The Democrats Always Want Trump To Be More Pro-War.

Instead Of Opposing Trump's Actual Hawkish Foreign Policy, The Democrats Always Attack Him For Not Being Pro-War Enough.

Pictured Above: Chuck Schumer’s video urging Trump to be more hawkish on Iran.

Recently, Chuck Schumer, the New York Senator and Senate leader for the Democratic party, lambasted Trump’s Middle East policy, not over the fact that he is supporting a genocidal ethnic cleansing plan in Gaza, but for not going to war with Iran for Israel.

In a video released to social media, Schumer said,

When it comes to negotiating with the terrorist government of Iran, Trump’s all over the lot. One day he sounds tough, the next day he’s backing off. And now, all of a sudden, we find out that Witkoff are negotiating a secret deal with Iran. What kind of bull is this? They’re gonna sound tough in public, and then have a side deal that lets Iran get away with everything? That’s outrageous. We need to make that side deal public. We need to make that side deal public before Congress and, most importantly, the American people. If TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) is already folding, the American public should know about it. No side deals.

The implication of this unhinged, bloodthirsty screed is that Trump is a “chicken” if he negotiates a deal with Iran, and the only way for him to be “tough” is to fulfill Benjamin Netanyahu’s wish and start an American conflict with Iran, which would require American troops to be sent to the country.

This line of attack is not a one-off or out of character for the Democratic Party.

Since 2016, the Democratic Party has functioned as an outpost of Washington’s neocons, only attacking Trump on foreign policy in an attempt to make him more hawkish.

In this article, I will review the long history of Trump’s opposition party only attacking him from the right on foreign policy.

The Second McCarthy Era.

Going back to the 2016 election, in rhetoric, Hillary Clinton was actually far closer to the pro-war neo-conservative agenda than Donald Trump.

In the 2016 primary debate, Trump lambasted Jeb Bush for his brother, George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, saying the war was a “big fat mistake” and saying “we should have never been in Iraq, we destabilized the Middle East”, “They lied they said there were weapons of mass destruction there were none, and they knew there were none”.

In the general election, he lambasted Obama and Hillary Clinton similarly for their regime change operations in Libya and Syria, saying, “President Obama and Hillary Clinton should have never attempted to build a democracy in Libya, to push for immediate regime change in Syria”.

Trump called for better relations with Russia in 2016, and even signaled support for the creation of a Palestinian state and a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine.

On the Democratic side, Clinton’s rhetoric was far more hawkish than Trump’s, and she was even more hawkish on issues like Syria, Iran, and Russia than her Democratic predecessor Barack Obama.

She supported a military intervention in Syria, opposed the Iran deal and supported sanctions on Iran, wanted to be more confrontational with Russia, and called herself a “longtime champion of Israel”.

When he became president, Trump ended up enacting the neo-con preferred policy on all of these issues, but they did not know that yet in 2016.

Many neoconservatives fled to the Democratic Party during 2016, seeing it now as the most hawkish of the two parties.

They even held an event to underscore this.

Journalist Rania Khalek in The Intercept reported on a campaign fundraiser in 2016 called “Foreign Policy Professionals for Hillary”.

Among the attendees was Robert Kagan, the founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) think tank, a neo-conservative think tank widely seen as the architect of the Iraq War.

At the event, Khalek reported that Kagan said, “I would say all Republican foreign policy professionals are anti-Trump, would say that a majority of people in my circle will vote for Hillary”.

As Khalek reported:

The way they described Clinton’s foreign policy vision suggested that if elected president in November, she will escalate tensions with Russia, double down on military belligerence in the Middle East, and generally ignore the American public’s growing hostility to intervention.

Khaleck reported that the various neo-con blob creatures at the event touted Hillary over her support for the NATO war in Libya, intervention in Syria, willingness to arm Ukraine, and support for Israel.

At the same time, the Clinton campaign was hiring a number of firms to cook up false stories tying Donald Trump to the Russian government.

They hired the firm “Fusion GPS” to cook up a false claim that the Trump campaign had a secret back channel to Russia through the Russian Alfa Bank, and fed it to the FBI and media.

They hired researchers from the same firm and the unreliable agency “CrowdStrike” to falsely claim Russia stole emails from the DNC server.

The Clinton campaign also hired Fusion GPS to hire the former British spy Christopher Steele, who cooked up an even more over-the-top conspiracy theory, which claimed Trump was secretly “blackmailed” by the Kremlin through a secret “pee tape”.

These false conspiracy theories were not only used to discredit Trump, but they were also used to push for a more hawkish approach to Russia and get the Democrats to push for Trump to embrace it.

Much of the neoconservative foreign policy agenda during this time centred around confronting Russia through different proxy wars.

The U.S. backed a coup and installed a puppet government in Ukraine in 2014, causing a civil war between pro-West and pro-Russia Ukrainians in the Eastern Donbas regions of Ukraine. The coup was driven by Victoria Nuland, a long-time neocon and the wife of the aforementioned Robert Kagan.

The CIA was spending a billion dollars a year arming and training jihadist rebels in an attempt to overthrow the Russian-aligned Assad regime in Syria, triggering Russia to intervene on the government’s side in 2015.

Neocons and the security state were also attempting to overthrow Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, who was also allied with Russia.

Through the Russigate conspiracy theory, neo-cons convinced Democrats and their mouthpieces in the media that the best way to oppose Trump was to accuse him of being “weak” or blackmailed by Russia and other official enemy countries, and that he needed to advance a hawkish neocon agenda to prove he was not.

To prove this fabricated theory wrong, Trump ended up reneging on his promise to foster better relations with Russia and approved the hawkish Russia policies that the neocons pushing “Russiagate” wanted.

He approved lethal arms to the Ukrainian government in 2017 and 2019, which ramped up civilian casualties against ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine from the Ukrainian government.

A UN Human Rights Council report found that between 2018 and 2021, 81 percent of the civilian casualties happened on the pro-Russia side of the Donbas conflict.

Trump also unilaterally pulled out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia, which Russia cited as one of their main grievances to justify their invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

He put sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany, furthering the top neocon goal of isolating Russia in Europe.

Much of this was done by Trump to “prove” that he was not a Russian agent, a claim that was constantly pushed by Democrats and allied media like MSNBC.

Trump would brag about his hawkish actions by correcting, saying that “There's never been a president as tough on Russia as I have been”.

Indeed, even the Atlantic Council’s Daniel Vajdich said during Trump’s first term that “When you actually look at the substance of what this (Trump) administration has done, not the rhetoric but the substance, this administration has been much tougher on Russia than any in the post-Cold War era”.

Even Trump’s son, Eric Trump, boasted about Trump’s illegal cruise missile strike on Syria because “it was to validate the fact that there is no Russia tie”.

This statement underscored the real point of the Russiagate campaign.

Democrats would accuse Trump of being in bed with Russia or “weak”, and then Trump would, in turn, approve the most hawkish, neocon-approved policy to prove he was not.

This is why bloodthirsty neo-cons like Bill Kristol, David Frum, Max Boot, and Nicolle Wallace became Democratic Party stars.

Every time Trump did anything out of line with the Neocon agenda, Democrats would effectively blackmail him by saying he was doing it for Russia, and pushing him to take the more hawkish approach.

When Trump tried to take a diplomatic approach towards North Korea, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow ran a segment that claimed Trump’s attempt at peace with a nuclear-armed power was because he was in bed with the Russians.

She ran another segment where she accused Trump of “listening to Putin” because he did not support his psychopathic national security advisor, John Bolton’s, proposal to do a military intervention in Venezuela.

The entire Democratic-led impeachment debacle against Trump in 2019 was based on the fact that he temporarily paused arms shipments to Ukraine.

Democrats used the entire impeachment hearing to push for more hawkish policies towards Russia, with Democratic House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff saying, “The United States aids Ukraine and her people so we can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight them over here”.

This impeachment inquiry actually helped stop a peace deal that could have prevented the Ukraine proxy war.

In reality, Volodymyr Zelensky ran in 2019 on a platform of fully implementing the Minsk 2 accords - a peace plan that would have ended the fighting in the Donbas region that U.S. weapons to Ukraine were fueling.

As the Ukrainian political scientist Konstantin Bondarenko documented in his recent book, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State David Hale met with Zelensky while he was running for president and “was told about the U.S.’s interests in Ukraine” including “cooperation with the IMF, continuing the confrontation with Russia, sabotaging the Minsk agreements, and protecting the interests of transnational corporations”.

When he was elected president in 2019, Zelensky was threatened and blackmailed with threats of violence against implementing the deal by members of the Neo-Nazi paramilitary group Azov Battalion, which was emboldened by U.S. arms to Ukraine.

At the time, the late Stephen F. Cohen, one of the leading American experts on Russia, warned that Zelensky’s “life is being threatened by a quasi-fascist movement” and that “He can’t go forward with full peace negotiations unless America has his back”.

Instead of pushing Trump to support the Minsk 2 peace process, which, if successful, could have prevented the full-scale war in Ukraine, Democrats attempted to impeach Trump for temporarily pausing weapons to Ukraine and lauding the benefits of using Ukraine to “fight Russia over there”.

The Democrats ran a similar pro-war campaign around Trump’s attempt to withdraw from Afghanistan.

When Trump tried to withdraw from Afghanistan, the CIA put out a fabricated claim that Russia was putting “bounties” on the heads of U.S. troops for the Taliban.

Based on this fabricated claim, Democrats accused Trump of being in bed with Putin if he continued with the Afghanistan withdrawal plan.

Democratic Congressman Jason Crow and Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney (the daughter of Dick Cheney) even co-sponsored a resolution to prevent troop reduction in Afghanistan- which was supported by many democrats.

Cheney also worked with Democrats to oppose a Trump-proposed withdrawal of American troops from Germany.

As journalist Glenn Greenwald noted at the time:

Just as she did with Afghanistan, Congresswoman Cheney, to oppose this troop removal from Germany, cited — along with her Democratic Committee colleagues — the threat of Russia, now the all-purpose rationale for continuing endless U.S. imperialism and war, just as it was during the first Cold War:

The Biden Era Continuation

Enter the Biden administration from 2020-2024, which ended up being arguably the most hawkish Democratic administration in American history.

They intentionally provoked and prolonged the war in Ukraine, running the Ukrainian side of the war from a base in Germany and repeatedly risking a Nuclear confrontation with Russia.

They supported Israel's genocide in Gaza without ever putting pressure on Israel to accept a ceasefire and stop their mass murder of civilians, the majority of whom were women and children.

They gave Israel the green light to invade Lebanon and bombed Yemen on Israel’s behalf.

Yet again in 2024, they boasted about this blood-soaked record and went to the right of Trump on foreign policy.

The official 2024 DNC platform lambasted Trump for not being hawkish enough on Iran, writing that the Democrat’s hawkish, Zionist Middle East policies “stands in sharp contrast to Trump's fecklessness and weakness in the face of Iranian aggression during his presidency” and writing “Trump failed to respond against Iran or its proxies”.

Along with this, the platform attacked Trump for not going to war with Iran, writing “In June 2019, when Iran shot down a U.S. surveillance aircraft operating in international airspace above the Straits of Hormuz, Trump responded by tweet and then abruptly called off any actual retaliation, causing confusion and concern among his own national security team”.

As journalist Caitlin Johnstone noted:

The ‘national security team’ who suffered ‘confusion and concern’ when Trump opted not to wade into a middle eastern war of unfathomable horror includes psychopathic war criminal John Bolton, who was reportedly ‘devastated’ when Trump called off a deadly military assault on Iran in retaliation for its shooting down the aforementioned (unmanned) surveillance aircraft.

Writing about the Democrats siding with John Bolton over Trump on Iran, Johnstone noted, “When you’re siding with John Bolton on whether to bomb Iran, you’re as insanely hawkish as it gets”.

In the 2024 debate, Kamala Harris attacked Trump for wanting to end the proxy war in Ukraine, saying “Why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up (in Ukraine) for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch?”.

As Politico noted, these comments only helped Trump, as many Polish voters in Pennsylvania wanted to stop American funding of the Ukraine war, prioritizing domestic issues instead.

Trump was even able to outflank the Democrats from the left in rhetoric about Gaza.

As the BBC reported, “On billboards lining Michigan highways and during visits, the Trump campaign argues that he stands ‘for peace’ in the Middle East, while casting Harris as pro-Israel.”

The Democrats, on the other hand, sent Bill Clinton to Michigan to repeat genocidal Zionist talking points, saying that “Israel has been ‘forced’ to kill civilians in Gaza” and saying “I got news for Hamas—Israelis were there first” ignoring the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1947 that caused the creation of Israel.

The Democrats also went around campaigning with Liz Cheney and even touted their endorsement from her war criminal father Dick Cheney.

Speaking about the Democrats’ hawkish campaigning, the mayor of the Muslim Majority city of Dearborn, Michigan, Abdullah Hammoud said, “When you see the remarks of former President Bill Clinton, talking about how Israel is forced to kill civilians … it gets extremely frustrating, when you have surrogates like Liz Cheney campaigning across the state of Michigan, talking about how even Dick Cheney – the war criminal – is supporting Vice President Harris, is that supposed to be a welcoming message to this community?”.

The Democrats even attacked Trump for correctly calling Liz Cheney a radical war hawk.

Near the end of the 2024 election, Trump said:

I don't want to go to war. (Liz Cheney) wanted to go, she wanted to stay in Syria. I took (troops) out. She wanted to stay in Iraq. I took them out. I mean, if it were up to her, we'd, we'd be in 50 different countries. And you know, number one, it's very dangerous. Number two, a lot of people get killed. And number three, I mean, it's very, very expensive.

I don’t blame (Dick Cheney) for sticking with his daughter, but his daughter is a very dumb individual, very dumb. She is a radical war hawk. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.

Trump was obviously calling Liz Cheney a chicken hawk here, but the Democrats took this correct attack on her warmongering out of context, and claimed Trump was threatening violence against Liz Cheney, when in reality, he was opposing her for threatening violence against countries overseas.

The Democrats’ rhetorically going to the right of Trump on foreign policy in 2024 certainly played a large part in their loss and Trump’s victory.

Going After Trump For All The Wrong Reasons.

Once Trump was in, in 2024, the Democrats doubled down on their pro-war rhetoric and attacked Trump for not being pro-war enough instead of for his support of Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing in Gaza or his bombing of Yemen.

The Democratic Party focused heavily on Trump’s shuttering of USAID, presenting the organization as purely humanitarian.

What the Democrats ignored was that USAID functioned more often than not as a cutout of the CIA and was used to further imperial regime change goals in Ukraine, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, Romania, Bangladesh, and elsewhere.

The Democrats heavily attacked Trump for trying to end the unwinnable proxy war in Ukraine and opposing Zelensky’s obvious authoritarian turn.

The Democrats focused on Trump allowing his Signal chat about bombing Yemen to be leaked as the major scandal instead of the fact that he was conducting a murderous bombing of Yemen in coordination with Israel and their return to the genocide in Gaza.

Now, Chuck Schumer is continuing this trend, attacking Trump for not starting a war with Iran for Israel.

Just like how the Democrats pressured Trump to be more hawkish towards Russia in his first term, they are now pressuring him to start another disastrous and dangerous war in the Middle East.

The danger of the rhetoric is that by calling Trump a “chicken” for not sending Americans to go die in Iran for Israel, it may lead him to do it to prove how “tough” he is.

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