All American presidents end up leading a major military campaign.
By Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy columnist and professor of international relations at Harvard University, holder of the Robert and Renée Belfer chair.
Whatever they say, American presidents find it impossible not to go to war. In 1992, Bill Clinton won the presidency by declaring, “The economy, that’s all that matters,” and announcing the end of the era of power politics. Once in power, however, he was forced to order missile strikes in several countries, maintain no-fly zones over Iraq (and sometimes bomb it), and conduct a long aerial campaign against Serbia in 1999.
In 2000, George W. Bush won the White House by criticizing Clinton’s hyperactive foreign policy and promising voters a strong but “humble” foreign policy. We all know how that turned out. Eight years later, a young senator named Barack Obama became president largely because he was one of the few Democrats to oppose the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Less than a year into his term, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize without having done anything to deserve it, simply because people were convinced he would be a staunch advocate for peace. Obama did try his hand at several issues and eventually reached an agreement to reduce Iran’s nuclear program, but he also launched an unnecessary “offensive” in Afghanistan, contributed to toppling the Libyan regime in 2011, and became increasingly comfortable authorizing targeted strikes and other assassinations against a series of targets. By the end of his second term, the United States was still at war in Afghanistan and not close to winning.
Then, a mediocre businessman and reality television star by the name of Donald Trump ran for the presidency in 2016, openly condemning the “endless wars,” denouncing the foreign policy establishment, and promising “America first.” After an unexpected electoral victory, he also announced a temporary surge in troops in Afghanistan, continued full-scale the global war on terrorism, ordered the missile assassination of a senior Iranian official, and led a steady increase in the military budget. Trump didn’t start any new wars during his first term, but he also didn’t end any.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, ended a war when he terminated the futile American campaign in Afghanistan and was criticized for taking into account the realities that his predecessors had ignored. Biden orchestrated a vigorous Western response to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but most observers overlooked the fact that his earlier efforts to bring Ukraine closer to the Western orbit had made war more likely. After ignoring the Palestinian issue during his first two years in office, Biden provided billions of dollars in weapons and diplomatic protection to Israel in response to Hamas’ genocidal attack on Israel in October 2023.
Biden’s mistakes (and his determination to win a second term) helped Trump return to the Oval Office, once again promising to be a president of peace and end the permanent interventionism that has cost Americans trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. But instead of radically breaking with the past, Trump 2.0 has shown himself to be even more eager to pull the trigger than the presidents he used to ridicule. [Context: This article discusses the historical pattern of American presidents ultimately resorting to military action during their tenure.]
What is the problem here? Since 1992, a succession of presidents from both parties has run for election promising to be peacemakers and avoid the excesses and mistakes of their predecessors, but once in power, they cannot resist the urge to blow everything up in distant lands. Once again, we must ask the question: Are the United States addicted to war?
