Fresh into his office during his second term, Donald Trump’s claim to fame was his claim of averting many wars. This self-serving myth rested on a fundamentally flawed premise. International peace or conflict typically results from a complex interplay of deterrence, alliances, diplomacy, and the independent decisions of multiple states. In fact, the Trump presidency has been nothing but peace in words and war in deeds.
Extraterritorial assassinations, abductions of a president and his spouse, coercive sanctions, tariffs, and the weaponization of legal systems are not signs of a war-averter; they are the symbols of one. An example is the assassination of Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani. Iran’s retaliation could have triggered a war but for the restraint shown by it. Earlier in the Trump presidency, tensions with North Korea escalated sharply with Trump’s threats of “fire and fury.” North Korea’s answer was test-firing hypersonic intercontinental ballistic missiles.
In 2018, the Trump administration unilaterally revoked the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement with Iran. This reckless move was largely criticized because of concerns that it would increase the long-term risk of nuclear proliferation and conflict in the Middle East. These incidents suggest that the claim of averting wars relies on political claims about a period that, while not resulting in a major war, contained several serious escalatory moments.
In his first term Donald Trump, like Arthur Balfour, gifted Netanyahu with the Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Apart from lifting sanctions on armed Israeli settlers in the West Bank, he shifted the US Embassy to Jerusalem in violation of Security Council resolutions. Come the second term, he kept on aiding and arming the Gaza genocide that has seen the murder of over 75,000 Palestinians, 22,000 of them children.
Since his brokered and much-flaunted Gaza (non)ceasefire on 19 January 2025, Israel murders an average of 13 persons daily. More than 93 percent of children in Gaza, nearly 930,000, are at risk of famine. Over 10,000 bodies remain buried under the rubble. Despite this, Trump is fixated on converting Gaza into a Riviera of the Middle East. Instead of reining in the genocidal Netanyahu, he has joined forces with him in attacking Iran.
As the atrocities in Gaza continue unabated and neglected, the US-Israel airstrikes on Iran have led to the whole region morphing into a war theater. The transition from Donald Trump’s no-war and non-interventionist rhetoric to the present reality is the starkest of contrasts between campaign promises and unfettered geopolitical ambitions.
Trump’s primary foreign policy selling point was that he was the first president in decades not to start a new war. However, he is the one who has moved the US from proxy confrontations to a high-intensity direct war with a major regional power. The outcome, as is evident, is not in his control. The fallout of this reckless act has triggered a cascading global crisis that has affected the whole world. The IAEA and UN bodies have warned that escalation against Iranian nuclear sites poses a severe risk of accidental nuclear fallout and a broader nuclear confrontation.
Joe Kent, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, was handpicked by Trump and had access to top-level intelligence. His resignation, claiming that Iran posed “no imminent threat to the US,” is a stark indictment of the Trump administration. Kent’s resignation follows that of Sameerah Munshi, Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission advisor, who called the war in Iran illegal. Earlier, Trump removed Carrie Prejean Boller, another personal appointee, from the commission’s board. This was because of her pro-Palestine views and her asking a fellow Jewish Commission member if he condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Principled resignations leave behind a void of integrity. They also take the most experienced people out of the room with a signal to those remaining behind that dissent is not welcome. Advisors stop offering uncomfortable truths in what becomes an administration’s echo chamber devoid of ethical guardrails. The replacements are usually yes-men, leading to more tactical errors, leading to bog-downs and unnecessary loss of life. They also lead to reckless acts like abducting a president and his spouse and yet another unbridled urge to take over a sovereign country like Cuba.
Investigative journalist Bob Woodward broke the Watergate scandal. His book “Peril” is his third in his Trump trilogy. The book reveals that on 30 October 2020, General Mark Milley, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, called General Li Zuocheng, his Chinese counterpart. A second call to him was made on 6 January 2021, the day Trump supporters led a deadly riot at the US Capitol. In these calls, Milley assured Li that the US was not going to attack China. He also assured Li that if at all it did, he would be alerted.
Giving the reason, Woodward cites a transcript about Speaker Nancy Pelosi asking Milley about “the safeguards to prevent an unstable president (Trump) from launching a nuclear strike.” Woodward writes that Pelosi told Milley, “He’s crazy. You know he’s crazy.” To this, the general replies, “I agree with you on everything.” In another Woodward book, “War,” Milley is quoted as calling Trump “fascist to the core.” No wonder, Trump’s second term’s first act was to have the personal security detail and security clearance of General Mark Milley revoked. In the nuclear age era, such a mindset carries unprecedented stakes. The fusion of personal volatility with nuclear capability renders miscalculation existential.
John Kennedy warned against a Pax Americana enforced by weapons of war, saying “not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave,” but a genuine peace worth living for. Today, that warning is more prevalent than historical. From Gaza to Iran, the same calamitous binary re-emerges—subjugation or annihilation. Hardening into a doctrine, they have ceased to be choices at all. They are now trajectories, self-fulfilling and irreversible. The logic of force has replaced the possibility of reason. The end, at least for now, is no longer negotiated; it is inflicted.
If you want to submit your articles and/or research papers, please visit the Submissions page.
To stay updated with the latest jobs, CSS news, internships, scholarships, and current affairs articles, join our Community Forum!
The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.
Mir Adnan Aziz is a columnist whose writing explores the forces that shape power, belief, and society.
