.S. and Iran to the brink of war.
The second Trump administration may not start any new wars, but his track record – as well his new cabinet picks – make clear there will be no peace while he’s in the Oval Office.
Trump’s secret drone wars
One of the darkest stains on Barack Obama’s presidency was his warm embrace of drone strikes and targeted killing, which quickly became his signature counterterrorism move. When Trump was voted in, some commentators hoped that Republican isolationism could offer some relief from this unchecked, remote-controlled mass killing.
Yet in just the first two years of Trump’s previous presidency, he launched 2,243 drone strikes. That’s compared with 1,878 during Obama’s entire eight years in office.
Trump’s first presidency saw far more drone strikes and even less transparency than Obama’s notoriously drone-happy administration. To hide these secretive drone campaigns, he revoked an Obama-era rule requiring the U.S. to publicly report the number of civilians killed in drone strikes, calling these laws “superfluous” and distracting.
In the first two years of Donald Trump’s previous presidency, he launched 2,243 drone strikes, compared with 1,878 during Obama’s entire eight years in office.
“In annual reports under Trump, the U.S. military has claimed that zero civilians were killed in Yemen during operations it carried out in 2018 and 2019,” The Intercept reported in 2020. “Such a claim flies in the face of painstaking reporting by monitoring groups like Airwars. Unsurprisingly, the absurd death toll went unquestioned by an administration that has gone out of its way to encourage and defend individuals accused of killing civilians in combat.”
In fact, the Trump administration appears to have dropped more bombs in Yemen than all previous U.S. presidents combined. Even as Congress pushed through a bipartisan resolution to end U.S. military assistance for Saudi Arabia’s ruthless war on Yemen, he issued an emergency declaration to send Saudi another $8.1 billion worth of precision-guided missiles and other high-tech weapons. The emergency: the need to curb Iran’s “malign influence” in the region.
Later, Trump vetoed three joint Congressional resolutions blocking licensing for some arms sales to Saudi, the U.A.E and several European nations.
Today, Yemen remains one of the world’s worst man-made humanitarian crises, with millions facing starvation and displacement. An estimated 154,000 people were killed through military action; at least 8,900 were killed in Saudi-led airstrikes directly targeting civilian buildings and gatherings (including, infamously, weddings).
Notably, Trump also dismissed Saudi crown prince Muhammad Bin Salman’s role in the 2018 assassination of U.S. citizen and journalist Jamal Khashoggi in order to continue arms sales. Later, Trump bragged about “saving” MBS from congressional heat.
Setting the course for Israeli genocide
As Palestinian policy analyst Muhannad Ayyash explains, the Trump administration set the course that the Biden White House has aggressively pursued since: promoting Arab normalization of relations with Israel via the Abraham Accords, abandoning America’s veneer of support for a two-state solution, and isolating Iran.
“There is every reason to believe his second administration will continue to push further down this bipartisan path to eliminate the ‘Palestinian Question’ once and for all,” Ayyash wrote in Al Jazeera this week.
Unsurprisingly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was among the first to congratulate Trump on his victory this month. It’s part of a long history of coziness between the Trump administration and Netanyahu’s far-right government.
In 2017, Trump moved the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and formally recognized the holy city as Israel’s capital. With one announcement, he upended decades of American foreign policy and broke from its longtime neutrality on Jerusalem’s status.
Netanyahu, of course, celebrated Trump’s announcement as an “important step toward peace.” He also hailed Trump’s 2019 recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights — breaking from longstanding U.S. policy and a U.N. resolution on the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.” In recognizing the forcibly annexed territory, the U.S. endorsed Israel’s capture and colonization of the Golan Heights from Syria back in 1967.
Analysts predicted the recognition could lead to American recognition of Israeli sovereignty elsewhere; in one State Department report published under Trump, the U.S. removed its standard language describing the Golan Heights, Gaza and the West Bank as occupied territories.
In 2019, the Trump administration proclaimed that Israel settlements in the West Bank did not violate international law. In doing so, he broke from more than four decades of U.S. policy that criticized Israel’s settlements as illegal and counterproductive.
Among Trump’s biggest foreign policy projects was negotiating the Abraham Accords in 2020. The controversial set of treaties normalized relations between Israel and four Arab Gulf states: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. The Accords effectively upended the long-standing foreign policy consensus that peace with the Palestinians must be a condition for Israel’s integration with the Arab world.
The Arab nations’ leaders “hailed the agreement as a means to encourage and cajole Israel to take positive steps toward ending its occupation and annexation of Palestinian territory,” explains Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the nonprofit Democracy for the Arab World Now.
Instead, the treaties have allowed Israel to benefit from regional cooperation, including military, economic and trade development, without granting Palestinians their rights – or ending their genocide in Gaza.
All the president’s hawks
Trump has broadly called for an end to the war in Gaza but has not provided a plan for how he would bring that about, only offering contradictory statements designed to win support from both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli quarters.
During his campaign, Trump promised that “you’re going to have peace in the Middle East,” while also telling Netanyahu in October to “do what you have to do.” Trump celebrated Israel’s military operation that killed Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar and said Netanyahu was “doing a good job”; hours later, he met with an Arab American leader in Michigan and promised he’d bring peace to the region, The Washington Post reports.
One clue comes from his new hires. Trump is stacking his new cabinet with war hawks, most if not all of which are vehement critics of China and Iran and staunch allies of Israel.
His nomination for Secretary of State, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, is known for his hawkish approach to foreign policy. In addition to taking a hardline approach to Iran sanctions, Rubio has called for Israel to “destroy every element of Hamas they can get their hands on” and advocated against a ceasefire.
Rubio has introduced legislation to prevent the Biden administration from placing conditions on aid to Israel; to stop the U.S. from sending Palestinian aid through the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA); and to enable U.S. states to crack down on boycotts against Israel.
“Israel has no choice but to seek the complete eradication of Hamas in Gaza,” he tweeted. “There simply is no diplomatic solution or ‘measured response’ available. This tragically necessary effort will come at a horrifying price. But the price of failing to permanently eliminate this group of sadistic savages is even more horrifying.”
For the next U.S. ambassador to Israel, Trump has selected Mike Huckabee, a fiercely pro-Israel politician and evangelical minister. Huckabee has infamously stated that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian”; derided the “irrational and unworkable” idea of a two-state solution; suggested that a Palestinian state could instead be created in Egypt, Syria, Jordan or “the rest of the world”; laid the cornerstone for a new neighborhood in an Israeli settlement; and said just this week that the Trump administration would consider supporting Israeli annexation of the occupied West Bank.
“I think Israel has title deed to Judea and Samaria,” Huckabee told CNN in 2017. “There are certain words I refuse to use. There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.”
Trump’s recent pick for Secretary of Defense, the Fox News host and Army veteran Pete Hegseth, is also a strong supporter of Israel and its war on Gaza. His background is sending up red flags for many analysts.
According to CNN, Hegseth encouraged Trump to issue presidential pardons for several U.S. servicemen accused of war crimes. These include Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher (who served in Iraq and was charged with stabbing and killing a wounded and imprisoned teen and posing for a photo with the corpse, alongside other crimes) and Army Major Matt Golsteyn (who served in Afghanistan and was accused of killing and covering up a man in 2010).
Hegseth served under multiple administrations in the U.S. Army but has stated that he was removed from duty ahead of Biden’s inauguration in 2021 due to his tattoo of a Jerusalem Cross. “Ultimately, members of my unit in leadership deemed that I was an extremist or a white nationalist because of a tattoo I have, which is a religious tattoo,” he told Fox.
The Christian symbol has sometimes been deployed by far-right Christian nationalist movements — and even Donald Trump’s son — in an apparent reference to the anti-Muslim violence of the European Crusaders.
The symbol of the Crusades is one Hegseth has called upon often, including in his 2020 book American Crusade.
“One thousand years ago, after years of ceding land to conquering Muslim hordes, the pope ordered military action to save Europe,” he writes, drawing a parallel between the Christian knights’ rallying cry of “Deus vult,” or “God wills it,” to Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan.
“Surrounded by the Left, with the odds stacked against us, only a crusade will do.”
