Donald Trump Isn’t Anti-War. He’s Anti-West. Learn the Difference.

George W. Bush would no doubt say, and did say at the time on many occasions, the same thing about Iraq. I never thought, as many left-wing critics did, that that war was about oil, although the prospect of some easy oil revenues didn’t hurt, from the neocons’ perspective. And I never thought, as Michael Moore argued in Fahrenheit 9/11, that it was about the Carlyle Group. Rather, it was about establishing the United States as the preeminent global power in a unipolar, post-Cold War world; and, in Bush’s mind, I’m sure, it was also about bringing freedom to the people of Iraq—that is, he convinced himself that he was upholding Western values.

What Trump is against is the idea that America’s military might needs to be tethered to some positive sum goal that positions the United States as a force that fosters global security and Western democracy. It’s this entire notion of values that Trump is against, not war per se. As my colleague Greg Sargent wrote last summer during an intra-MAGA squabble over how far the Trump administration should go in backing Israel in its aggressive acts toward Iran: “Some confuse Trump’s hostility to the postwar liberal international order with an ‘isolationism’ that eschews foreign military entanglements. But as Nicholas Grossman points out, this doesn’t reflect principled opposition to military action. It reflects Trump’s desire to shred the Western alliance and suck up to authoritarians who similarly hate that alliance, while generally undermining multilateralism and any other international frameworks he might perceive as constraining to the U.S.—and to himself.”

In other words, it’s not war Trump opposes. It’s just war in defense of the Western alliance. War is fine, provided it’s just about what everything is, to him, really all about: raw power in the service of plunder and conquest.