Donald Trump was never a dove

In 2023, then-Sen. JD Vance endorsed President Donald Trump’s presidential bid for one big reason: Trump’s commitment to peace. “He has my support in 2024,” Vance wrote, “because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”

Flash forward to 2026, and Vice President Vance has been put in the awkward position of defending one of the most reckless US military raids of my lifetime: an explicit attempt to bring about regime change in Venezuela by abducting its president from his bed.

This is not an exaggeration. Trump said during a Saturday press conference that America now “runs” post-Maduro Venezuela. Administration officials have said that the country’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, will either rule according to American dictates or else. One of those dictates is that American oil companies be allowed to extract Venezuelan crude — and that the proceeds of their sales be used to finance US military activity in the country.

In essence, Trump is demanding Venezuela will become an American imperial vassal and pay for the privilege. If they do not, they will face a “a second and much larger attack” — and potentially even an invasion.

“We’re not afraid of boots on the ground,” as Trump put it on Saturday.

We may not get that far. Perhaps Rodriguez will strike some kind of deal, or Trump’s threats will prove to be empty. It wouldn’t be the first time.

But the fact that the US is even attempting a kind of regime change by protection racket, one that began with the brazen abduction of a foreign leader, is proof that Vance and the many, many, many others who insisted that Trump is some kind of dove have been taken for a ride (which was obvious to me from the start).

One question now is why they missed that reality. But the much bigger one is what Trump’s particular brand of hawkishness means for the country — and the world.

Nearly 10 years ago, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd published a column titled “Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk.” In Dowd’s telling, Trump “thought the invasion of Iraq was a stupid idea.” While “he can sound belligerent,” he actually “would rather do the art of the deal than shock and awe.”

Nearly every part of this analysis was wrong — demonstrably wrong at the time. Trump had not opposed George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in advance; he had publicly supported it. He had also supported the 2011 US war in Libya and was calling for US intervention in the Syrian civil war on the campaign trail.

But while Dowd’s op-ed was demonstrably wrong, her basic frame — that Trump is the non-interventionist antidote to the hawkish bipartisan consensus — quickly became one of the dominant ways politicians and analysts described Trump. This was, in large part, at his own encouragement.

“If Kamala wins, only death and destruction await because she is the candidate of endless wars,” Trump said during the 2024 campaign. “I am the candidate of peace.”

This view has indeed become central to the Trump mythos, repeated both by his allies and third party observers.

“Good leaders don’t foment pointless wars. They end them. If you voted for Donald Trump, that’s reason enough to be proud you did,” Tucker Carlson said after the 2024 election. Christian Parenti, a Marxist economist, wrote an essay in Compact arguing that Trump “has done more to restrain the US imperium than any politician in 75 years.” Even NPR, in an ostensibly straight-news writeup from earlier this year, wrote that “Trump has long been known for his ‘America First’ ethos and non-interventionist stance.”

This all was totally at odds with his first-term record (more on that in a second). But it’s also at odds with Trump’s own explicitly stated worldview, in which “America First” is less about avoiding foreign wars than advancing narrowly-defined American interests through more nakedly imperialistic politics.

Let’s take one issue of particular relevance to Venezuela: Trump’s longstanding preoccupation with seizing foreign oil deposits. While that isn’t the sole motivation of the Maduro abduction, and doesn’t really make sense as a practical matter, it’s clear that it played a major role in Trump’s mind — as it has for years.

In 1987, he called on the US to invade Iran and take its oil. In 2011, he proposed an imperial US intervention in the Libyan civil war: “I’m only interested in Libya if we take the oil.” In 2013, he explained his evolution on Iraq — from war supporter to critic — as a kind of disillusionment with the US refusal to do naked imperialism.

“When I heard that we were first going into Iraq, some very smart people told me, ‘Well, we’re actually going for the oil,’ and I said, ‘All right, I get that.’ [But] we didn’t take the oil!” the future president said in a 2013 speech.

And, in 2019, as president, he sent US troops to seize Syrian oil fields, claiming “we’re keeping the oil” to be developed by ExxonMobil at a future date. This plan went nowhere — partly because Exxon itself refused to play ball.

But in Trump’s second term, his policy id has been unleashed. There are no more “adults in the room,” like Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, who saw their job as protecting US foreign policy from the man in charge of it. Instead, the current Trump administration is made up of various competing sub-factions trying to influence his instincts. Vance is a genuine isolationist; Marco Rubio is an uber-hawk with a longstanding preference for regime change. They are all trying to sway Trump to their point of view by trying to sell their own positions as the best expression of his.

Rubio has figured out that the language of crude national interests — of seizing oil deposits for US corporations, or fighting “narco-terrorism,” or asserting American power — taps directly into the particular kind of hawkishness that Trump has consistently expressed for decades.

Hence how you can have what is, in effect, Rubio’s longstanding preference for regime change in Venezuela enacted by a president who has long pretended to oppose regime change wars.

The myopia of “no new wars”

When pressed on these sorts of points, the defenders of Trump-as-peace-candidate have long fallen back on the same line: that Trump did not start any “new wars” during his first term. Vance wrote this in his 2023 op-ed; Curt Mills, the editor of the non-interventionist American Conservative magazine, made the same point in a 2024 piece arguing that Trump’s second term would be a peaceful one.

This line was always a sleight of hand distracting from how Trump dramatically escalated the wars in which America was already involved.

In Iraq and Syria, for example, he removed Obama-era limitations on the use of force designed to prevent civilian casualties, leading to three times as many civilian deaths from US bombs as in in the 1991 Gulf War, the 1998-1999 Kosovo intervention, and the Libya war combined. It’s absurd to call a president with this kind of body count a dove, especially when the civilian death toll from US air wars dropped dramatically after Biden took office.

But it also ignored the way in which Trump frequently took risks that could easily produce a full-scale conflict. In 2017, for example, he threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” and moved US naval assets nearby, bringing us far closer to war with a nuclear-armed power than most people remember. In 2020, he assassinated top Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani — an outright act of war with the Islamic Republic that could easily have spun out of control.

Trump, in short, had proved himself willing to risk new wars in his first term frequently.

It’s clear that he didn’t necessarily want his provocations to escalate; he has a preference for shows of force over actual invasions. But it’s also the case that once you start down a road toward conflict, things don’t always go the way you want. Maybe Trump’s first term avoidance of new wars in term one was the result of deft diplomacy on Trump’s party, the sheer intimidating power of the US military, or the restrained policy choices of his targets. But it also could be attributed to luck.

In his second term, Trump seems determined to push that luck to the brink.

His bombing of Iran’s nuclear site, for example, avoided the most dire predictions of immediate escalations. But, Iran appears to be rebuilding its nuclear capabilities, and Trump is now threatening more attacks over both the nuclear program and the country’s repression of protesters.

His policy of drone strikes on drug traffickers in the Caribbean, allegedly aimed at stamping out “narco-terrorism,” seems to have opened the door to the abduction of Maduro, which the White House has justified as a law enforcement action aimed at putting him on trial on drug-related charges.

And now, the immediate question is whether that hawkishness will escalate to a broader war with Venezuela if the country refuses to comply with Trump’s demands.

Currently, Delcy Rodriguez is striking a defiant tone, saying in a Saturday speech that “we shall never be a colony ever again.” Trump is threatening retaliatory escalation, telling the Atlantic on Sunday that “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

If Rodriguez remains in power and defiant, Trump will have two choices: do nothing and expose his threats as empty, or make good on them. If it’s the latter, his belligerence could lead to an escalation of catastrophic proportions.

Once you understand Trump’s foreign policy as an essentially belligerent one, you begin to appreciate the full enormity of our new era of global politics.

It’s not as if the United States hasn’t been warlike in the past. This isn’t even the first time that the US has launched an invasion to forcibly arrest a Latin American dictator whom it accused of involvement in drug trafficking.

Rather, it’s that American belligerency in the post-World War II era has followed certain predictable rules and guidelines that limited the overall systemic impact of even acts of aggression. The United States was, for all its faults, widely understood as the anchor of an international order it created; charges of hypocrisy in places like Vietnam had bite because of the stated commitment to basic ideas like sovereignty and human rights.

There’s good evidence that the predictability and strength of the US-led alliance system, however imperfect, played a major role in deterring aggression in the latter 20th century. After World War II, the number and severity of wars between states steadily declined, leading to a dramatic drop in the rate of people killed by war relative to historical averages. The term “Pax Americana” was not entirely a misnomer, even when you factor in America’s criminally brutal Cold War policies in places ranging from Vietnam, to Argentina, to Indonesia.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq, with its brazen indifference to international law, weakened faith in the US-led order. Trump’s first term hollowed it out. And now, the naked imperial violence of his second might have well and truly shattered it. Trump is making a series of wild threats and territorial claims, forcing Mexico to prepare for a potentially imminent US invasion and Denmark to take recent US threats to seize Greenland seriously.

What this new world disorder looks like is hard to say. Seva Gunitsky, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, suggested one model after the Maduro operation — a kind of regional “carve-up” in which the US, Russia, and China each get to do what they want in their respective spheres of influence.

“What just happened is entirely consistent with the spheres-of-influence approach that Putin has long advocated, and that Trump embraced in the latest National Security Strategy. The emerging order is one in which Putin, Xi, and Trump each get to do whatever they want in their respective zones: a grand bargain among the powerful at the expense of everyone else,” he wrote. “For ‘smaller’ places caught in the gray zones, like Ukraine, Taiwan, the Baltics, even Greenland, this is not an abstract theoretical debate but a question of survival.”

But this is just one possibility. The truth is that an unconstrained Trump, acting on his longstanding hawkish impulses, could cause all sorts of chaos in his remaining three years. While US military interventionism is very precedented, Trump’s particular brand of it — naked pre-modern imperialism backed by a modern globe-spanning military — is not.

Americans should be prepared for things to go very, very wrong.