U.S. President Donald Trump announces that the U.S. has begun 'major combat operations' in Iran in this screengrab from a video released on Saturday.Donald Trump via Truth Social/Reuters
Debra Thompson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
On election night in November, 2024, President Donald Trump explicitly said, “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.” His inauguration day speech confirmed that his plans to put “America first” involved increasing America’s isolation from multilateralism in world politics. “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win,” he promised, “but also by the wars that we end – and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”
During the election campaign, the Republican Party called Mr. Trump and running mate JD Vance the “pro-peace ticket,” echoing Mr. Trump’s warnings that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris “would get us into a World War III guaranteed because she’s too grossly incompetent to do the job.” Mr. Vance, the living automaton of White House propaganda, wrote an opinion piece in 2023 for the Wall Street Journal under the headline, “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.” During last week’s State of the Union address, Mr. Trump claimed to have ended eight wars in his first 10 months in office.
Just last week, the White House declared Mr. Trump the “President of Peace.” It is an assertion that is patently and demonstrably false. President Trump is, instead and terrifyingly, the most dangerous man on the planet.
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Rather than ending wars, Mr. Trump has initiated military action eight times, carrying out attacks in seven countries (Syria, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Yemen, Somalia, and Venezuela) in 2025. Mr. Trump ended the first year of his second administration by capturing the Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro, and threatening to annex Greenland and marked the start of the second year by declaring that Cuba is an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the “national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
And now most recently, the attack on Iran – a joint American-Israeli military action conducted with the exclusive goal of regime change. After the brutal crackdowns and massacres of anti-government protestors, it’s no wonder that many in the Iranian diaspora are celebrating, even as the future remains both immensely complicated and uncertain.
Whether the ends justify the means is beside the point. It is both possible and necessary to simultaneously hope that a regime change will lead to more democratic, prosperous and safer outcomes for the Iranian people, and remain gravely concerned that an unhinged, unprincipled, and unaccountable U.S President controls the world’s largest defence budget and the second-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons.
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There is a dangerous hypocrisy embedded in a President who craves both the accolades of bringing peace and the exercise of power and military might that comes with making war. Mr. Trump’s Board of Peace is a farcical cross between a typical Trumpian vanity project and a genuine attempt to replace multilateralism in international relations with the same payoffs and patronage that define Mr. Trump’s governing style in domestic affairs.
In Mr. Trump’s mind, of course, there is no hypocrisy; there is only the belief that world peace can be won solely through global concession to American hegemony. The golden age of American greatness is its demonstrated power, which, Mr. Trump predicted on Inauguration Day, “will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent, and totally unpredictable.”
The recurring danger in this latest presidential aggression is that there are no guardrails, no constraints, and no post-hoc justification other than that Mr. Trump is the President of the United States and can do whatever he wants.
Once again, Mr. Trump invoked the emergency powers of the presidency to assert that Iran posed an imminent threat that needed to be eliminated and in doing so completely bypassed the checks and balances on executive power. Mr. Trump’s unilateral decision to launch such a consequential military strike on Iran opens constitutional questions about whether congressional authority is required to enter into this kind of conflict; Mr. Trump clearly thinks that it is not.
During Mr. Trump’s first presidency, his advisers included career military officers like John F. Kelly and Jim Mattis who seemed to provide critical counterweights to Mr. Trump’s impulsiveness. Now, Mr. Trump’s inner circle – Secretary of State Marco Rubio, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth being the most powerful among them – are tasked with the singular purpose of facilitating and then defending the President’s whims.
Impulsive executive action is not strength; it is volatility. Democratic guardrails exist precisely to temper moments like these. Multilateralism isn’t perfect and congressional gridlock is always a possibility. But when these constraints are sidelined, all that remains is the discretion of one power-obsessed man, backed by overwhelming military force.