Donald Trump sees a world on fire, and says he knows who’s to blame

In former President Donald Trump’s explanation of global events from the campaign trail, the world would not be aflame had he remained in the Oval Office.

Afghanistan? President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were responsible for setting off “the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world.”

Iran, he insists, would not be arming Hezbollah, the Houthis or Hamas had he remained in office, or moving inexorably towards the capability to build a nuclear weapon.

“Israel would never have been invaded by Hamas,” he insisted in the debate that ultimately forced Biden out of the race.

The war in Ukraine would never have happened, he added, “if we had a real president, a president who was respected by Putin.”

It is, of course, a politically appealing argument, if global crises unfolded in neat, four-year segments corresponding with the inauguration of presidents. The reality is that presidents inherit a world already hurtling through history.

In Biden’s case, that world was shaped, most immediately, by Trump himself — who struck the accord with the Taliban that governed the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, pulled out of the nuclear deal with Iran, did little to punish President Vladimir Putin of Russia for his takeover of Crimea and largely ignored the Palestinians during his years in office.

And that means that for every one of Trump’s accusations, there is a predictable countercharge that the roots of calamity lay in Trump’s haphazard approach.

Trump’s view is also based on an unspoken assumption that what the United States does guides all major events in the world, and specifically that the president is the driver of history.

His is hardly the first campaign to raise if-only’s: John F. Kennedy ran on a largely fictional “missile gap” with the Soviet Union that he blamed in part on Vice President Richard Nixon, his opponent in the 1960 election; John Kerry campaigned on the mistakes George W. Bush made in invading Iraq, an argument that failed to resonate in the 2004 campaign, but might have landed harder a year later.

Go back further in American history and the list of what-the-world-would-have-looked-like claims is long, the stuff of novels and arguments among presidential historians.

Below is a look at Trump’s interpretation of history.

Afghanistan

Trump doesn’t deny that he wanted to leave Afghanistan — it was, after all, just about the only foreign policy goal that he and Biden had in common in 2020. But he insists now that the U.S. withdrawal would not have resulted in what he has repeatedly called “the most embarrassing day in the history of our country” if he had been president.

“Caused by Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world,” Trump said Monday, the same day his campaign officials got into a confrontation with an employee of Arlington National Cemetery, which bans political activity on the grounds.

While Trump’s rhetoric may be inflated — Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11 attacks were far more deadly and rife with well-documented intelligence failures — Biden bears the brunt of responsibility for the botched withdrawal.

Classified assessments provided to the White House three summers ago warned of the imminent collapse of the Afghan military and the likelihood of a Taliban takeover, even as Biden insisted that none of those events were likely to transpire anytime soon.

There is plenty of fodder for Trump’s campaign, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s declaration in June 2021 that “I don’t think it’s going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday.” (Essentially, it did.) Biden insisted after the collapse that the administration “planned for every contingency.”

He was wrong, as a New York Times account, based on interviews with key participants, delineated in the weeks after the collapse. An inspector general report published in 2023 pointed to poor planning by the Pentagon and noted evasive answers from officials.

What Trump omits in his account is that his administration reached an agreement in Doha, Qatar, in early 2020, committing to withdraw all U.S. troops by the spring of 2021 in return for unenforceable guarantees from the Taliban.

If the Harris campaign is looking for devastating time capsules of its own, it might start with a photo of Mike Pompeo, then the secretary of state, standing in Doha with a leading member of the Taliban.

Later Pompeo declared: “I met with them myself when I was in Doha; I looked them in the eye,” as Taliban members swore to oppose al-Qaida and abide by the accord.

Trump also fails to mention that in October 2020, in the heat of his bid for re-election, Trump blindsided his own aides and Pentagon leaders with a social media post that declared “We should have the small remaining number of our brave men and women serving in Afghanistan home by Christmas.”

There was no plan, and his aides had to talk him out of it.

But Trump now insists: “We were going to do it with dignity and strength.”

Iran

“Iran was broke with me,” Trump said during his June debate with Biden. “I wouldn’t let anybody do business with them. They ran out of money. They were broke. They had no money for Hamas. They had no money for anything. No money for terror.”

Trump’s argument is based on an argument that when he left office in January 2021, he had Iran just where he wanted it: on the brink of economic collapse, squeezed by economic sanctions that Biden has failed to enforce.

There is an element of truth to the claim. In 2020, the final year of Trump’s presidency, Iran’s crude oil exports fell to 444,000 barrels a day, according to the International Monetary Fund. They have since roughly tripled, the result of significantly relaxed enforcement of U.S. sanctions and a huge Chinese appetite for the heavily discounted Iranian oil.

Iranian oil revenues also rose, though not nearly as fast as the number of barrels of oil shipped out of the country. Some of that money undoubtedly fueled the country’s ability to finance Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis — and pay for a considerable expansion of its nuclear program. Biden has never lifted the Trump-era sanctions, but he has allowed other American diplomatic imperatives to get in the way of enforcing the sanctions already on the books.

It is all part of a Trump campaign argument that sheer toughness alone would change the behaviour of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the generals who run Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

That theory did not work out quite the way Trump predicted.

When he announced in spring 2018 that he was pulling out of the nuclear deal that President Barack Obama and his staff negotiated three years earlier, he predicted the Iranians would come back begging for a new accord. They did not.

In January 2020, after Trump ordered the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s Quds force, who the United States concluded had organized attacks on U.S. troops, Trump declared that Iran’s “reign of terror is over.” It was not.

It was the nuclear deal withdrawal that most backfired. Until he pulled out of the deal, his own top foreign policy advisers argued that Iran had largely abided by its provisions — shipping roughly 97 per cent of its nuclear material out of the country, and abiding by limits on new production. But Trump was determined to end what he called “the worst deal ever.”

Eventually, Iran declared that if the United States would not abide by the deal, it would not either. It resumed producing nuclear fuel, at a level just short of bomb-grade quality. An effort by the Biden administration to negotiate a new deal collapsed, and today Iran has cemented its role as a “threshold” nuclear state, walking right up to the line of building a weapon — without overstepping it.

The companion element to Trump’s argument on Iran is that American weakness had allowed Hamas to commit the Oct. 7 terror attack that killed about 1,200 Israelis.

He has never fleshed this argument out — or explained why the United States should be considered more responsible than the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, which ignored for a year intelligence warnings that Hamas was preparing an attack and whose military responded far too slowly.

Ukraine

Nowhere does the accounting of history diverge more than over Ukraine.

Trump’s insistence that Russia never would have invaded Ukraine on his watch, because Putin “respected” him too much, is unprovable. And it is true that Trump provided Ukraine with a small number of defensive weapons that Obama had denied them, for fear the shipments would be too provocative to Russia.

But Trump leaves out from his description the fact that he fundamentally agreed with Putin’s goals. “Trump made it very clear, you know, that Ukraine, and certainly Crimea, must be a part of Russia,” his top Russia adviser at the National Security Council, Fiona Hill, recalled after she left Trump’s White House.

Trump’s move to withhold aid to the Ukrainian government, unless it provided political dirt about Biden and his son Hunter, was at the centre of Trump’s first impeachment trial.

Trump himself argued that Ukraine “tried to take me down in 2016,” and he claimed that Ukraine, not Russia, tried to interfere in that presidential election. No evidence has emerged to back up that view.

Now Trump argues he would resolve the war in 24 hours, without saying how. He went further in his debate with Biden, insisting: “I will have that war settled between Putin and Zelenskyy as president-elect before I take office on Jan. 20. I’ll have that war settled.”

Presumably that would involve allowing Putin to retain the territory he has seized, and forcing that resolution on Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president.

Harris has not announced a plan of her own for Ukraine, other than standing with the country and U.S. allies in NATO. But she sees an opportunity to cast Trump as a danger to American national security, noting that “he encourages Putin to invade our allies” and that he has said Russia could do “whatever the hell they want.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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