The Antiwar Trump Was Always a Myth

As Donald Trump considers a U.S. war with Iran and the Pentagon builds up military forces in the Middle East, I find myself returning, oddly, to a question posed by Leo Tolstoy: “How many men are necessary to change a crime into a virtue?” He wondered this in his 1894 treatise on Christian nonviolence, The Kingdom of God is Within You, paraphrasing a pamphlet by Christian anarchist and abolitionist Adin Ballou: “One man may not kill. If he kills a fellow-creature, he is a murderer. If two, ten, a hundred men do so, they, too, are murderers. But a government or a nation may kill as many men as it chooses, and that will not be murder, but a great and noble action.”

I first encountered this passage last April, six months into Israel’s genocide in Gaza. At that point, the war felt like it had been going on for a lifetime; in hindsight, it had barely started. Now, more than 130 years after Tolstoy wrote his treatise, I’m struck by how political leaders still treat war as not just inevitable, but virtuous, good.

“We’re in the midst of one of the greatest military operations in history,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video statement released June 13, shortly after Israel began carrying out a series of airstrikes in Iran. Purporting to address the Iranian people directly, Netanyahu continued, “As we achieve our objectives, we’re clearing the path for you to achieve your objective, which is freedom. …Your light will defeat the darkness.”

This is pure propaganda. Israel’s attack on Iran was an act of naked aggression, not one of humanitarian concern. While the first wave of airstrikes targeted Iranian nuclear facilities, in less than a week, Israel has hit an Iranian state broadcaster and killed more than 200 civilians. Netanyahu claims the military action was preemptive, yet there is no evidence that an Iranian nuclear strike was imminent, or that Iran even has a nuclear weapon, or is capable of producing one soon. Meanwhile, officials in the U.S. and Israel have pointed to regime change as the ultimate goal.

The U.S. is, in many ways, already involved in a war against Iran, sending money and weapons to Israel and shooting down Iranian missiles. But Israel is now requesting that the U.S. directly partake in its military offensive — a move that 60 percent of Americans oppose, according to a recent poll. We know that additional U.S. military intervention would be disastrous; time and time again we’ve seen how war destabilizes entire regions. During the 2016 presidential primary, Trump himself railed against George W. Bush for invading Iraq in 2003 and said the former president had lied about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Prior to that, in 2011, Trump lambasted Obama’s foreign policy, claiming the then-president would start a war with Iran in order to get reelected — “because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective.”

This type of rhetoric enabled Trump to paint himself as the antiwar candidate on the campaign trail, from 2016 to 2020 to 2024, drawing a contrast between himself and both war hawk Democrats and the neoconservative wing of his own party. Now, the MAGA movement is splintering over whether the U.S. should join Israel in attacking Iran. Representing the GOP hawk flank, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) urged Trump to go “all in” on an attack on Iran. Far right political commentator Tucker Carlson, however, rebuked the warmongers for abandoning a commitment to “America First” — comments that incited a fiery social media response from Trump.

“Somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that, ‘IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!’” Trump wrote on Truth Social. In a follow up post, he continued, “AMERICA FIRST means many GREAT things.”

MAGA’s Iran schism, and the president’s foreign policy decisions thus far, make clear that the antiwar Trump was always a myth. The fact is that, contrary to public sentiment, there is still no great political representation for people in the U.S. who are actually antiwar and trying to do something about it through policy or legislation. Aside from a few progressives in Congress, Democrats have either stayed silent or backed the idea of a U.S. offensive in Iran. And MAGA’s “America First” stance is not a viable alternative for antiwar voters, nor does it challenge the root of the issue.

That’s because Carlson and other MAGA isolationists — including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), who has spoken out against a potential direct U.S. strike on Iran — are not opposing a possible war from a place of humanitarian concern or an expressed belief in the Iranian people’s right to self-determination. “I’m really afraid we’re watching the beginning of the end of the American empire,” Carlson told Steve Bannon on the War Room podcast. This type of “antiwar” stance is boldly in service of imperial violence, not opposed to it.

As Trump attempts to appeal to both factions of the MAGA coalition, U.S. and Israeli officials have provided conflicting statements about the degree of U.S. knowledge and involvement before Israel’s attack. This deception is seemingly part of the strategy: The president can pay lip service to diplomacy all he wants, but that does not change the facts on the ground. On June 16, Trump called on the 10 million citizens of Tehran to “immediately evacuate” — an impossible feat, and one that stands at odds with his gestures toward a peaceful way out of the current conflict.

While the Trump administration initially focused on calling for a diplomatic resolution, let us not forget that it was Trump who in 2018 unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from the Iran nuclear deal. In that agreement, negotiated by Barack Obama and several other world leaders in 2015, Iran consented to limiting its nuclear program and expanding international inspections in exchange for the easing of some economic sanctions. After the U.S. withdrew from the agreement, Iran then violated its terms, beefing up its uranium enrichment activities. U.S.-Iran relations further deteriorated in January 2020, when Trump authorized the drone strike assassination of Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani and threatened to strike Iran’s cultural sites.

As Murtaza Hussain wrote in The Intercept in 2021, “In place of a diplomatic arrangement, the Trump administration waged a campaign of economic pressure, sabotage, and assassinations targeting Iranian leadership.” But unlike the 2015 nuclear deal, these tactics failed to actually curb Iran’s nuclear program, which has continued to advance in the ensuing years, even as U.S. sanctions cause great humanitarian harm.

In light of these diplomatic failures, what has Democratic leadership had to offer? Not much. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) and House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) have stayed mum since Trump ordered the evacuation of Tehran, though they released statements expressing “ironclad” support for Israel after the initial June 12 airstrikes. In fact, they’ve both urged Trump to respond more belligerently to Iran in the first place. Earlier this month, Schumer attacked the president for “folding” on nuclear talks; in February, Jeffries told reporters, “We can’t take our foot off the gas pedal until Iran is brought to its knees.” Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania), meanwhile, has explicitly called on the U.S. to escalate its involvement, writing that Israel should “keep wiping out Iranian leadership” and the U.S. “must provide whatever is necessary — military, intelligence, weaponry — to fully back Israel in striking Iran.”

Axios reports that only a few Senate Democrats have publicly supported a resolution, introduced by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia), that would limit Trump’s ability to wage war with Iran. Per the U.S. Constitution, only Congress, not the president, has the power to declare war, though the White House has often circumvented this rule in practice. Kaine said that his war powers resolution simply underscores the Constitutional requirement that war with Iran be explicitly authorized by Congress, and Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) and Ro Khanna (D-California) introduced a similar bipartisan resolution in the house on Tuesday. On Monday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) introduced the No War Against Iran Act, backed by seven Democratic senators, which would “prohibit the use of federal funds for any use of military force in or against Iran absent specific Congressional authorization.”

It’s a shame that these attempts do not have more widespread support and as such are unlikely to rein in the Trump administration. Still, it is not too late to chart a diplomatic course forward. We must not stop calling on our elected officials to do better, to commit to new ways of challenging U.S. complicity in this war, to demand an arms embargo on Israel and an end to military cooperation with Israel’s war crimes. I’ll return, now, to Tolstoy, again paraphrasing Ballou: “Gather the people together on a large scale, and a battle of ten thousand men becomes an innocent action. But precisely how many people must there be to make it so? That is the question. One man cannot plunder and pillage, but a whole nation can. But precisely how many are needed to make it permissible?”