I wrote for Politico today on what the Soleimani strike says about Trump’s foreign policy:
Donald Trump isn’t George W. Bush.
That should be obvious to everyone by now, but his critics and even some of his supporters immediately acted as if it were 2003 on the cusp of the Iraq War when Trump ordered an airstrike to take out Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani.
Suddenly, the neocons had cachet again (Vox warned that “the Iraq War hawks are back”), and we were about to launch yet another endless war. Trump’s decision to kill Soleimani, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote, repeating a common refrain, “has brought the United States to the brink of a devastating new conflict in the Middle East.”
There’s no doubt that the operation against Soleimani carried risks — and still does — but it didn’t transform Trump into a conventional interventionist. In fact, taking out Soleimani was wholly consistent with the president’s approach to the world that can’t be plotted on a simple hawk/dove or neocon/isolationist axis. As a Jacksonian, Trump is none of those, combining a willingness to whack our enemies with a distaste for ambitious foreign interventions.