Donald Trump ran for President seemingly promoting a much less interventionist foreign policy than his predecessors should he be elected President. During the campaign, for example, he expressed disdain for the Iraq War, the continuation of the war in Afghanistan, as well as a good part of the Obama Administration’s policies with regard to the civil war in Syria. Despite that rhetoric though, Katrina Vanden Heuvel notes that what Trump has actually delivered is more of the same interventionism we’ve seen in the past:

The lie of “promises made, promises kept,” a favorite phrase in President Trump’s stump speech for reelection, is perhaps most apparent in his foreign misadventures. The candidate who scorned “regime change,” and promised to end the policy of “intervention and chaos,” is sowing chaos and intervening from Yemen to Iran to Venezuela and beyond. Instead of wasting money on endless wars, Trump would rebuild America’s roads and bridges. The candidate who promised restraint has only delivered more calamitous intervention.

Last week, Trump vetoed the bipartisan joint resolution of Congress directing the president to withdraw U.S. support for the war in Yemen. This veto is a particularly execrable folly. The administration is continuing to support Saudi Arabia in its unconscionable savaging of that impoverished country, creating the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today. Fourteen million Yemenis are facing war-induced starvation. A cholera epidemic has broken out.

After the Saudi regime assassinated Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi inside their consulate in Istanbul, Congress — led by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) in the House, and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) in the Senate — backed a joint resolution, under the authority of the War Powers Resolution, directing the president to end our complicity in this horror. Bipartisan majorities in both houses voted to end this shameful policy started under Barack Obama. Instead, Trump reasserted the claim of untrammeled executive prerogative in matters of war and peace and vetoed the resolution. Sadly, Congress failed to overturn the veto.

Meanwhile, the latest U.S.-backed coup attempt in Venezuela has sputtered, tramples international law and gives lie to Trump’s promise that “we will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with.” The administration decided that the misrule by authoritarian Nicolás Maduro, whose election as president was marred by voting irregularities, must end. It rushed to support the president of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó,when the opposition leader announced that he was the legitimate leader of Venezuela. In an economy that has already shrunk by half over the past five years, sanctions have been tightened and tightened again, to the point that former U.N. special rapporteur Alfred de Zayas has called them “crimes against humanity.”

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And the “endless wars” that Trump promised to end continue — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and so on. Libya is a failed state, mired in violence since our “humanitarian” intervention. Drone attacks have escalated in eight nations, almost certainly generating more terrorists than they kill. U.S. Special Operations forces were in 149 countries in Trump’s first year in office. The administration is ramping up economic sanctions against Iran, remaining bellicose with Russia and (especially) China, and going all in with Saudi Arabia and Israel, with Bolton and others pushing for military action. Bolton has designated Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua as the “triangle of terror,” expanding the list of targets.

Here, the so-called adults in the room, the keepers of the “guardrails” to protect an ignorant and impulsive president from himself, are part of the problem. When Trump called for removing troops from Afghanistan and Syria, his national security advisers got in the way. As Trump expresses caution about actual military action in Venezuela, the truculent trio barrels forward.

Trump has trampled his promise to war-weary Americans. Opposition to this endless folly is building, however. Progressives in the Congress — led by Khanna and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) in the House, and Sanders in the Senate — are intent on reasserting congressional power over war and peace. Republicans such as Lee and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) add bipartisan support.

As Vanden Heuvel notes, the situation in Venezuela is perhaps the most blatant example of the abandonment of his previous position regarding breaking away from nearly twenty years of what clearly seems like failed policies of intervention and nation-building. In 2015, for example, Trump criticized the entire idea of nation-building, which had clearly failed in Iraq and Libya to pick just two examples, saying “We’re nation-building. We can’t do it. We have to build our own nation.” It was a message that clearly seemed to resonate with Trump’s supporters and even many of his critics who recognized that our previous policies pursued by both the Bush 43 and Obama Administrations were not working they way they were supposed to and that interventionism and nation-building were not working and were costing American taxpayers billions of dollars with no discernable benefit.

Instead of following through on that rhetoric, though, Trump has instead doubled down on the interventionism of the past. He has, for example, twice attacked Syrian military positions in response to alleged Syrian use of chemical weapons and has done so without receiving prior authorization from Congress, which the Administration later claimed it didn’t need. He increased the number of troops in Syria and later backed away from a promise to bring those troops home. In Afghanistan, he has done much the same thing and, as a result, America’s longest war appears set to continue into and beyond its nineteenth anniversary. He has, of course, continued American support for the Saudi War on Yemen and has placed American “advisers” closer to the front line of that war than they had been in the past. Most recently he has taken an increasingly militaristic approach toward Iran. Finally, he has essentially continued the policy of his immediate predecessor of expanding the so-called “War On Terror” into newer battlefields around the world again without seeking Congressional authorization. This is perhaps not surprising given who Trump has surrounded himself in terms of foreign policy advisers, but it is nonetheless a complete reversal from the Trump we saw on the campaign trail.

For the most part this has been greeted with a shrug on Capitol Hill. Most Republicans were leery of Trump’s apparent non-interventionist stances from the start, so the fact that he’s turned his back on them doesn’t really seem to bother them. The only exceptions to this rule appear to be a handful of legislators such as Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and Michigan Congressman Justin Amash. Even most Democrats don’t seem to fault the President for walking away from his non-interventionist past, with again only a handful being critical of the Administration or even raising questions about the direction of U.S. foreign policy. As for the voters, it’s hard to know where they stand. Absent a crisis, foreign policy is seldom a big factor in Presidential elections compared to issues like the economy, and Trump’s hard-core supporters aren’t going to abandon him because of this, or seemingly anything else.