A day after blasting the Nobel Committee for ignoring his anti-war legacy, US President Donald Trump ordered "spectacular" airstrikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, shattering his long-crafted image as a peacemaker. Once the loudest voice against America's "forever wars," Trump is now at the centre of a high-stakes military escalation, one years in the making, and fuelled in part by his own decisions.
In 2018, Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) brokered by Barack Obama and five global powers in 2015. The pact had curbed Iran's nuclear activity in exchange for sanctions relief and sweeping inspections. After the US exit, Tehran ramped up uranium enrichment, pushing the deal toward collapse. Tensions surged in January 2020 when Trump ordered the killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and threatened to target Iran's cultural sites.
Trump's Anti-War Comments: A Timeline
In his 2016 presidential bid, Donald Trump repeatedly campaigned against US involvement in what he termed "endless, forever wars", a reference to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with entanglements in Syria and Libya.
At his 2019 State of the Union address, Trump declared, "Great nations do not fight endless wars."
The remark was widely seen as a rebuke of the military-industrial complex and the bipartisan consensus that had supported prolonged US deployments since 2001.
As he prepared for the 2020 election, Trump reminded voters, "I'm the only president in generations who didn't start a war." Here, he was distancing himself from the legacies of George W Bush (Iraq, Afghanistan), Barack Obama (Libya, Syria involvement), and even previous Republican administrations.
In both his 2020 campaign and later "Agenda 47" videos, Trump leaned heavily into his image as a dealmaker, not a warmonger.
"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," he said.
That line showed his preference for negotiations over military action, from outreach to North Korea to pushing the Abraham Accords in the Middle East.
By early 2024, during the Republican primaries, Trump was again invoking this anti-war posture, this time to distinguish himself from rivals like Nikki Haley, who had taken more interventionist stances.
In a January rally in Iowa, he told supporters, "Let's turn the page forever on those foolish, stupid days of never-ending wars. They never ended." He later criticised Haley by saying, "Nikki Haley was a warmonger whose mentality is 'Let's kill people all over the place...'"
This May, when asked about US support for Ukraine in its war with Russia, Trump made it clear, "It's not our war. We're going to try to end it, but if we can't end it... This is not our war."
But that non-interventionist image was upended on June 21, when Trump ordered precision airstrikes on Iran's nuclear sites. In an Oval Office address afterward, he issued a warning, "If peace does not come quickly, we will go after those other targets with precision, speed and skill. Most of them can be taken out in a matter of minutes."
In the same speech, Trump justified, "For 40 years, Iran has been saying, 'Death to America, Death to Israel.' ... It will not continue."
He added, "Tonight's strike was the most difficult of them all, by far, and perhaps the most lethal."
