“My rhetoric is going to keep us out of wars. There will be no endless wars under my administration.”
The idea that rhetoric alone — not policy or alliances — is the primary deterrent to war is a provocative and unconventional theory of foreign policy.
Donald Trump
“We're going to get together today by probably phone. We're doing a five-day period. We'll see how that goes. And if it goes well, we're going to end up with settling this. Otherwise, we'll just keep bombing our little hearts out.”
Trump's casual, almost flippant framing of a potential military escalation against a nuclear-adjacent state is a jarring contrast in tone that reveals how transactional his approach to geopolitics is.
Donald Trump