Remember when the Afghanistan troop withdrawal was about to happen? Suddenly there was the fake news about Russian bounties, which put a stop to it. Remember when Syrian withdrawal was about to happen? False flag chemical attack, which put a stop to it. The US president just isn’t that powerful. He can be overruled fairly easily. Now that they’ve got a tame Biden in office, it’s going to be behind-the-scenes palace intrigues to decide which faction will get to make decisions. This usually happens with a ruler in his dotage.

Also, Trump openly supported a one state solution and recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, giving the American client state much more leeway for ramping up their settler colonialism than previous presidents. Then there’s the broken nuclear treaty with Iran, prolonging sanctions that otherwise should have been lifted by now. There’s the escalation of the trade war with China, the coup in Bolivia, or openly bragging about the assassination of an Iranian general in Iraq, or the false flag operation in the Strait of Hormuz. Anything looking “anti-interventionist” about Trump was pure ineptitude at best.

Exactly like Bush before him, Trump wasn’t about non-interventionism or isolationism. He was about unilateralism. Making decisions on your own, with disregard for the interests of your allies, with disregard for international treaties and institutions, is the GOP way of foreign policy. It has zero to do with keeping America out of international affairs, it has everything to do with dropping even the flimsy pretenses of not being an empire ruling with an iron fist that the Democrats like to hold up.