U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a ceremony at the White House on Monday.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
So much for that Nobel Peace Prize.
Unless, of course, the following argument – being mobilized by the Trump administration – starts gaining traction: that it is precisely Donald Trump’s two military operations against Iran that will secure the regional and global peace for which the world has yearned.
That line of thinking is analogous to the precept Mr. Trump intoned as he sought bank loans for new hotels, resorts and casinos: Just as it takes money to make money, it may take warfare to prevent warfare.
The President, who has never done any military service, has taken pains to portray himself as something of a modern-day peacenik. He opposed George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, portrayed Barack Obama as trigger-happy in his willingness to launch hostilities against Libya and ran for president three times as an anti-war candidate.
He abandoned the Mahatma Gandhi persona over the weekend and by Monday was speaking in the argot of Second World War U.S. General George S. Patton, who was known for urging the employment of “the means at hand to inflict the maximum amount of wound, death, and destruction on the enemy in the minimum amount of time.”
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Speaking at the White House, the President said American air strikes were “destroying Iran’s missile capability, and we’re doing that hourly.” He said U.S. forces were “annihilating their navy,” adding that the goal was to assure that Iran’s “sick and sinister regime” wouldn’t be able to obtain nuclear weapons or spread terror in the Middle East.
This transformation provided a dramatic contrast with the peacemaker image he cultivated as he campaigned in 2024. He promised to bring the war in Ukraine to an end within 24 hours of being inaugurated president. Since then he has often boasted that he has ended eight wars.
But he has projected more American force in the first 13 months of his administration than any U.S. president save for Abraham Lincoln (the Civil War began five weeks after his 1861 inauguration) and George W. Bush (who initiated an attack on Afghanistan after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S., just eight months into his presidency). John F. Kennedy ordered the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba three months after taking the oath of office, but that operation was far more limited than Mr. Trump’s forays in Iran and Venezuela.
The echo of the Trump campaign pledges and the ongoing hostilities in Iran remind us of two political truths: Campaign promises are evanescent; and the “lessons” of the past, perhaps even those about the perils of nation building and regime change, seldom have broad applicability – and when they do, those lessons seldom are heeded.
“People in my business are always asked what lessons history teaches,” said David Kennedy, the Pulitzer-winning historian at Stanford University. “History is written with verifiable facts about the past, and the problem is that we have no facts about the future. But while there are parameters in the relations between nations, and there are historical American principles about international law, we now seem to be great violators of them in kidnapping and killing other countries’ leaders.”
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Many if not all presidents have been violators of campaign pledges – some in a dramatic way and almost always to great embarrassment.
In a speech only days before the 1940 election, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” Thirteen months later, the United States was caught up in the Second World War.
In an address before the New Hampshire Weekly Newspaper Association five weeks before the 1964 election, Lyndon B. Johnson said, “So just for the moment I have not thought that we were ready for American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. What I have been trying to do, with the situation that I found, was to get the boys in Vietnam to do their own fighting with our advice and with our equipment.” By the time Mr. Johnson left office, 550,000 U.S. troops were in Vietnam.
Speaking to the International Business Council in Chicago two months before the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan vowed to “balance the budget, reduce tax rates and restore our defences.” Mr. Reagan left office with a budget deficit of US$151-billion.
In his nomination acceptance speech at the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans, George H.W. Bush said, “Read my lips: No new taxes.” Mr. Bush was later manoeuvred into supporting a huge tax hike.
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“Presidents often find their promises often conflict with something else they also care about,” said William Mayer, a Northeastern University political scientist. “They also dramatically underestimate how difficult it is to fulfill their promises and how circumstances force them to do things they pledged not to do.”
At least Mr. Roosevelt could argue that after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Second World War was no longer a “foreign war.”
Some of these examples may provide comfort to MAGA supporters who took Mr. Trump at his word when he inveighed against “forever wars” and nation building. He has tested their loyalty and forbearance before, specifically with his order to attack Venezuela and seize president Nicolás Maduro, now being held in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, N.Y.
But now some of Mr. Trump’s most prominent allies have broken with the President, including commentator Tucker Carlson (who called the Iran attack “absolutely disgusting and evil”) and former representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (who said on social-media platform X that the Trump team was a “bunch of sick … liars,” using an expletive and adding, “We voted for America First and ZERO wars.”)
These fresh critics of Mr. Trump may be channelling John Quincy Adams, who as secretary of state in 1823 would write the Monroe Doctrine. In a July Fourth speech two years earlier, and four years before he would become president himself, Mr. Adams said that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy” and warned that, even in undertaking noble causes, “she might become the dictatress of the world.”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that John Quincy Adams made a July Fourth speech warning of the potential for the U.S. to become “dictatress of the world” five years before he became president. He made the speech four years before becoming president.