Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again talk about ending wars, “denuclearizing” the planet, driving warmongers and war profiteers from Washington, and halving Pentagon spending in line with a warming of relations with Russia and China has caused the full range of reactions, from firm disbelief to fervent hope that he might follow through on his rhetoric. A corollary argument is that, because Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize, he will be willing to strike a deal on nuclear weapons reductions to get one.
Trump the peacemaker contrasts sharply with the Donald Trump who makes casual reference to taking over other nations, launches trade wars, orders mass deportations, empowers high-tech billionaires intent on getting ever more Pentagon contracts, and dismantles America’s foreign aid apparatus, putting millions of lives at risk while undermining America’s image in large parts of the world. And accompanying all of this is some of the most divisive rhetoric to emanate from the White House in living memory.
Can these two Donald Trumps coexist? It’s true that Trump is a deal maker and an opportunist, not tied to any particular ideology with respect to foreign policy, unless one counts narcissism as an ideological stance. To his credit, Trump is willing to talk to US adversaries, which is a basic precondition for any meaningful diplomacy. The question is whether he can follow through on any diplomatic initiative, or whether any deals he might strike would leave the participants and the world in a more secure place.
In puzzling out these questions, it’s useful to remember that Donald Trump has a track record, as evidenced by his actions during his first term in office.
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Take, for example, Trump’s 2016 campaign, when he took numerous swipes at big arms manufacturers, suggesting that they were ripping off the taxpayers and pushing for weapons systems we didn’t need in order to line their own pockets. Industry leaders were duly concerned. Still, once he took office, Trump embraced the Lockheed Martins and Raytheons of the world as useful political allies, not enemies of the taxpayer.
Trump’s romance with the arms lobby began in the runup to his first foreign trip as president, to Saudi Arabia. He wanted to make a huge splash by making a major trade deal with the Saudi regime, as a way to demonstrate his skill as a dealmaker who could bring jobs to America. The core of his proposed deal was an arms package that was allegedly worth $110 billion. The number was a fiction, composed of deals already made by the Obama administration; deals that would not come to fruition, if at all, until years after Trump left office; and new offers that actually would bring jobs and revenues to the United States.
But vastly exaggerated or not, the deal meant Trump had to have something to offer. So as part of putting the package together, his son-in-law Jared Kushner put in a call to then Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson to ask if they could cut the price on an $18 billion missile defense system that the administration wanted to put in the Saudi arms package.
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The real political benefits of the Saudi deal came to fruition upon Trump’s return. He routinely overstated the number of US jobs tied to Saudi arms sales, at one point putting the number at more than half a million. Upon closer scrutiny the number was far lower, one-tenth to one-twentieth the figure Trump put forward. But the arms sales equals jobs narratives made for a good story — so good that when de facto Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman visited the White House, Trump pulled out a map of the United States ringed by pictures of weapons the US was selling to Saudi Arabia, complete with figures on how many jobs in key states were tied to weapons exports to Riyadh.
The arms sales equals jobs narratives made for a good story.
Trump underscored his own attachment to big weapons firms when he rose to their defense after the Saudi regime murdered US resident and Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Under pressure to suspend arms sales to the Saudi regime, Trump said that he would not cut off arms sales because of the economic benefits of the regime’s “purchase of military equipment from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and many other great US defense contractors.”
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The second Trump administration may have a different relationship with the arms industry. Advocates for the emerging military tech firms from Silicon Valley — from virtual co-president Elon Musk to vice-president JD Vance, who was mentored, employed, and financed by Silicon Valley military tech guru Peter Thiel — are seemingly outmaneuvering the old guard of Pentagon contractors for influence in the Trump II administration.
Whether this will result in a shift in how the Pentagon spends its money — from piloted aircraft and bulky combat ships to swarms of drones and robotic weapons — remains to be seen. Meanwhile, Trump-appointed secretary of defense Pete Hegseth has made clear that any savings Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency finds at the Pentagon will go into other military programs, not used to reduce the department’s mammoth budget.
As for nuclear diplomacy, Trump’s overture to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un during his first term in office may be instructive. Trump took harsh — and undeserved — criticism from the Washington foreign policy establishment when he decided to meet with Kim Jong Un to discuss curbing North Korea’s nuclear program. But the Trump administration was not able to move from its initial intent to actually cutting a deal — a few meetings and a presidential visit to North Korea did not result in a concrete agreement. One analyst suggested that Trump treated his first summit with Kim Jong Un as “a victory in itself,” and that the interactions between the two leaders “delivered little of substance for either side.”
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The best path forward is to seize on the public attention that Trump’s comments on nuclear reductions and cutting Pentagon spending have sparked by endorsing the spirit of those remarks, then making it clear which steps Washington must take to make those promises a reality. In the meantime there will be plenty of urgent issues to address on the domestic front, from the destruction of key programs and agencies to measures that reduce the power of Congress and diminish democracy more broadly.
Amid all the chaos in Washington and the pain it is causing here and abroad, it is important to put forward a vision of a more constructive American role in the world, one that leads with diplomacy and cooperation rather than military force and confrontation. That vision may seem far from where we are today, and neither major party has even remotely lived up to it. But any one individual will not deliver a better, safer world — it can only be the product of an unprecedented global movement that holds politicians to account and counters the influence of the special interests who profit from war and tension at the expense of the rest of us.
