Donald Trump’s Anti-Interventionist Instincts
By 
Who could have seen this coming?
In 2009 and 2010, Obama launched 186 drone strikes on Yemen, Somalia, and especially Pakistan. Donald Trump’s drone strikes during his own first two years on the three pivotal undeclared battlefields, however, eclipse Obama’s—but without a corresponding reputation for robot-delivered bloodshed, or even anyone taking much notice. In 2017 and 2018 to date, Trump has launched 238 drone strikes there, according to data provided to The Daily Beast by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and the drone-watchers at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London.
Those numbers come with a slew of asterisks. The number of drone strikes on the full-fledged acknowledged battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria have, ironically, proven far more difficult to track than those in shadow war zones—and knowledgeable observers like Chris Woods of the UK’s Airwars organization believe that the true center of the drone strikes is found there. Additionally, the death toll from those strikes in shadow war zones, especially of civilians, is at best a rough estimate.
A spokesperson for the National Security Council declined comment. Pentagon officials did not respond to The Daily Beast’s inquiries. But several former U.S. counterterrorism officials and practitioners point to Trump relaxing the standards Obama put in place to authorize a lethal attack in Somalia and likely elsewhere as the wellspring of an explanation.
“The burden of proof on the target was changed to a lesser burden of proof, and so that automatically opens up the aperture when you’re looking at intelligence and you have a probability factor, or a reasonable one, that your target is there,” explained retired Army Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, who commanded U.S. special operations forces in Africa from April 2015 to June 2017.
Under the Trump administration, the Air Force is spending more on the Hellfire missiles used by armed drones. Hellfire spending in the latter years of Obama administration briefly spiked as the Defense Department stocked up on ammunition to counter the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. But even as the wars in Iraq and Syria wind down, the Trump administration has sought to purchase more drone missiles. Air Force budget documents show a 63 percent increase in Hellfire purchases in Trump’s 2017 budget and an another 20 percent increase in the most recent budget request.
The fact that Trump has changed the standards needed for an attack should make clear that the “Trump can only do it because Obama set the precedent [note: Obama did not actually set this precedent]” justification is bullshit. Which given that a desire to undo as much of Obama’s work as possible for its own sake is one of the few consistent animating principles of Trumpism should be obvious anyway.
Sadly, the reality is that a lot of ostensibly leftist pundits were every bit as clueless about this as MoDo. They only way you could own yourself worse would be to create the world’s most painfully unfunny satirical Twitter feed in response to a pundit retweeting the one that repeatedly makes you look ridiculous by quoting you nearly verbatim:
The Charles Pierce parody acct, which has no followers (bc it was just created), makes its first tweets 'parodying' Charles & then, less than 10 min. later, the (non-parody) Greenwald account approvingly retweets the account (that again, no one follows) . What a wild coincidence! pic.twitter.com/bZfoETnm6U
— Centrism Fan Acct 🔹 (@Wilson__Valdez) November 24, 2018