Trump is willing to flout the rules of war like no other US president

The US vice-president, J.D. Vance, recently declared that he “doesn’t give a shit” if the Trump administration’s strike on a suspected Venezuelan gang boat is called a “war crime”. In a speech to hundreds of senior US military officers weeks later, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, then called for troops to ignore “stupid rules of engagement”.

These anecdotes are a reminder that, for all the focus on President Donald Trump’s overt attacks on democratic institutions at home, his administration’s approach to the law of armed conflict – the corpus of laws governing how militaries fight wars – is just as suspect.

In my upcoming book, Killing Machines: Trump, the Law of War, and the Future of Military Impunity, I make the case that Trump is unique among US presidents in the extent of his willingness to discard the law of war. This doesn’t mean that all of Trump’s predecessors in the White House have meticulously followed the law to the letter – far from it.

President George W. Bush, for example, was widely accused of riding roughshod over the law of armed conflict in waging his “war on terror” after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. His administration was alleged to have authorised or tolerated “enhanced interrogation techniques”, including waterboarding, stress positions and sleep deprivation, which are widely considered torture.

However, unlike past American commanders-in-chief, other US executives at least showed outward deference to the law of armed conflict, even as they pressed the law’s limit behind the curtains.

Writing in the Washington Post in 2020, during Trump’s first term as president, Georgetown University law professor Rosa Brooks said: “Bush at least tried to cloak his administration’s use of torture in legal sophistry, a backhanded testament to the strength of the norms his aides sought to circumvent.” Brooks added that “in contrast to Bush, Trump makes no secret of his disdain for the laws of war”.

The list of ways Trump has openly attacked the law of war is long. He denounced the Geneva conventions, a set of treaties that established rules for humane treatment during armed conflicts, in his 2016 presidential campaign. He described them as a “problem” for the conduct of US wars and pledged to bring back “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” if elected as president.

Around the same time, Trump also advocated the killing of civilians. In an interview with Fox News in December 2015, Trump said militaries needed to “take out” the families of Islamic State militants. He even endorsed dipping bullets in pig’s blood, considered impure in the Muslim religion, to intimidate Islamic terrorists.

Trump’s expressed contempt for international law doesn’t stop there. He has attacked global laws on state sovereignty and the use of force against terrorists, urging the US to “fight fire with fire”. Trump has also threatened to bomb cultural sites, proposed pillaging Middle Eastern oil fields for profit and lambasted the need to fight “politically correct” wars while terrorists “chop off heads”.

Not least, in 2019 and 2020, Trump pardoned multiple US servicemembers and private military contractors accused or convicted of war crimes. In 2019, condemning a decision by military courts to prosecute US service members convicted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Trump mocked on social media: “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!”

Trump’s desire to challenge the law of war prompted journalist Adam Serwer to denounce him as a “war-crimes enthusiast” in the Atlantic magazine later that year. And around the same time, the New York Times ran a headline questioning whether the laws of war were “history” under Trump.

Challenging the law

Why has Trump so openly challenged the law of war? Put simply, as I argue in my book, he has had the means, motive and opportunity.

Trump has relied on right-wing allies in Washington. The Congressional Justice for Warriors Caucus is the group on Capitol Hill that has most vociferously advocated for war crime pardons. It has also defended Trump’s actions in office regarding the military.

Meanwhile, elements of the media have positively spun Trump’s explicit attacks on the law of war to conservative audiences. In his former days as a Fox News personality, Hegseth highlighted war crimes cases on his show and described the accused or convicted service members as heroes facing malicious prosecution.

Data also shows that Republican voters, who emphasise law and order domestically, are willing to discount the law when it comes to conduct by American military personnel overseas. For example, following Trump’s November 2019 war crime clemencies, a national poll showed that nearly 80% of Republicans approved of his actions.

At the same time, study after study has shown that people in or affiliated with the US military tend to lean to the right politically. That tilt was evident on January 6, 2021, when a disproportionate number of former service members ended up in jail for storming the Capitol building in Washington.

Many ex-combatants and current service members within the military have absorbed Trump’s calls to dismiss the laws of war and, by extension, the rule of law itself. The byproduct has been little resistance within the ranks to Trump’s agenda of military impunity.

Prior to Trump, there was little disagreement among US presidents about the moral and strategic imperative of upholding the law of war. Trump’s breaking of this precedent is yet another way in which he has taken the US into uncharted political waters.

Thomas Gift does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.