Global Peace by US President

Trump wasn't the greatest influence for peace since 1980, but he might be close

There was a sense running up to the 2016 election that Trump was going to land us in a nuclear war, multiple land wars, and all sorts of other shenanigans. Trump’s opposition commonly accused this. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] Not only did that not happen, he also managed to avoid committing US troops to almost any new engagements, as well as reigning in some of the more adventurous parties in the Pentagon, without a corresponding increase in global conflict.

With the election season shaping up, we will assuredly hear renewed calls that Trump is going to land us in nuclear war or similar, so it’s worth our time to take a look at the record going back at least to 1980. We’ll present statistics and graphs on that in a moment, but first let’s start by breaking out our French Language translation books, and let’s end the yarn with a story of drunken leaks from a Reagan secret service agent.

By the time we’re done, we’ll not only discover that conservatives in power in the US correlate with a reduction in the number of global state deaths on net, but we will also formulate a theory as to why. You’ll enjoy this. Or perhaps not.

Le Français

French Quora is fun.

Trump est réélu. Y aura-t-il une troisième guerre mondiale ?

Contrairement à ce beaucoup disent, je pense que si Trump est réélu, il y aura une troisième guerre, mais pas mondiale.. ou on va dire mondiale sans les USA.
Parce que si Trump est réélu, ce sera America First. C'est à dire qu'il ne se mélera pas des conflits comme Israel Hamas, Ukraine, voire Chine vs Taiwan. Et si la Chine arrive à empêcher la Corée du Nord d'attaquer directement les USA, ils pourront tranquillement lancer un conflit avec celle du Sud.

Pour Trump rester en dehors des conflits , c'est assurer la prédomiance des USA sur la scène économique pendant des dizaines d'années, en évitant de dépenser dans un conflit tout en rentrant des devises via la vente d'armes, de munitions et de produits de première nécessité.

I don’t speak French, but a very cool guy I know is French Canadian and his translation goes like this:

Contrary to what many say, I think that if Trump is reelected, there will be a third war, but not world war... or in other words, a world war without the USA. Because if Trump is reelected, it will be America First. 

That is to say that he won't mess with conflicts like Israel/Hamas, Ukraine, see China vs Taiwan. And if China can keep North Korea from directly attacking the USA, they can happily launch a conflict with South Korea.

For Trump, staying out of the conflicts assures the dominance of the USA economy for decades, keeping from spending in a conflict while selling weapons and ammo and needed products.

This is an interesting theory. Le Translator Friend thinks a lot of foreigners feel that way, and I do think there are probably a lot of Trump Camp isolationist Americans who truly wouldn’t mind this outcome. I don’t think the theory fits the statistics, though.

Les Mathématiques

Our World In Data maintains a data set that covers all deaths in state based conflicts by region since 1946. They have a pretty good graphic of it on their site but I made my own, featuring all state based conflict deaths since 1980, and indexed it by president.

If the dire predictions about Trump were true, we’d see an incredible spike in 2016. We did not. We saw a fall in 2016 and a plateau through the rest of the Trump presidency, followed by the worst spike in recorded history as soon as Biden took over. The Biden spike is really bad. It’s worse than 1947, worse than 1967, and their data only runs through 2022. It doesn’t even include [Israel+Gaza]. It’s almost as if all the world’s leaders saw a bunch of Afghanis falling out of the wheel wells of C-17 cargo planes to their deaths above Kabul, laughed, poured a drink, and decided to tee off against their neighbors.

Do US presidents influence the amount of global deaths in state based conflicts? I don’t know. Probably not directly. Probably somewhat indirectly. But the repeated claim that “electing Trump would increase global conflicts” seems to presume it’s true, so let’s continue to presume it’s true and take a look at the scoreboard.

A Republican United States president has presided over every reduction in global state-based deaths in the last four decades. The lowest annual average of global state based deaths was George W. Bush, the Republican who oversaw the second Iraq war. Donald Trump scored the third lowest global average state based deaths since 1980.

The cold war had a lot of deaths in state based conflicts around the world, Bush One presided over the collapse of the cold war and banked the losses, Clinton got a little bit better, Bush Two surprisingly oversaw the most peaceful time in the world by measure of overall global conflict, Obama more than tripled GWB’s numbers, Trump reigned Obama’s numbers in some, and under Biden we’re on track to reach levels of conflict not seen since The A-Team was on TV. The differentials are very extremely astoundingly bad.

Provided we assume that US presidents matter at all, three of the four Republican presidents since 1980 improved things. Trump presided over the second biggest improvement in the last four decades. The only Republican president to end with global state based death numbers worse than when he started was Reagan, by an amount similar to Clinton. Obama made the score worse by more than double what Clinton or Reagan did. And Biden through 2022 was the worst influence on global state based death numbers in modern times by a factor of ten. He made things twenty two times worse than Reagan did on an average annual basis, through 2022.

Keep in mind, this all presumes that US presidents have some influence over global conflicts. Maybe they do and maybe they don’t. But if they don’t, then Trump doesn’t. And if they do, and if we care, then someone’s got to get rid of Biden.

Le Reagan

Everyone who lived through the 1980s remembers a constant aura of fear that we all might die in nuclear fire at any moment, because a crazy person named Ronald Reagan had his finger hovering over “the button” which would annihilate the Russians, and also ourselves. Kids these days have mass shooter drills, we had “hide under your desk and wait for your blood to be evaporated by nuclear fire” drills, with Reagan playing the Avatar of Death, Angel Azra’il wielding the Flaming Sword of Nuclear Damocles Ushering In the Apocalypse, the Republican who will Boil the Oceans and Feast on the Bones of the Young, also featured in King’s Row, Sergeant Murphy, The Killers, and Knute Rockne, All-American. This was Reagan to many people.

The great American tradition of Tall Tales remains strong in only two remaining places of which I’m aware - heavy construction job trailers and military barracks. My father was a heavy construction worker, and I was raised on job sites by heavy construction workers, and I say this to you in advance so you realize this story may be a complete fabrication.

As the story goes, my father found himself sitting in a bar with a retired secret service agent who worked for Reagan. They got pretty liquored up together, whereupon this agent told my father a story. The agent said one day, unprompted, Reagan pulled him aside and told him a simple truth. “I will never push the button,” Reagan said. “I cannot have the deaths of all those people on my conscience. Even if Russia attacked us first, I would never push that button. But the only way I can be sure that Russia never pushes their button, is to make them think that I’m ready to push mine.”

Is that real? It sounds like something Reagan would say. It could be bullshit, a total fabrication of my father in order to pass some strange wisdom down to me, his son, about some random thing that has nothing to do with the topic at hand. I have no idea whether Reagan said it or not. But it does bring me to an alternate theory about the numbers above, and about Trump, and about global stability.

La Peur

Imagine you’re on the playground and you really want to beat the tar out of Billy, because Billy’s been stealing your lunch money and you’re sick of his shit. But there’s some goody goody who’s twice either of your size, who’s likely to step in and whoop both of you if you get in a fight, so instead you hold off. You bide your time until he’s out sick one day. That’s the Reagan playground, and largely the Bush 1 and Bush 2 playground.

Now imagine that guy’s not around anymore, but this other huge psycho dude with ADHD and Tourette’s syndrome is on the playground, and nobody can figure out what he’s going to do next. If you clock Billy he might back you and give Billy the atomic elbow, or he might back Billy and hit you in the head with a lead pipe, or he might throw rocks at trees muttering “COVFEFE.” Nobody knows. Clocking Billy is too risky because that dude is just too unpredictable. That’s the Trump playground.

Then imagine both of these guys are gone, and there’s a third big dude on the playground, but he mostly just sleeps on the bench and wets his pants. That’s the Biden playground. Time to go find Billy and break his nose.

Nobody started nuclear war when Reagan was in charge because they were scared Reagan might be just the kind of lunatic who would nuke the planet. Nobody started major global conflicts during Trump because they had no idea what the hell Trump was going to do, because he seemed to govern by Magic 8 Ball. Biden peed his pants in Afghanistan and spent the following years ignoring the pee stain, so the globe decided it was time Billy got what’s coming.

Fear of one flavor or another kept the peace, and now there’s no fear.

It’s just a theory.

If it turns out false, I blame the French.