To be clear: Trump's plan is to use American ground troops to forcibly seize the most valuable resource in two different sovereign countries. The word for that is colonialism.
Trump wants to wage war in the name of explicitly ransacking poorer countries for their natural resources — something that's far more militarily aggressive than anything Clinton has suggested.
This doesn't really track as "hawkishness" for most people, mostly because it's so outlandish. A policy of naked colonialism has been completely unacceptable in American public discourse for decades, so it seems hard to take Trump's proposals as seriously as, say, Clinton's support for intervening more forcefully in Syria.
Yet this is what Trump has been consistently advocating for for years. His position hasn't budged an inch, and he in fact appears to have doubled down on it during this campaign. This seems to be his sincere belief, inasmuch as we can tell when a politician is being sincere.
One of Trump's signature proposals is targeting and killing the families of suspected ISIS fighters. "When you get these terrorists," Trump said in December, "you have to take out their families."
He also wants to bring back torture that's "much tougher" than waterboarding. "Don’t kid yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work," he said at a November campaign event. But "if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing."
To be clear, both torture and the intentional killing of civilians are crimes under international and US law. Confusingly, Trump said in early March he would not order US military officers to disobey the law. But he subsequently suggested that he'd "like the law expanded" to permit torture.
So Trump has not only supported most of America's recent wars, he also wants to wage wars in a fashion that's far more violent than what Clinton — or most mainstream politicians — would countenance. There's just no evidence, when you look at actual policy positions rather than rhetoric, that Trump is inclined to be skeptical about using force in the midst of an international crisis.
The point here is that despite occasional comments during the 2000s where Trump criticized the war, his actual policy positions were consistently hawkish. His criticism of the war reflects a surface-level look at the conflict: The war was obviously going badly, so Trump said it was a failure.
Trump's criticisms of Iraq and other wars, then, don't reflect a deep view of foreign policy, because he doesn't really have one; he just says what makes sense to him at the time. Sometimes the situation brings out his hawkish impulses, and sometimes it doesn't.
Today the negative consequences of the US interventions in Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011 are pretty obvious — so Trump has decided to make it look like he opposed both of them, even though he really didn't at the time. He has a longstanding habit of saying whatever he thinks will make him look the best or smartest, which can make figuring out what he truly thinks somewhat difficult.
But when you actually go back and look closely at his positions over the years, it becomes very clear that he has consistently advocated hawkish policies, like colonizing Iraq and Libya for their oil.
Why we get Trump wrong: His hawkishness doesn't look like what we're used to
I honestly don't know how Trump would govern if elected president. Nobody knows how Trump would govern, because we've never had a president like him before.
All we have to go on is what he's said and done. And any close examination of that record, beyond his high-profile rhetoric at debates, suggests that Trump is an instinctive advocate for US military force. He seems especially interested in it when it can be used to enrich or protect the United States — taking the oil, killing the terrorists, etc.
This isn't the kind of hawkishness we're used to. During the Bush administration, hawkishness became equated with neoconservatism. You're a hawk if you support sending in ground troops to fight terrorism or bombing Iran's nuclear program; you're a dove if you oppose those things.
Trump's instincts are not neoconservative, and he's skeptical of neoconservatism's more grandiose ambitions to remake the world in America's democratic image. That makes him sound dovish by American standards, because we've come to equate dovishness with opposing policies that neocons support.
But historically, there are lots of other forms of American hawkishness. Trump fits well with one of those — one that Bard College scholar Walter Russell Mead calls the "Jacksonian tradition," after President Andrew Jackson.
*Jacksonians, according to Mead, are basically focused on the interests and reputation of the United States. They are skeptical of humanitarian interventions and wars to topple dictators, because those are idealistic quests removed from the interests of everyday Americans. But when American interests are in question, or failing to fight will make America look weak, Jacksonians are more aggressive than anyone. *
"*The Gulf War was a popular war in Jacksonian circles because the defense of the nation’s oil supply struck a chord with Jacksonian opinion," Mead writes. "In the absence of a clearly defined threat to the national interest, Jacksonian opinion is much less aggressive." *
Unlike neoconservatives or liberal interventionists, who have well-fleshed-out foreign policy doctrines, many Jacksonians think about war and peace more instinctively. "With them it is an instinct rather than an ideology — a culturally shaped set of beliefs and emotions rather than a set of ideas," Mead writes. Sound familiar?
This is attributable, Mead suggests, to the Jacksonian impulse to wage total war on declared enemies of America. "The first Jacksonian rule of war is that wars must be fought with all available force," Mead writes. "Jacksonian opinion takes a broad view of the permissible targets in war. Again reflecting a very old cultural heritage, Jacksonians believe that the enemy’s will to fight is a legitimate target of war, even if this involves American forces in attacks on civilian lives, establishments and property. "
Trump's foreign policy ideas sound outlandish today because the Jacksonian tradition has fallen out of fashion. In this post–Cold War world of unquestioned American military dominance, neoconservatives and liberal interventionists' loftier ideals have controlled US foreign policy discourse.
But Jacksonianism has had a huge influence on American war fighting. The notion that Trump doesn't really want to annex Iraqi oil fields or murder the families of ISIS fighters and is just saying this to be provocative, which some people seem to believe, is belied by the fact that US leaders and generals in the Jacksonian mold have advocated and implemented similarly aggressive policies throughout American history. *> On the campaign trail, Trump routinely cites Gens. George Patton and Douglas MacArthur as foreign policy models — uber-Jacksonians both. *Patton wanted to invade the Soviet Union after World War II to head off perceived future threats to America. And President Harry Truman fired MacArthur, *despite his strategic genius, for publicly and insubordinately advocating total war against China during the Korean War. *>
This is the tradition Trump's views seem to fit into. But while Patton and MacArthur at least had real military expertise and intellectual heft animating their hawkishness, Trump is just a collection of angry impulses. There's no worked-out strategic doctrine here, just an impulse to act aggressively when it seems like America's interests and/or reputation are at stake.