Why would Trump launch a foreign war when he is so domestically weak? Precisely because he is weak
In the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, members of the George W Bush administration presented the case for war exhaustively, repeatedly, and in public. The then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who played a major role in green-lighting waterboarding of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, wrote an editorial in the New York Times claiming that Iraq was lying about its so-called “weapons of mass destruction”.
Meanwhile, Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, went to a meeting of the United Nations security council in New York. There, before America and the world, he held up a tiny vial of substance meant to represent anthrax, a chemical weapon that had terrorized the US in a series of mail attacks just over a year before; Powell claimed that Iraq had the weapon and was willing to use it. Bush himself routinely addressed the American people, making the case for war. They were all lying, it turned out, but the lie served a purpose: it was a concession to the idea that the American people would have a say in whether or not their country went to war.