Even as Donald Trump discussed pulling America out of NATO, tried withdrawing US troops from South Korea, moved to pull 12,000 troops out of Germany, withdrew America’s effective 1,000 man fighting force from Kurdish areas in Syria, and ordered a drawdown of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq by January 20, 2021 as part of his policy of ending “senseless wars,” he manifested a militaristic foreign policy that almost led America into two major and potentially high casualty wars in Asia.
The Inconsistencies of Trump’s Military Retreatism. While Trump as a candidate had previously attacked Obama for “cutting and running” from Iraq, he pivoted to attacking America’s overseas military engagements during the 2016 Republican presidential runoffs. During and after the debates, Trump took a sledgehammer to the sacred cows of Republican Orthodoxy and attacked George W. Bush’s costly war in Iraq as a cudgel to mock and belittle the Republican Party’s anointed heir Jeb Bush. In so doing, Trump broke a taboo in the Republican Party which stated that no one could criticize Bush’s highly unpopular war in Iraq, which Democrats and the undecided largely believed had been premised on false weapons of mass destruction claims (majorities of Republicans up until this point still believed the US had found WMDs in Iraq). Among other criticisms of the WMD-based war, Trump said “It's one of the worst decisions in the history of the country. We have totally destabilized the Middle East."