American Strategy under Trump. By Christopher Little at Real Clear Defense.
Trump has done more to dismantle the rules-based order in 12 months than the BRICS nations did in 12 years. He didn’t just bend the rules. He dropped his gloves and hit the referee. …
The system was already dying. The pendulum had been swinging toward globalization for decades, and COVID rang the bell at the top. It is now swinging back hard and would have done so regardless of who won in 2024. Trump is a uniquely blunt instrument for an era that demands one — not the cause of the disruption but its most forceful expression. …
Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution calls Trump’s approach “Jacksonian preemptive deterrence.” It is neither isolationism nor empire-building. It is a focused strategy to weaken adversaries and strengthen friends before a larger confrontation — one nobody wants but everyone is preparing for — has to be fought.
The Obama and Biden administrations projected weakness and paid for it: four major theater conflicts, from Crimea in 2014 through the full invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the Middle East theater war of 2024–25. Anemic deterrence invites aggression. Trump’s approach is designed to make the cost of testing America so prohibitive that adversaries think twice. …
China, China, China:
Venezuela. Cuba. The Panama Canal. The cartel designations. The deportations. The “51st state” pressure on Canada. The Greenland campaign. The January 2026 removal of Nicolás Maduro — accomplished in less than 48 hours. To most observers these look like random provocations. They are neither random nor unrelated. They are all aimed at the same target: China.
While America spent the 2000s consumed by Iraq and Afghanistan, Beijing was methodically rewriting its relationship with Latin America — one infrastructure loan, one port deal, one oil-for-credit arrangement at a time. By 2024, China had become the dominant trading partner for South America’s largest economies and had signed Belt and Road agreements with more than twenty Latin American nations. Nobody in Washington had a serious plan to stop it. …
Venezuela … was never going to be allowed to keep its oil fields — the largest reserves in the Western Hemisphere — in Chinese hands indefinitely. The only question was when. The answer turned out to be January 2026. This was not about stealing oil. It was about denying China a strategic asset in America’s own backyard. The same logic governs the Panama Canal — built by America, given away for a dollar under Carter, and now strategically reclaimed after Chinese companies moved aggressively to control it. …
Hanson does not mince words on the fentanyl front: 75,000 Americans die every year, much of it deliberately laced into other substances. The precursor chemicals come from China. They flow through Mexican cartels. Designating those cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and going after them with military tools is not cruelty. It is triage on a mass casualty event — and it simultaneously squeezes Chinese influence out of the Americas by severing a critical revenue stream. …
Even when it isn’t about China, it is still about China. The number that should stop every American cold: in 2000, China manufactured 6 percent of the world’s goods. On its current trajectory, by 2030 that share reaches 45 percent. Extended further, there is a point at which China makes effectively everything — at which point it can do whatever it wants, because the rest of the world cannot function without it. America has a closing window to reverse this trajectory.
Globalism got China completely wrong:
Hanson dissects the old bipartisan fantasy with surgical precision. For decades, both Republican and Democratic administrations operated on the same assumption: the more American money invested in China, the more a prosperous Chinese middle class would demand freedom, and China would gradually liberalize. This was catastrophically wrong. Those trade dollars funded the largest peacetime military buildup in modern history.
American consumers made China rich. China used that wealth to build a military capable of challenging American power on every front. The NSS calls the old trade relationship “free but not fair,” and the results are now impossible to ignore. …
Trump is reverting America to a previous stance:
What Trump is doing is not radical departure — it is a return to American roots. Alexander Hamilton built American industry behind tariff walls. The post-war era of open markets was the exception, not the rule. When it stopped serving American interests — when it hollowed out the industrial base and handed China the supply chains that underpin American military power — the model had to change. The tariffs are not primarily an economic instrument. They are a weapon: forcing American allies to stop trading with China on terms that sustain Beijing’s industrial and military expansion. …
Harnessing the globalist anti-Trump reflex:
Trump uses predictable opposition as a mechanism. European and Canadian elites have a reliable reaction function: they reflexively oppose anything he proposes. So rather than ask them politely — which has never worked — he provokes them into doing what he needs while they believe they are resisting him.
The proof is in the results. During his first term, Trump pleaded with European NATO members to increase defense spending. Defense budgets barely moved. Then he threatened to pull out of NATO entirely. The response was dramatic: Germany hit 2% of GDP for the first time in decades, Poland is building one of the largest armies in Europe, and NATO members collectively committed to 5% in total defense and security spending — a number that would have been considered fantasy five years ago. He did not persuade them. He provoked them.
American strategy:
Preventing Chinese regional dominance in Asia is the non-negotiable core American interest. But the United States cannot concentrate forces in the Pacific while simultaneously babysitting Europe and maintaining commitments around the globe. The math only works if allies handle their own regions — Europe handles Russia, Asia-Pacific allies handle their piece of the Chinese containment line, and America pivots to the decisive theater when needed. Either allies step up or Trump creates conditions in which the cost of inaction exceeds the cost of action. …
Trump is attempting a reverse transformation of the American economy: shifting it from financialization and consumption toward production, industry, and military capacity. … He needs enough state direction to rebuild American manufacturing without destroying the market dynamism that makes America innovative. The margin is narrow. The state directing capital in the name of necessity rarely gives that power back.
Not that the media will ever admit that Trump is more than a bumbling clown with no idea or plan, or discuss the relative merits of the globalist and Trump visions.