Obama had run as a kind of anti-war candidate in his fairytale 2008 campaign, and when it turned out that he was a hard-bitten pragmatist, in this and other areas, many of his supporters were surprised. Obama expanded the “war on terror” to an awesome extent, while making it sustainable for a domestic audience in a way his predecessor never did – in part because Obama understood the political uses of transforming American warfare in a humane direction. [...]
No dove, Donald Trump nevertheless capitalised on the perception that mainstream politicians were committed to endless wars. And he won. The arc of the moral universe ran through the humanisation of interminable conflict. But it bent toward an ogre. More and more humane forms of fighting abroad had now brought disaster at home, too. Then Trump went on to repeat the very same pirouette from anti-war candidate to endless war president that Obama had performed. And now Joe Biden risks doing the same.[...]
By the end of Obama’s time in office, drones had struck almost 10 times more than under his predecessor’s watch, with many thousands dead. The air force now trained more drone operators than aircraft pilots, and the bases and infrastructure of drone activity had been extended deep into the African continent, not merely across the Middle East and south Asia. Meanwhile, light-footprint Special Forces operated in or moved through 138 nations – or 70% of all countries in the world – in Obama’s last year in office. Actual fighting took place in at least 13, and targeted killing in some of those. [...]
But a funny thing happened on the way to the feared restoration of brutal older forms of war that Trump personally favoured. The executive order to reinstitute torture was never issued, in part because secretary of defense James Mattis found torture unconscionable. And Trump’s proposals were met by the howls of leading Republicans, such as Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. The CIA itself pushed back, reflecting a period of institutional self-correction parallel to the one the military had undergone after Vietnam – even if neither held anyone accountable for past crime.
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