Trump at War
Huss Banai on the Israel-Iran-U.S. war.
This week: a conversation with Huss Banai on Trump’s war. Find it at our site or wherever you go for podcasts.
“Trump the anti-war president was always a myth,” ran a Responsible Statecraft headline back in 2021: “Trump poured fuel on our endless wars and kicked diplomacy to the curb.” Still, the clichés persisted. This week we reflect on Trump’s bombing of Iran, discussing the reality contradicting the myths.
Huss Banai, professor of International Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington, explains things:
If you believe what he says, coming into the second term of his, he wants to be the person that ends all wars, and especially the most entrenched ones—such as this one between Iran and Israel—for good. Now he says that, but he also . . . partakes in violence and attacks in military cooperation with Israel in this war.
It's unclear, I think, where his true heart is on this issue because it is so attached to his individual interests and to his sheer appetite for the domination of the good news out of this picture, whatever that good news means at any given moment. And so I think we're at the whim of the appetites and aversions of a single man when it comes to his position on peace.
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