Give up wars in far away places and concentrate on annexing territory close to home. Is that the Trump strategy? From Alasdair Crooke at strategic-culture.su:
Putin hinted this week that the Ukraine conflict could end in weeks, so Trump may not have a long wait.
How to do the impossible? America is instinctively an expansionist power, needing new fields to conquer; new financial horizons to master and to exploit. The U.S. is built that way. Always was.
But – if you are Trump, wanting to withdraw from wars on the empire’s periphery, yet nonetheless wanting too, to cast a shiny image of a muscular America expanding and leading global politics and finance – how to do it?
Well, President Trump – ever the showman – has a solution. Disdain the now-discredited intellectual ideology of muscular American global hegemony; suggest rather, that these earlier ‘forever wars’ should never really have been ‘our wars’; and, as Alon Mizrahi has advanced and suggested, set about re-colonising that which was already colonised: Canada; Greenland; Panama – and Europe too, of course.
America thus will be bigger; Trump will act with decisive muscularity (i.e. as in Colombia); make a big ‘show’ of things, but at the same time, shrink the mainstream U.S. security interest to centre on the Western Hemisphere. As Trump keeps observing, Americans live in the ‘western hemisphere’, not in the Middle East or elsewhere.
Trump thus attempts to detach from the American expansionist war periphery – ‘the outside’ – to proclaim that the ‘inside’ (i.e. the western hemisphere’s sphere), has become bigger and is unquestionably American. And that is what matters.
It is a big shift, yet it has the virtue of beginning to be recognized by many Americans as a more accurate reflection of reality. America’s instinct remains expansionary (that doesn’t change), but many Americans advocate a focus on American domestic needs, and its ‘near neighbourhood’.
