Zack Beauchamp — The Donald Trump dove myth: why he’s actually a bigger hawk than Hillary Clinton

Donald Trump as colonialist.

In fact, Trump is an ardent militarist, who has been proposing actual colonial wars of conquest for years.…

In the past five years, Trump has consistently pushed one big foreign policy idea: America should steal other countries' oil.…

To be clear: Trump's plan is to use American ground troops to forcibly seize the most valuable resource in two different sovereign countries [Iraq and Libya]. The word for that is colonialism.

Yeah, he actually said this — repeatedly. Although I would not say that this makes him a bigger hawk than HRC. The Donald is not a neocon — as far as we can tell now anyway. He has suggested he would back off confronting Russia.

But he has also said things involving torture that go way beyond HRC, so while Trump is not a neocon bent on US global hegemony, at least from what he has said publicly, he is no dove either.

This post provides a lot of background. Beauchamp sees Trump as a Jacksonian* rather than a neocon (Wilsonian).

Vox
The Donald Trump dove myth: why he’s actually a bigger hawk than Hillary Clinton
Zack Beauchamp

* The four traditional schools of US foreign policy by Walter Russell Mead

Longtime readers will know that I divide American foreign policy into four schools of thought. Hamiltonians (well represented among the old Republican foreign policy establishment) want the United States to follow the trail blazed by Great Britain in its day: to build a global commercial and security system based on sea power and technological leadership, maintaining a balance of power in key geopolitical theaters and seeking to attract rivals or potential rivals like China into our system as, in Robert Zoellick’s phrase, “responsible stakeholders.” Wilsonians also want the United States to build a world order, but to anchor it in liberal human rights practices and international law rather than in the economic and security frameworks that Hamiltonians prefer. Those two globalist schools dominate the foreign policy establishment’s thought about the world we live in, and have done so since the 1940s.
There are two other schools that are home-focused rather than globalist. They are less interested in changing the world around the United States than in keeping the United States safe from the world. Jeffersonians have historically sought to avoid war and foreign entanglements at all costs; Jacksonians have been suspicious of foreign adventures, but strongly believe in national defense and support a strong military and want decisive action against any threat to the United States, its honor, or its treaty allies.Jeffersonians are generally opposed to almost any war other than a war of self defense following a direct enemy attack; Jacksonians aren’t interested in global transformation but will generally back robust American responses to anything they see as a security threat or a threat to America’s honor and reputation abroad.