"This directly contradicts what he has said he would do [1],[2]."

I don't think it does, actually. Right now we're involved in a number of military interventions in a number of countries, and I can not articulate to you at all what our interests are in these interventions, or more accurately, what my interests are in these interventions. Theories about Saudi Arabia and Qatar giving money to the Clinton foundation and getting military services in Syria sound at least reasonable to me on the grounds that I have no other explanation for what the hell is going on in Syria, or how it interests me, a fairly common American voter. As near as I can tell, if we "lost" all of those engagements right now and just went home, perhaps with an apology, my geopolitical position would be improved as a result of that in every way, especially in less tension with Russia and other developing powers.

(Aren't liberals supposed to be in favor of the proposition that the US is nothing special, and the world is becoming more multi-polar, and we ought to peacefully stand down and let the American Hegemony dissolve to some extent? As near as I can tell, all of our actions in the Middle East right now are primarily intended to try to hold on to American Hegemony out there. I don't want it, on almost every level, not least of which is our demonstrated inability to stabilize those countries. History tells us what it would take to do it. We don't want to do it. I don't want to do it. It's time to let American Hegemony in the Middle East go.)

That's why I specified that he's more likely to pull back on the things that are currently going on that hardly anybody even seems to realize we're doing. It was actually amusing to me, in a grimdark sort of way, than ANSWER is already planning to start up its protests again [1], as if they could possibly make it any more obvious that they are simply a anti-(R) organization rather than an anti-war one. If they were really anti-war, they should have bee protesting continuously throughout the entire Obama administration, as big as they ever did (props to those rare few who actually have been), not starting it up the instant an (R) is back in office.

Trump appears to be promising to wave a big stick at things that are actually in American interests; I rather anticipate that faced with the threat of much more focused action, those interests won't actually want direct war. It is also, ultimately, the only sane policy... you must threaten to retaliate when your interests are threatened, the game theory is clear, you can't promise to take a nuke to Boston and then sit back and be considered about the response... even if that is what you actually do. You still have to promise (credibly!) that you're going to retaliate.

I think a lot of people are coming in with the assumption that Trump's foreign policy must necessarily be stupid and brutish, and of course, when you come in with that assumption, you'll find plenty of confirmation bias that it's true. I don't think it is. I think people are also coming in with a lot of false assumptions about our current policy and our current situation, such as the guy I saw on HN yesterday who appears to believe that Obama has actually shut down the war in Iraq and that we are currently at peace. We aren't. We're basically at war right now. Given the number of fronts we've got some sort of fight going on, if the situation we are currently in does end up breaking out into World War III, the start date historians assign for that conflict will probably be in our past, and Obama will get "credit" for being the President at its beginning. Personally, I think that a lot of people have a hard time understanding Trump's foreign policy because it's based on the situation that actually exists right now out there in the world, and you've been kept very carefully unaware of what's actually going on out there, so the resulting proposal looks like gibberish to you. Part of my vote for Trump was actually to avoid World War III, which contrary to the impression most people seem to have, is actually the course we are currently on. The powder keg is already going off. The question is not whether Trump will set it off, but whether he can successfully stop the explosion already in progress. From what I can see, he's taking the steps to do that.

Yes, that even includes making clear declarations that we will defend our interests. That returns predictability to a situation that has become very unpredictable. The Middle East can not be stabilized when the US will decide to knock over your government so that a different government can run a pipeline through your country that you don't want, or whatever other dumbass reason we actually did it for. The Middle East will be stabilized (at least more so) when the US makes a clear declaration that we will only intervene when our direct interests are at stake.

My personal opinion is that the Clinton campaign has done their best to claim that Trump is going to be a madman deploying our military every which way and nuking whomever he chooses precisely to cover up the fact that our current policy is deploying our military every which way for dubious reasons.

[1]: https://www.facebook.com/events/1068785513242447/