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BUSTING THE MYTH OF TRUMP AS AN ANTI-WAR PRESIDENT  
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C.J. Polychroniou
June 24, 2025
Common Dreams
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_ Trump's vision is of a world where the strong do what they can and
the weak suffer what they must. It has nothing to do with peace. _

Iranian protesters chant slogans and one holds a poster with a
vampire-like illustration of U.S. President Donald Trump in Revolution
Square to protest US attacks on nuclear sites in Iran on June 22, 2025
in Tehran, Iran. , Getty Images

 

It’s been said that Donald Trump’s decision to join Israel’s war
with Iran underscores his failures as a peacemaker
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This is a preposterous statement because the idea of Trump being “a
peacemaker and unifier
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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
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and withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty
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the Open Skies Treaty
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while U.S. air wars became broader and “increasingly indiscriminate
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Iraq, Somalia, and Syria were among the countries that Trump loosened
the rules of engagement for U.S. forces.
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also ordered the killing
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Qasem Soleimani and threatened “fire and fury
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Korea.In addition, Trump increased tensions between Israelis and
Palestinians by recognizing Jerusalem
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.”
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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
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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
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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.

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C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has
taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in
Europe and the United States. His latest books are The Precipice:
Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (A
collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky; Haymarket Books, 2021),
and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists
(Verso, 2021).

* Iran; Trump's Policy; Israel; Warmongering;
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