Why Did Donald Trump Start a War With Iran?
MAGA was never about isolationism. It was about dominance.
Why did Donald Trump start a war with Iran?
It does not, on first glance, make much sense. The president has now run three times on a platform of making America great again, by which he clearly stated meant making America isolationist again. The Iraq War, he has said many times, was a debacle and an embarrassment. Kamala Harris, he insisted, would torpedo the country into war with Iran.
To believe that this all meant Trump had an ideological opposition to wars of choice is to fundamentally understand the president’s views, and the man himself.
Trump is ideologically flexible on just about everything, but he has a handful of very particular impulses that have shaped his entire life. The first is that he believes power is zero-sum, that it is grabbed rather than earned, and that he needs – and deserves – as much of it as possible. The second is a deep suspicion of people who are different from him, in terms of race but also in terms of approach to life. It’s racism, but not just racism – he can find common cause with Saudi royals who share his fecklessness, unadulterated self-interest, and dismissiveness toward their many lessers, but is triggered to rage at the thought of hard-scrabble immigrants taking great risks to make it to America and doing back-breaking work once they arrive, and devoid of even the barest shred of empathy for young Black and brown men born into every disadvantage, especially when, like the much-luckier Trump’s, their life choices veer into the criminal. Trump disdains the weak, but he also disdains those who hustle and scrap, and he really hates those who inconvenience him in any way. Finally, he is both spectacularly thin-skinned and a master of the distraction spectacle. He understands, perhaps better than any politician in my lifetime, just what valuable currency attention can be. And he rose to power at the exact time the attention economy surpassed all others.
Trump was never anti-war. He just believed that Iraq made America generally, and George W. Bush specifically, look weak. He was never an isolationist – he just wanted America to be dominating other nations, not helping them.
