It’s been said that Donald Trump’s decision to join Israel’s war with Iran underscores his failures as a peacemaker. This is a preposterous statement because the idea of Trump being “a peacemaker and unifier” has always been nothing short of preposterous.
Yes, long before his ascendance to the White House, Trump had managed to paint him as a peacemaker, promising to end America’s “endless wars.” But most people in the United States of Amnesia seem to have forgotten that during his first four-year tenure in the White House Trump embarked on a dangerous path with a series of reckless foreign policy decisions that threatened peace and made the world a far more dangerous place. Trump 1.0 walked away from an Iran deal and withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty while U.S. air wars became broader and “increasingly indiscriminate.” Iraq, Somalia, and Syria were among the countries that Trump loosened the rules of engagement for U.S. forces. Trump also ordered the killing of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani and threatened “fire and fury” against North Korea.In addition, Trump increased tensions between Israelis and Palestinians by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the U.S. embassy there from Tel Aviv. The president of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas said at the time that Trump’s decision undermined all peace efforts and called his actions “a crime,” while the political leader of the Hamas movement, Ismail Haniya, who was assassinated by the Israeli Mossad in Tehran on July 31, 2024, called for a new “intifada.” Shortly upon assuming the Office of the President of the United States for the second time, Trump embarked on a jingoistic journey by threatening to take over Greenland (an idea he had floated back in 2019), make Canada the 51st state, reclaim the Panama Canal, and attack Mexico. And just as he had done during his first term in office, he withdrew the U.S. from the landmark Paris climate agreement, even though the climate crisis is an existential one and is expected to increase the risk of armed conflict.
So much for Trump being a peacemaker.
Trump is also a notorious braggart. He repeatedly said that he would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours upon taking office and boasted that the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas militants would not have happened if he were president. Yet, five months into his second term in the White House and all that Trump has accomplished in connection with the war in Ukraine is to receive Putin’s middle finger. With regard to Gaza, of course, there is no difference between “genocide Joe” and Trump. Biden funded and armed the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza while Trump has not only continued to provide Israel with the weapons that is using to slaughter innocent people, mostly women and children, but has floated a plan to “clean out” Gaza and move Palestinians to Egypt and Jordan.
It is hilarious to see Trump’s decision to join Israel in its war with Iran as some sort of a setback in his quest to become a global peacemaker. Trump was never a peacemaker and, in fact, has always been a warmonger. His politics in general, both domestic and foreign, has never been about the pursuit of unity but rather about sowing seeds of division.
Trump’s view of international order is one based on pure power politics and the fear factor. As such, coercion, intimidation, violence and ultimately war are the means through which he understands that U.S. dominance in the international system can be maintained and reinforced. It’s a vision of a world where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Nonetheless, let’s not have any illusions that today’s world is the world that Trump himself has somehow created. We live in a dark world because the powers that be are fundamentally dark forces in themselves, and the most powerful nations call the shots on the international stage. And this is not to imply that the rest of the world is occupied by saintly creatures. Horrendous governments, religious fanatics and extremists of every twisted stripe ready and willing to engage in bloodshed are in plenty supply across the world. But none bears greater responsibility for international injustices and conflicts across the world than the country that stands as the most powerful actor in the world since the end of the Second World War.
Take the U.S. war on terror, which started following the September 11 attacks in 2001. It has been a disaster on multiple fronts. With the U.S. carrying out anti-terror measures in a total of 85 countries, nearly one million people were killed as a result of combat operations, almost 400,000 of them civilians, while an estimated 3.6-3.8 million “died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones,” according to the “Cost of War” project of Brown University.
There is little doubt that NATO, led by the U.S., provoked Russia into invading Ukraine in 2022. The U.S. and its allies have also repeatedly sabotaged possibilities for peace after Russia's invasion. Three years and four months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there is still no potential for a negotiated end to the war. Nearly 630 days since Israel launched a retaliatory incursion into Gaza, and the slaughtering of innocent people continues on a daily basis as part of what has been widely recognized, even by leading Israeli Holocaust and genocide scholars such as Omer Bartov and Raz Segal, to be an outright genocidal campaign by the neo-fascist Benjamin Netanyahu government. None of this horror would be happening if it were not for the full support provided to Netanyahu’s government by the United States and, to a lesser extent, by some of its key allies. Americans and Europeans alike have as much Palestinian blood on their hands as the Israelis themselves.
Notwithstanding interstate cooperation and the evolution of international law, the international system remains fundamentally anarchic. One of the most important provisions in the Charter of the United Nations, Article 2(4), prohibits the use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the organization. As a global hegemon, the U.S. has consistently sough to assert its dominant position internationally by acting in violation of the Charter. The use of force against Iran, both by Israel and the U.S., is in clear violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter and amounts therefore to a crime of aggression. Yet, there is no international authority to punish Israel and the U.S. for their unlawful actions. Not only that, but both the U.S. presidency and U.S. lawmakers, as well as Israel’s intelligence agencies, are audacious enough to threaten an independent international organization like the International Criminal Court for pursuing international justice. Both Israel and the U.S. feel exempt from accountability for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide simply because of their overwhelming military power and because of the lack of an overarching authority to enforce rules.
And then, of course, there is Europe’s hypocrisy over Israeli and U.S. aggression against Iran. Consider, for example, the pathetic response of G7 leaders to the conflict between Israel and Iran, which started with the former launching blistering attacks on the latter’s nuclear and military structure. Instead of condemning the Netanyahu government for engaging in yet another display of state-sponsored terrorism by “bombing its way to a new neighborhood” as part of a strategic plan to change the face of the Middle East, the leaders of some of the world’s major liberal democracies issued a statement asserting that Israel has the right to defend itself, thereby endorsing its actions, and identified Iran as “the principle source of regional instability and terror.” If propaganda is the intentional twisting of facts, the European Union’s (EU) response to Israel’s crime of aggression against Iran is so surreal that it doesn’t even qualify as propaganda.
The EU’s response to the U.S. strikes on Iran was equally astonishing and jaw-dropping. No European leader dared to condemn Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran. In fact, German chancellor Friedrich Merz said outright that “there is no reason to criticize” either U.S. or Israeli bombing of Iran. But as the Brussels-based foreign policy expert and non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft Eldar Mamedov pointed out “This hypocrisy does more than expose EU moral posturing -- it actively erodes the foundations of international law and the much-vaunted ‘rules-based international order.”’
And then one wonders why there is such strong anti-establishment sentiment in contemporary democracies.
Be that as it may, it is about time that we put an end to the myth of Trump as the “peacemaker” president. He is a warmonger as well as a serial liar and a world-class hypocrite.
