President Donald Trump is a unique political figure, both his admirers and detractors would agree.
But as he decides whether to become directly involved in Israel’s military strikes against Iran, some comparisons can be made to several of his predecessors.
Like Ronald Reagan, Trump’s opponents have cast him as a warmonger despite a much more complicated record. “Ronnie Raygun,” as left-wing activists once called him, was a fervent anti-communist who once summed up his attitude about the Soviet Union and the Cold War as follows: “We win, they lose.” He called the Soviets the “Evil Empire” and exhorted them to tear down the Berlin Wall. His Strategic Defense Initiative was first derisively, and then almost admiringly, referred to as “Star Wars.” Reagan presided over a major defense buildup and sent intermediate-range missiles to Western Europe.
But Reagan mostly avoided large-scale military engagements, confining himself to small, limited interventions like Grenada. He talked about abolishing nuclear weapons and, after tough negotiations from which he showed a willingness to walk away, concluded arms reduction agreements with the Soviets. The late conservative historian Lee Edwards titled a Catholic University lecture, “How Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.”
Trump in his first term appeared to be building up to a major confrontation with nuclear-armed North Korea, threatening “fire and fury like the world has never seen” against its dictator, the “Little Rocket Man.” But instead, he engaged in direct talks with Kim Jong Un. His lethal strike against Iranian military officer Qasem Soleimani looked like it might result in war with Iran back in 2020. It did not.
Since returning to the White House, Trump was quick to declare victory against the Houthis and stop bombing. He has, so far, fruitlessly tried to negotiate an end to Russia’s war with Ukraine. The current tensions with Iran were preceded by weeks of negotiations, which the president is evidently open to resuming as he deliberates what to do next.
“My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” Trump said in his second inaugural address in January. “That’s what I want to be: a peacemaker and a unifier.” He added, “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”
In both terms, Trump invoked Reagan’s mantra of “peace through strength.”
That does not make Trump a peacenik. (Or an isolationist, for that matter.) He has intervened militarily and may do so again, perhaps in Iran at any time in the next two weeks or beyond. But it is clear he would prefer to go down in history as a deal-maker rather than a warmaker. If a deal is possible.
The next presidential comparison is one Trump would welcome less. He has been an often bitter rival with Barack Obama, whom he succeeded in 2017 and with whom his own political career is inextricably linked. But the two agreed that the wars in the Middle East largely spent down American capital rather than built it up. They both wanted to wind them down.
“We’ve spent trillions of dollars overseas while allowing our own infrastructure to fall into total disrepair and decay. In the Middle East, we’ve spent as of four weeks ago $6 trillion. Think of it,” Trump said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2017. “And, by the way, the Middle East is in what — I mean, it’s not even close — it’s in much worse shape than it was 15 years ago. If our presidents would have gone to the beach for 15 years, we would be in much better shape than we are right now, that I can tell you.”
Both Obama and Trump wanted to shed hegemonic obligations, but for a variety of reasons — not least including their worries about national security should the U.S. take a step back globally — neither was completely able to do so. Both surged troops in Afghanistan, however reluctantly.
Trump may find himself in a similar situation in Iran, while wanting to avoid Obama’s legacy of a mistrusted nuclear deal with the ayatollahs in Tehran. Trump pulled the U.S. out of that deal in his first term and has been trying to negotiate a new, improved one in his second. Perhaps it will be something of Obama’s that he does end up repealing and replacing.
Trump often compares himself to William McKinley, the tariff-hiking nationalist Republican, and now finds himself compared to Democrat Grover Cleveland, the only other president to serve nonconsecutive terms.
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As Trump’s Iran decision looms, there are two presidents he does not want to be compared to: Jimmy Carter, who was humiliated by the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran, and George W. Bush, whose war in the region ended in failure.
The examples of those two extremely different presidents surely weigh on Trump’s mind.