Trump hawkish tone doesn’t match history as dove
Donald Trump is promising to “bomb the hell” out of Islamic State terrorists, bring back waterboarding interrogations and deport Syrian refugees.
And GOP primary voters are lining up behind him.
However, the billionaire businessman’s aggressive tone in recent days belies the more dovish approach to the use of military force that he's advocated in years past — one that's less interventionist than most of his other rivals.
Trump’s aversion to committing the U.S. to overseas conflicts goes beyond his opposition to the war in Iraq –- he’s been an outspoken critic of former president George W. Bush — to include the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Prior to the Paris terror attacks, Trump took a more hands-off approach to the Islamic State, suggesting the U.S. outsource the fight to Syria and Russia, was tepid about U.S. involvement in Ukraine and distinguished himself in the Republican field by saying he’d make nice with Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s evolution on a number of issues, from his support for abortion rights and marijuana legalization, hasn’t hurt him with his base voters. The question is whether the same will be true for his previously dovish posture on the use of force.
“He’s Donald Trump, and he’s in his own lane. It’s not easily categorized as dove or hawk,” said George Allen, a Republican and former Virginia governor and senator who flirted with a 2008 presidential run. Voters “think this guy’s not going to be worried about breaking eggs,” he said.
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Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks did not respond to USA TODAY's request for comment.
As recently as an October CNN interview, Trump said he believes Afghanistan was “a terrible mistake,” although he supports keeping troops there now. He later denied his opposition in a separate CNN interview.
In a September debate, while most of his competitors called for a bigger military effort to destroy the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, Trump hewed more to President Obama’s approach, noting that the Syrian leadership and ISIL are enemies. “Let them fight each other and pick up the remnants,” he said.
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In an interview later that month with 60 Minutes, Trump said “maybe let Russia do it. Let ‘em get rid of ISIS. What the hell do we care?”
After the attacks, Trump released a new radio ad calling it “dangerous” that Obama “has no strategy to defeat ISIS.”
His previous stance on ISIL is part of his long-standing advocacy for a less interventionist U.S. foreign policy.
Trump, who a few years ago called Obama a “war monger that’s even worse than Bush,” has also long opposed military involvement on humanitarian grounds, including the 1995 intervention in the Balkans.
He’s been skeptical of U.S. involvement in Ukraine, saying in August that it’s “really a problem that affects Europe” more than the U.S. In his 2000 book, The America We Deserve, Trump wrote that “the Soviet Union is no longer a threat to our Western European allies.” Their conflicts “are not worth American lives.”
In the Reagan Library debate in September, Trump distinguished himself by saying he’d restore U.S. standing globally by reaching out to adversaries, a stance reminiscent of Obama’s during his 2008 campaign against Hillary Clinton. Specifically, Trump boasted that he would get along with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.
As the 2016 battle takes a sharp turn toward national security and terrorism issues, Trump’s get-tough message, including a pledge to bulk up the U.S. military, is helping him consolidate his lead over his competitors in a number of polls taken after the Paris attacks.
“They’re sympatico,” Craig Shirley, a Republican strategist and Ronald Reagan biographer said of Trump’s lead and terrorism fears. “The Republican Party does best when it combines political revolution with national security,” he said.
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According to a recent Washington Post–ABC News poll, 42% of Republicans say they trust Trump over his top four GOP rivals to handle terrorism. That’s 24 points above his nearest competitor, Jeb Bush.
Yet that support may be easy to puncture, both in a primary and a general election.
A separate CBS poll of Iowa voters found Trump lagging Texas Sen. Ted Cruz by 18 percentage points when it comes to who’s most ready to be commander in chief. The Washington Post poll also found voters trust Clinton more than any of the Republican candidates to handle terrorism, including Trump.
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Tom Rath, a longtime Republican strategist in New Hampshire who now backs Ohio Gov. John Kasich, said Trump’s resurgence is more related to declining support for Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who was rising in the polls prior to the Paris attacks, than it is to Trump’s muscular national security stance.
Critics are also likely to resurrect his previous praise for Clinton. In December 2011, Trump said she would do a “good job” negotiating a nuclear deal with the Iranians.
It’s also possible Trump could parlay his past positions to his advantage, said Shirley.
Twelve years into a conflict in the Middle East that appears to have no end, Trump’s warnings in his book may appear prescient to a war-weary nation.
“When we intervene in these conflicts we do little more than temporarily tilt the balance of power,” he wrote in 2000. “We don’t have any idea of how to build democracies in these countries,” Trump said, referring to “the Balkan mess.”
Rath said Trump’s newly hawkish tone is the greater risk than his previous positions.
“Part of it’s theatre, and yet the stuff that came out last week, like waterboarding, seem outside of the political mainstream,” said Rath. “I don’t know that the personality factor will overcome that. There will be a moment when voters reflect and become very serious about their choices.”
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