President Trump uses ferocious rhetoric. We all know that. Sometimes, it works really well. Other times, it bounces off of those on the receiving end. No matter the case, the media uses Trump’s harsh words against him at every turn.
Lately, they’ve been using this tactic to try and paint the President as a war monger. After all, he’s dropped bombs in seven different countries and has promised total annihilation to countries like North Korea and Iran.
But if you look at the numbers, you find that the media narrative doesn’t hold any water at all. President Trump inherited all seven of the conflicts where he has authorized military action. He’s also done a good job of actually ending some conflicts — something many Americans might have forgotten is a possibility.
No, by the numbers, comparing President Trump to a media darling like Joe Biden paints a completely different picture.
President Trump’s War Record
To say that President Trump inherited a mess in 2016 is to make a powerful understatement. America’s global policy was in shambles. We’ll go into each a little more, but Trump was handed active conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Uganda and Cameroon. That’s a working military presence in seven different countries for a number of different reasons.
Let’s start with the biggest one: Iraq. While Obama pulled most ground troops out of the country, the takeover of ISIS was serious and required American help to resolve. President Trump intensified our campaign in the country, and our last bombing in Iraq was in December of 2018. Essentially, President Trump successfully ended one of the largest and longest conflicts in American history.
Afghanistan was the other big one. Taliban presence was growing rapidly in the country in 2016. Again, President Trump met the threat head on. Since last summer, the campaign has scaled back substantially. That’s because it worked. While we’re still active in Afghanistan, our 2019 commitments have been the smallest so far since we invaded in 2001.
Yemen and Libya are similar stories. Both conflicts started during the Arab Spring. Obama unilaterally decided to commit American forces to aiding uprisings in both countries. Those commitments accomplished nothing, betrayed a U.S. ally, and didn’t stop or slow down when President Trump took the reigns. While he hasn’t completely removed U.S. initiatives in either country, he has significantly scaled back our military presence in both.
Uganda and Cameroon were smaller operations in the first place. We’ve gone from special forces operations to advising only roles. That means fewer American lives are at risk, and we’re maintaining commitments we made to help each country deal with unruly violence.
Somalia is the one conflict where President Trump has so far only escalated our presence. While Obama picked that fight, President Trump has recognized the necessity of seeing it through.
After seeing victory in Iraq, he authorized an escalation of force in Somalia. It could be considered the one “dark mark” on his war record, but if it follows the pattern of his other policy decisions, we’ll be out of Somalia before the 2020 elections conclude.
The last major conflict to discuss is Syria. That was the biggest mess of all handed to President Trump. With two campaigns he successfully destroyed Syria’s will to continue to use chemical weapons on its own people.
He also helped coalition forces drive ISIS to the breaking point. Now, he’s discussing ways to completely pull out of the country. Whether or not you agree with this policy, there is no question that President Trump has dramatically reduced American intervention in foreign wars.
Biden
Technically, Obama was the one making decisions while Biden was vice president, but Biden openly supported every single decision. This ties Biden to conflict escalation in so many places.
When he took office, he inherited two conflicts: Afghanistan and Iraq. The administration tried to scale back both operations, but ultimately they dropped more bombs in each country than Bush did in both of them combined. That’s a pretty big failure.
Biden was then part of starting the other five wars that President Trump inherited. Missing from that list is a number of conflicts that actually concluded before Trump was inaugurated in 2017. Those include military actions in Jordan, Turkey, Chad and Mali. Obviously, these were smaller conflicts (since they aren’t still going on), but it shows that Biden has a trigger-happy war record.
Overall, the administration he served engaged in military combat in 13 different theaters over 8 years. Let’s put this in perspective. In all of WWII, the U.S. only engaged in three theaters. Biden, with less justification, supported committing the United States to a wider range of military conflict than we saw in WWII.
Another way to compare Biden to President Trump is to look at raw numbers. The Obama Administration dropped more than twice as many bombs as the Bush Administration. That still surprises a lot of people.
Overall, Obama and Biden dropped an average of 5400 bombs a year in the first term. As of January 1st, 2019, President Trump’s average was 5100 bombs. This looks like a close comparison until you consider that the U.S. is no longer bombing Iraq and is scaling down all other operations.
So far, 2019 is on track to cut that average in half. If things continue like this through 2020, President Trump’s bombing average will be on par with Bush’s second term.
This is pretty cut and dried. Biden was vice president of the most aggressive, war-mongering regime our country has ever known. They presided over hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, and they had virtually nothing to show in the form of accomplishments.
Over the eight-year run, Obama and Biden oversaw only an escalation of conflict. Nothing was resolved despite the high price of blood.
Next year, anyone who wants to vote for peace and reduced global violence has an easy choice. President Trump has applied ancient wisdom, and he has ended several of the bloodiest conflicts in modern history. He clearly is not the war monger in the group.
