During his campaigns for president, Donald Trump spoke of the need to stop engaging in ''endless'' or ''forever wars,'' and said removing ''warmongers and America-last globalists'' was among his second-term foreign policy priorities.
Trump's move to strike Iranian nuclear sites risks embroiling the United States in the sort of conflict he once derided. Like other recent American presidents, Trump said he would not permit Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon. In recent months, he had held out hope that diplomacy could avoid the strike he announced Saturday.
Trump's consideration of military action had opened a schism among his ''Make American Great Again'' movement and drew criticism from some of its most high-profile members.
Here's a look at some of Trump's rhetoric before his announcement Saturday about the strikes:
2024 campaign
Trump often drew lines of contrasts with his Republican primary opponents. In January 2024, at a New Hampshire rally, he referred to former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who was U.N. ambassador during Trump's first term, as a ''warmonger'' whose mentality on foreign policy is, ''Let's kill people all over the place and let's make a lot of money for those people that make the messes.''
During a Jan. 6, 2024, rally before the Iowa caucuses, Trump told supporters that returning him to the White House would allow the country to ''turn the page forever on those foolish, stupid days of never-ending wars. They never ended.''
Rolling out his foreign policy priorities during that campaign — something Trump's orbit called '' Agenda 47 '' — he posted a video online in which he talked of how he was ''the only president in generations who didn't start a war.''