“I will prevent world war three,” promised Donald Trump in a recent speech. The Republican candidate’s running mate, senator JD Vance, insists that Trump is “the candidate of peace”.
In a campaign full of outlandish claims, it would be easy to dismiss all this as meaningless bombast. But that would be a mistake. Beneath the slogans and the insults, the Trump and Harris camps have fundamentally different views of how to prevent the world from sliding into conflict.
Trump’s view of US foreign policy — like his “America first” slogan — harks back to a pre-1941 vision of the country’s role in the world. Like the groups that opposed its involvement in the first and second world wars, Trump’s instinct is to stay aloof from foreign conflicts. He is suspicious of what Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president, called “entangling alliances”.