Trump's Endless Wars: The pretend peacemaker has repeatedly endangered the nation and world.

• Author: Benjamin, Medea
• Position: President Donald Trump's war on terror - Essay

In the aftermath of the attacks on 9/11, the Bush Administration invaded Iraq and tortured prisoners of war and terrorism suspects, in flagrant violation of the U.N. Charter and the Geneva Conventions. As a result, the United States lost standing among many of its traditional allies around the world.

President Barack Obama's global charm offensive brought friends and allies back to Americas side, but his ten-fold increase in drone strikes to assassinate often innocent terrorism suspects, and his failure to reverse the ever-expanding violence and chaos of U.S. wars, overshadowed his efforts to restore America's international credibility, especially in the Global South. Then came Donald Trump.

The 2016 election was a make-or-break moment in U.S. history. Would the United States build on the constructive elements in Obama's record, like the nuclear agreement with Iran and restored relations with Cuba? Or would it perpetuate catastrophic neo-colonial wars justified as humanitarian interventions?

Trump campaigned on a platform of ending "endless wars," in contrast to his hawkish opponent, Hillary Clinton. A detailed study by Douglas L. Kriner of Cornell University and Francis X. Shen of the University of Minnesota Law School reached the stunning conclusion that support for Trump in counties with a high number of war casualties--especially in the battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin--played a critical role in the elections.

Yet Trump, far from delivering the peace he promised, doubled down on the worst of Obama's policies, particularly in regard to the nation's covert and proxy wars. In Libya, Syria, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen, U.S. allies still do most of the fighting while the U.S. military provides devastating air support, special operations "kill or capture" raids, training, and weapons for its proxies.

This strategy has resulted in massive casualties to combatants and civilians in those countries. But it reduced domestically sensitive U.S. war deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan to just thirty in 2015 and thirty-three in 2016, compared with 560 at the peak of Obama's escalation in Afghanistan in 2010 and 1,021 in 2007 at the peak of the Iraq War.

And while Trump has reduced U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan under a peace agreement with the Taliban, there are still about 8,600 U.S. troops there, slightly more than when he took office. Trump has promised another reduction to less than 5,000 U.S. troops by...