Former President Donald Trump has vowed to fire “warmongers” in the U.S. State Department and the military if he is elected back to office in 2024.
In a
video posted on Twitter by his campaign team and his son Donald Trump Jr. on Tuesday afternoon, Trump said, “World War III has never been closer than it is right now.”
“We need to clean house of all of the warmongers and America last globalists in the Deep State, the Pentagon, the state department, and the National Security industrial complex,” the Republican 2024 candidate continued.
In the video, Trump went on to tout his record in office, saying he was “the only president in generations who didn’t start a war” and saying he rejected the advice of military generals, bureaucrats, and “so-called diplomats who only know how to get us into conflict but they don’t know how to get us out.”
“We'll also stop the lobbyists and the big defense contractors from going in and pushing our senior military and National Security officials toward conflict, only to reward them when they retire with lucrative jobs getting paid millions and millions of dollars,” Trump said.
War in Ukraine
In his video, Trump said career government officials have promoted uprisings in Ukraine in a broader effort to provoke a confrontation. He named Victoria Nuland, the current U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, as an example of government officials he believes have sought confrontation.“Now we’re teetering on the brink of World War III and a lot of people don’t see it, but I see it and I’ve been right about a lot of things,” Trump said.
Trump’s comments about the growing risk of World War III come as both U.S. and Russian officials have
alluded to the possibility of the war in Ukraine escalating into a
global conflict with
nuclear weapons. Hours before Trump released his video, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced
Russia would suspend its participation in the New START
treaty, which had imposed nuclear arms reduction and allowed for mutual inspections of nuclear arsenals between the United States and Russia.
“None of this excuses in any way the outrageous and horrible invasion of Ukraine one year ago, which would have never happened if I was your president, not even a little chance,” Trump said. “But it does mean that here in America, we need to get rid of the corrupt globalist establishment that has botched every major foreign policy decision for decades, and that includes President Biden.”
Trump has repeatedly claimed he would have been able to avert the war in Ukraine if he had remained in office. Last year, Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.)
agreed with Trump and said the reason Russia invaded Ukraine was “because we have such enormously weak leadership in the White House.”
In a Tuesday
interview with UnHerd, former Trump administration official Fiona Hill also said Russia would not have invaded if Trump were in office, but said that was because “Putin would have anticipated that he could get Ukraine handed over without the necessity of invading.”
Hill, who served as senior director for Europe and Russia matters in Trump’s National Security Council until July 2019, testified against Trump in his 2019 impeachment case, alleging that Trump had withheld military aid from Ukraine for political favors.
“Biden isn’t willing to negotiate Ukraine. It’s not the United States’s to negotiate away,” Hill told UnHerd.
In his
video, Trump said the reason the United States didn’t get into new wars was because “other countries respected us” and because he “rebuilt” the U.S. military.
Trump’s Record on Wars
“We made incredible progress in putting the ‘America Last’ contingent aside and bringing the world to peace, and now we’re going to complete the mission. The state department, Pentagon, and national security establishment, will be a very different place by the end of my administration,” Trump said.
In October of 2019, Trump
called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, but his administration ultimately
retained troops in the country.
During his presidency, the Trump administration reduced the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and negotiated the final U.S. withdrawal. Trump had initially negotiated a May 1, 2021 withdrawal deadline, but President Joe Biden
pushed the final withdrawal date back by months.
In his final days in office, Trump
withdrew all U.S. forces from Somalia. Biden has since
reversed that course.
In 2019, Congress passed a resolution to end the U.S. support for a Saudi-led war in Yemen. Trump
vetoed the resolution, keeping U.S. support for the Saudi coalition in place.
