Let me refer you to this part of what he said to an audience of service members while in Iraq. You can tell that the first sentences of the first and third paragraphs were scripted; everything else is clearly Trump just speaking his mind:

While American might can defeat terrorist armies on the battlefield, each nation of the world must decide for itself what kind of future it wants to build for its people, and what kind of sacrifices they are willing to make for their children. America shouldn’t be doing the fighting for every nation on Earth not being reimbursed, in many cases, at all. If they want us to do the fighting, they also have to pay a price — and sometimes that’s also a monetary price — so we’re not the suckers of the world. We’re no longer the suckers, folks. And people aren’t looking at us as suckers. And I love you folks because most of you are nodding your head this way. We’re respected again as a nation. We’re respected again. America is safer, and peace is more possible because of the incredible courage and devotion of every patriot here tonight. Some people say, “Well, maybe somebody comes from the area, and they hit us on our homeland.” If that happens, they will suffer consequences over here like nobody has ever suffered before.

Before we get to the important things Trump is saying, we have to wade through the sewage. First, the United States is most certainly not “respected again” — in fact, respect for the United States around the world has plummeted since Trump took office. Second, it’s notable that Trump thinks the problem with decades of military action to expand and maintain U.S. hegemony is that it made us “suckers.” But it’s almost impossible to overstate how obsessed Trump has been for his entire life with the fear of becoming a sucker; in his world, either you’re the con artist or you’re the one being conned. And third, he makes clear that he sees foreign policy as largely a series of monetary transactions, such that it might be worth sending Americans to fight and die provided we’re being paid enough by other countries.

This is a vision completely devoid of any notion of U.S. values, or even U.S. interests that go beyond money. But Trump’s morally vacuous approach might just, in some cases, lead us to a reasonable place — or at least make it possible for Republicans to finally cast off the calamitous ambitions of the George W. Bush era.

It’s been forgotten by now, but during the 2016 presidential primaries Trump forced something of a rethinking of the Iraq War among Republicans. The standard line up until then in the GOP concerning the worst foreign policy disaster in U.S. history was that it was a noble cause carried out honorably, and the only problem was that we had some mistaken intelligence regarding Saddam Hussein’s supposedly terrifying arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. But Trump, who was perfectly happy to lie about his own mythical opposition to the war (including a ludicrous claim that he was so outspoken that the Bush administration sent a delegation to beg him to be quiet), knew where the public stood. So he simply said the war was a disaster from start to finish, and left his opponents sputtering about whether it might have been right given what we knew at the time. By the time it was over, nobody was trying to justify the war, and people like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) were explicitly rejecting nation-building.

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In Trump’s case, the opposition to nation-building comes not so much from the hard experience that should have taught us all that it’s extraordinarily difficult and tends to bring on unintended consequences, but the simple fact that he doesn’t much care about the fate of other nations. We won’t hear him making expansive claims about how he’s going to bring liberty and democracy to the world, because he doesn’t care about those things, either; in fact, he’s shown quite clearly that he admires dictators and has contempt for the United States' democratic allies.

This all leads him to a deep skepticism of U.S. military interventions, which can be a good thing even if it comes from bad motivations, just as good motivations can sometimes lead to disaster. As catastrophic a president as Bush was, I don’t doubt he sincerely believed that once we dislodged Hussein, a wave of democracy would sweep across the Middle East (and of course, Bush was willing to lie to the American people to bring about this glorious future). He was completely wrong due to his combination of ignorance and hubris, but he thought things would work out great for everyone.

If nothing else, the fact that Trump just doesn’t care about the fate of the world so long as he’s getting paid could help dial back his party’s faith in military adventurism. And it may also scale back the United States' military presence overseas. He announced (apparently on a whim) that he’ll be pulling U.S. troops out of Syria, and wants to withdraw many troops from Afghanistan as well.

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The argument against the latter — the argument that has kept us there for 17 years — is that if we go, the country will plunge into chaos and the Taliban may well take over again, which could make it a safe haven for terrorists. Which could be true. But Trump doesn’t care if Afghanistan plunges into chaos, and as he said in the passage I quoted above, if the United States is hit by terrorists from some foreign land, he’ll just retaliate. In other words, he’s repudiating the “we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” idea that has animated the GOP since 2001, and has led to so much destruction.