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DONALD Trump believes he invented wars. Like a mischievous arsonist, he can start fires, but does not know how to quench them.
Before occupying the White House, Trump should have studied Bob Woodward’s book Obama’s Wars (2010). Woodward reveals how Obama, as president-elect, received a detailed security briefing on Nov 6, 2008, two days after winning the election. Obama, made suddenly aware of America’s military strength and involvement globally, confessed that before the election, he had been worried about losing it. After hearing the briefing, he was worried about winning it.
Unlike previous presidents, Obama did not define any specific foreign policy doctrine. He emphasised “negotiation and collaboration rather than confrontation and unilateralism”. He put it simply: “My doctrine is we will engage, but preserve all our capabilities.” His secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, having shared her husband’s presidency, admitted: “We’ve got a lot of damage to repair.”
President Donald Trump used a different approach. He spent his first administration (2017-21) focusing on an ‘America First’ policy. Deals were more important to him — sales of arms to Saudi Arabia, brokering the Abraham Accords, a ‘handshake’ with the Taliban to allow US troops to leave a shattered Afghanistan, and three much-publicised but sterile trips to strike a deal with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un.
Trump is now into bloodless sports.
To match Obama’s abduction and elimination of Osama bin Laden from Abbottabad in 2011, Trump in 2020 ordered the assassination of Israel’s nemesis — the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. He had been responsible for Iran’s extraterritorial and clandestine military operations. A former Mossad director Yossi Cohen had complained that “Soleimani’s strategies had personally tightened a noose around Israel’s neck”.
Trump’s second and current administration has been to ensure that the world genuflects to America’s superior military might. Trump commands obedience, whether it is from his discomfited allies in Nato, or his insecure neighbours (especially oil-rich Venezuela and cash-poor Cuba), or by Denmark from whom he demanded Greenland. He has turned his sights away from hijacking the Nobel Peace Prize (who needs a second-hand trophy that bears the fingerprints of Obama?). Trump is now into bloodless sports. Incidentally, one has forgotten that Obama, in his time, tried to arm-twist the International Olympic Committee into awarding the 2016 Summer Olympics to his home city Chicago.
Can any future US leader, though, go any lower than Trump did during the 2026 World Cup? Trump called FIFA president Gianni Infantino to review a disqualifying red card issued to US player Folarin Balogun. An obsequious Infantino obliged. Balogun was permitted to participate in the match against Belgium, which won 4-1. When Spain (Trump’s least favourite country) beat Argentina in the finals, he tried to hog the cup presentation ceremony. A less narcissistic person might have had the grace to yield the honour to King Felipe of Spain, who found himself relegated to a subordinate place on the podium.
Such antics have many wondering whether the US is, as Trump asserts, an unassailable Colossus astride the modern world? Or has he reduced the US to being a thrashing white whale, harpooned by his Capt Ahab policies? Will he go down, as Herman Melville’s hero did, in a “hearse of American wood”? Even two years before the next elections, Trump has already cried foul. In a recent prime-time address, in advance of the midterms, he accused Beijing of meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden, even though the US intelligence community had announced publicly that China had not interfered.
Another team, however, headed by special counsel Robert Mueller during its investigation, had “concluded that Russia interfered to favour Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 election”. Trump had also attempted to pressure Ukraine to announce investigations into his opponent Joe Biden. He escaped impeachment by the skin of his mendacity.
In all this, where does Pakistan stand? Our leaders would like to believe that the present honeymoon with Trump’s administration will last at least until 2029. They too should read Woodward’s book. During the intelligence briefing given to Obama in November 2008, the country identified as posing the greatest threat to the US was not China or Russia or North Korea but Pakistan with its “100 nuclear weapons”, “a dishonest ally” in the Afghan war. Hamid Karzai did not get off lightly either. Woodward describes him as “a manic depressive” with “severe mood swings”. At all its fixtures, FIFA uses Pakistani footballs made in Sialkot. Perhaps, before we are given the boot by the US, we should realign our foreign policy towards trade rather than risk-ridden alliances.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, July 23rd, 2026
