Misunderstanding Trump
**Victor Davis Hanson | June 18, 2025
President Donald Trump stops and talks to the media before he
boards Marine One on the South Lawn at the White House on June 15,
2025, in Washington, D.C.
Many are now demanding that President Donald Trump act abroad
in the way they think he had promised and campaigned—which can be
mostly defined as how closely he should parallel their own version
of MAGA.
But Trump’s past shows that he never claimed that he was either
an ideological isolationist or an interventionist.
He was and is clearly a populist-nationalist: i.e., what in a
cost-to-benefit analysis is in the best interests of the U.S. at
home and its own particular agendas abroad.
Trump did not like neoconservatism because he never felt it was
in our interests to spend blood and treasure on those who either did
not deserve such largesse, or who would never evolve in ways we
thought they should, or whose fates were not central to our national
interests.
So-called optional, bad-deal, and forever wars in the Middle
East and their multitrillion-dollar costs would come ultimately at
the expense of shorting Middle America back home.
However, Trump’s first-term bombing of ISIS, standing down
“little rocket man,” warning Russian President Vladimir Putin not
to invade Ukraine between 2017-21, and killing off Qasem Soleimani,
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and many of the attacking Russian Wagner Group
in Syria were certainly not Charles Lindbergh isolationism but a
sort of Jacksonian—something summed up perhaps as the Gadsen “Don’t
tread on me” or Lucius Sulla’s “No better friend, no worse enemy.”
Trump’s much-critiqued references to Putin—most recently during
the G7, and his negotiations with him over Ukraine—were never, as
alleged, appeasement (he was harder in his first term on Putin than
was either Barack Obama or Joe Biden), but art-of-the-deal/trans-
actional (e.g., you don’t gratuitously insult or ostracize your
formidable rival in possible dealmaking, but seek simultaneously to
praise—and beat—him.)
Similarly, Winston Churchill initially saw the mass-murdering,
treacherous Josef Stalin in the way Trump perhaps sees Putin, some-
one dangerous and evil, but who if handled carefully, occasionally
granted his due, and approached with eyes wide open, could be useful
in advancing a country’s realist interests—which for Britain in 1941
was for Russia to kill three-quarters of Nazi Germany’s soldiers
and, mutatis mutandis, for the U.S. in 2025 to cease the mass
killing near Europe, save most of an autonomous Ukraine, keep Russia
back eastward as far as feasible, and in Kissingerian-style derail
the developing Chinese and Russian anti-American axis.
Trump was never anti-Ukraine, but rather against a seemingly
endless Verdun-like war in which after three years neither side had
found a pathway to strategic resolution—a war from the distance
fought between two like peoples, one with nuclear weapons, and on
the doorstep of Europe.
Usually, Trump prefaced the war as a nonsensical wastage of
life, at staggering human cost that his supposedly more humane and
sophisticated critics never mentioned all that much.
At best, one could say Trump really did lament the horrific
loss of life, and at the least, as a builder and dealmaker, wars for
him rarely made any practical business sense, i.e., it seems wiser
to build things and mutually profit than to blow them up and
impoverish all involved.
Add it all up, and what Trump is doing vis-à-vis Iran seems in
line with what he has said and done about “America First.”
He sees Israel’s interests in neutering the nuclear agendas of
the thuggish and dangerous Iran as strategically similar to those of
our own and our allies—but not necessarily tactically in every in-
stance identically so. Thus, Trump wants the Iranian nuclear threat
taken out by Israel—if feasible. And he will help facilitate that
aim logistically and diplomatically.
If it is not possible for Israel to finish the task, in a cost
-to-benefit analysis he will take it out—but, again, only after he
is convinced that the end of Iran’s nukes and our intervention far
outweigh the dangers of a superpower intervention, attacks on U.S.
installations in the region, a wider, ongoing American commitment,
spiraling oil prices, or distractions or even injury to his ambi-
tious domestic agenda.
Trump is willing to talk to the Iranians, rarely insults their
thuggish leaders, and wants to show that he always preferred ex-
hausting negotiations to preemptive war.
That patience allows him to say legitimately that force was his
last choice—as he sees all the alternatives waning.
Thus, Iran’s fate was in its own hands, either to be a non-
nuclear rich state analogous to the Gulf States but no longer a half
century rogue terrorist regime seeking to overturn and then appro-
priate the Middle East order and to threaten the West with nukes.
Tactically, Trump thinks out loud. He offers numerous possible
solutions, issues threats, and deadlines (some rhetorical or nego-
tiable, others literal and ironclad). He alternates between sounding
like a U.N. diplomat and a Cold War hawk, and sometime pivots and
reverses himself as situations change.
All this can confuse his allies, but perhaps confounds more of
his enemies.
In sum, he believes as far as enemies go, public predictability
can be dangerous—unpredictability even volatility being the safer
course.
Add it all up, and there is a reason Putin did not invade
Ukraine during Trump’s first term; why for the first time in nearly
50 years the Middle East has some chance at normality with the
demise of the Iran’s Shia crescent of terror; and why Europe and our
Asian allies may be more irritated by Trump than by Obama and Biden,
but also probably feel that he is more likely to defend their shared
Western interests in extremis, and will lead a far stronger and more
deterrent West than his predecessors, one that will prevent war by
assuring others that it is suicidal to attack the U.S.**
Trump and his administration have a motto that best describes
our most notable attention getter. "Peace by Strength", then say
what you mean and mean what you say.
Pray to God and ask for his grace.
Conservatively,
John
Conservativelyjohn.com 