Trump’s War With Iran Would’ve Happened With North Korea...
On the lessons from the 2017 nuclear crisis that the world seems to have memory-holed.
Trump is many things, and one of them is a warmonger.
It requires willful ignorance to think of MAGA and Trump as a force against war. MAGA ideology is a project of reactionary revolution, explicitly embracing violence.
Even if you pay no attention to the speeches and musings of neofascist intellectuals, there’s the reality of Trump’s violence-wielding constituents on the far right. Who’s committing 99% of the political violence in America? Trump voters.
And if you’d rather ignore the composition of Trump’s voter base, he also has a track record in office that bespeaks the militarism built into his worldview.
Trump’s foreign policy during his first term was highly predatory, extortionist, full of errors, and violent toward nations that weren’t white rich. He made life remarkably darker on many fronts and every aspect of US relations with the world was left worse, embrittled. And then there’s that most morbid of metrics—the body count. The blood on Trump’s hands was not only comparable to his predecessor, who oversaw eight years of forever wars; it would’ve been much worse if not for some extreme luck.
What everyone seems to have memory-holed about Trump 1.0 was also what I devoted my career to monitoring at the time: The 2017 North Korean nuclear crisis. I wrote a book about it, in near real-time, that still holds up.