{"id":349197,"date":"2025-11-02T00:57:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-02T00:57:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/349197\/"},"modified":"2025-11-02T00:57:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-02T00:57:11","slug":"trumps-peace-through-strength-mantra-features-bombs-and-bravado","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/349197\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump’s ‘peace through strength’ mantra features bombs and bravado"},"content":{"rendered":"

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) \u2014 It wasn\u2019t so long ago that President Donald Trump<\/a> spoke of building a legacy as a \u201cpeacemaker.\u201d<\/p>\n

His administration would measure \u201csuccess not only by the battles we win,\u201d Trump said in his inaugural address<\/a>, \u201cbut also by the wars that we end \u2014 and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.\u201d<\/p>\n

But nine months into his second go-round in the White House, Trump is beating a curious path to executing his \u201cpeace through strength\u201d foreign policy agenda, a phrase he borrowed from a fellow Republican president, Ronald Reagan,<\/a> who saw building a strong military and economy as the bedrock to Soviet deterrence.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s take on the Reagan doctrine includes sharper threats, bombings<\/a> and no shortage of bravado<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s too soon to tell how history will judge Trump\u2019s version, but the Gipper had his doubters, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a lot of people who would have given Reagan a not-passing grade around 1983 or so,\u201d said University of Tennessee scholar Andrew Busch, noting the year that Reagan ordered the U.S. invasion<\/a> of a Caribbean island, Grenada<\/a>. \u201cBy 1989, when he left office, they would say, \u2018Wow, that guy was like the biggest peacemaker in the 20th century in some ways.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Peace done Trump-style<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s unique approach to Reaganesque diplomacy was on full display during his trip to Asia<\/a> this past week.<\/p>\n

As he made his way to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit, Trump announced via social media that he was canceling trade talks with Canada<\/a> and imposing another 10% tariff on imports of Canadian goods. He expressed outrage over a television ad \u2014 paid for by the Canadian province of Ontario \u2014 that used a spliced audio<\/a> of Reagan criticizing tariffs<\/a> and aired during the World Series.<\/p>\n

Then as Trump met with leaders in Malaysia and South Korea, the U.S. Navy carried out more lethal strikes<\/a> on suspected drug boats in the Pacific. <\/p>\n

His administration moved to shift the USS Ford<\/a> and thousands of additional sailors from the Mediterranean toward the Caribbean Sea waters near Venezuela, continuing the biggest U.S. troop buildup in Latin America in more than 50 years.<\/p>\n

Trump wasn\u2019t done.<\/p>\n

Minutes before a critical meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday, Trump took to social media to suggest he was preparing to discard a decades-old U.S. prohibition on testing the nation\u2019s nuclear weapons<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Later, as he made his way back to Washington, Trump was coy on whether he really meant to say he was ordering the resumption of explosive testing of nuclear weapons \u2014 something only North Korea has undertaken this century — or calling for the testing of U.S. systems that could deliver a nuclear weapon, which is far more routine.<\/p>\n

He remains opaque<\/a> about whether he intends to resume underground nuclear detonation tests.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ll find out very soon,\u201d Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday, as he headed to Florida for a weekend stay.<\/p>\n

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is not shedding light on what kind of testing the administration planned to undertake. But he is reiterating Trump\u2019s Reagan-borrowed mantra.<\/p>\n

\u201cAmerica will ensure that we have the strongest, most capable nuclear arsenal, so that we maintain peace through strength,\u201d Hegseth said Friday. \u201cThat\u2019s what this is. In every meeting, that\u2019s what we talk about: Peace through strength.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Saturday, Trump was at it again. <\/p>\n

This time he was warning Nigeria<\/a> that he\u2019s ordered the Pentagon to begin planning for potential military action in Nigeria as he stepped up accusations that the government is failing to rein in the persecution of Christians<\/a> in the West African country.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, \u2018guns-a-blazing,\u2019 to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities,\u201d Trump posted on social media.<\/p>\n

Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu<\/a> has pushed back on Trump, saying the characterization of his country as religiously intolerant does not reflect the national reality.<\/p>\n

A classic top-to-bottom operation<\/p>\n

While the loose talk about nuclear testing was certainly unsettling to some, reaction appeared to be relatively measured. Trump, after all, has made many pronouncements only to later make pronounced shifts in positions. <\/p>\n

For example, in a matter of weeks recently, he went from maintaining Ukraine must cede land to Russia<\/a> to proclaiming that he believed Kyiv could win back all of the land lost in the war to declaring \u201cfighting should stop at the lines they are at now.\u201d <\/p>\n

Administration officials are loath to question Trump\u2019s tactics but acknowledge that some may appear to be contradictory, particularly with what seem to be spur-of-the-moment reversals in his public statements. <\/p>\n

Rather than regard these abrupt changes in course as defects, administration officials privately argue that they give the U.S. more influence and make adversaries and potential adversaries \u2014 not to mention allies and partners \u2014 more wary to cross Trump.<\/p>\n

But policy consistency has long been regarded as key in national security and international relations, not least because it provides a concrete basis for international understandings and actions that other countries consider when making their own decisions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a product of a lack of process,\u201d said Ian Kelly, a retired career diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Georgia in Trump\u2019s first term. \u201cIt\u2019s a classic top-to-bottom operation and there doesn\u2019t seem to be any consultation with other stakeholders, especially with Congress, but also long-standing allies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Steering clear of the endless war pitfall<\/p>\n

Trump has managed to grasp tightly onto the \u201cpeacemaker\u201d title even as his administration has carried out an activist foreign policy in the early going of his second term.<\/p>\n

Trump claims as a shining achievement his decision to order strikes in June on three critical Iranian nuclear facilities<\/a> that he says \u201cobliterated\u201d the Iranian program. The bombing caused significant damage in an operation in which no American troops were harmed.<\/p>\n

While Trump insists the program was destroyed, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said this week that renewed movement has been detected recently at Iran\u2019s nuclear sites<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Before those strikes, some of Trump\u2019s die-hard backers, including Steve Bannon, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and commentators Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, expressed consternation<\/a> as Trump mulled military action. They pointed to Trump\u2019s own wariness over decades of war fomented in previous administrations.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s strikes in the Caribbean appear to be landing huge blows to Venezuelan drug smugglers and unsettling the government of President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro. At the moment, that seems to be coming with \u201cvery little political cost\u201d for Trump, said Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington.<\/p>\n

But Logan argues that Trump should be careful as he ponders the path ahead in Venezuela and steer clear of the pitfalls of the \u201cendless wars\u201d in Iraq and Afghanistan that left an indelible mark on the American psyche. This one would be in his own backyard. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis administration seems to favor these short, sharp strokes and then say they have resolved the problem altogether,\u201d Logan said. \u201cI\u2019m afraid what will happen is that we will discover that none of these problems have actually been put to bed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014-<\/p>\n

Finley and Lee reported from Washington.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) \u2014 It wasn\u2019t so long ago that President Donald Trump spoke of building…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":349198,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[171148,91599,3881,396,88587,19719,84,69,723,57,86,85878,171150,4785,171149,9701,8132,50,92550,1219,375,6986,80,15119,161778,20965,96,93,161370,103,107,11762],"class_list":{"0":"post-349197","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-ahmed-tinubu","9":"tag-andrew-busch","10":"tag-ap-top-news","11":"tag-bombings","12":"tag-caribbean-sea","13":"tag-charlie-kirk","14":"tag-district-of-columbia","15":"tag-donald-trump","16":"tag-florida","17":"tag-general-news","18":"tag-government-policy","19":"tag-ian-kelly","20":"tag-inaugurations","21":"tag-iraq","22":"tag-justin-logan","23":"tag-marjorie-taylor-greene","24":"tag-military-and-defense","25":"tag-news","26":"tag-nicolas-maduro","27":"tag-nigeria","28":"tag-nuclear-weapons","29":"tag-pete-hegseth","30":"tag-politics","31":"tag-ronald-reagan","32":"tag-stephen-bannon","33":"tag-tucker-carlson","34":"tag-war-and-unrest","35":"tag-washington-news","36":"tag-weapons-testing","37":"tag-world","38":"tag-world-news","39":"tag-xi-jinping"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}