While the Democrat made the case for liberal militarism, the Republican attacked the interventionist status quo. “Yeah, I’m not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, ‘This is the way it’s gotta be,’” he said, as if he’d read his Chomsky. “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called ‘nation-building,’” he continued, lashing out at occupations that had killed U.S. troops and civilians alike. “I think what we need to do is convince the people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I’m missing something here.”

That was in 2000 and that Republican, George W. Bush, put America’s perceived interests first after winning the race for the White House—by ignoring effete international prohibitions against aggressive war, bypassing the United Nations, and unilaterally invading Iraq. Now, 13 years later, there is another Republican, Donald Trump, railing against the “arrogance” of U.S foreign policy in a race against a Democrat whose record is marked by support for war, including the one launched by the last conservative critic of liberals with bombs.

Bush’s change of heart should give the opinionated class some pause: running against the foreign policy of those in power is what those seeking it for themselves do. And past critiques of another person’s wars are often forgotten once a critic becomes president and starts looking forward to starting wars of their own. But making the same mistakes over and over again is the definition of punditry and, in this the second decade of Bush’s wars, a bloated demagogue’s version of Bush’s 2000-era rhetoric has led some commentators to ask: Is Donald Trump woke?

“Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk,” a column by The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, was what seems to have kickstarted a rash of takes in the mainstream media depicting Trump as something of a belligerent peacenik. “The prime example of commander-in-chief judgment Trump offers is the fact that, like Obama, he thought the invasion of Iraq was a stupid idea,” Dowd wrote. (Trump actually supported the war back in 2003, but has called it a mistake in 2016, when it would be a mistake not to.) He wants to “end nation-building,” she wrote, positioning him to “the left” of Hillary Clinton.

Others have suggested that the Republican candidate wouldn’t stop at ending America’s nation-building occupations.