As we watch the incomprehensible antics of our rogue President it is tempting to just dismiss it all as the Brownian motion of a madman. He must be crazy. Or he must be incredibly stupid. We can add to that the very strong probability that he is a criminal, a deliberate and calculated one. I don’t doubt that all these hypotheses have some truth to them, but I feel that perhaps there may be more to it than that. I suspect there is a mad logic at work here, a plan linked to a world-view that he accepts and that he feels he must work to confront and to adapt to. Its not ALL random spasms, there is a consistency here. We may feel it is mistaken, we certainly need not accept it, but it isn’t just galvanic twitching. There is a plan here, and I think the outlines are starting to emerge.

Donald Trump sees the world as dominated by large power centers, nation-states and their allies and vassals, competing on a world stage for power and domination. This is not that much of a different view than that held by many others, but with Trump (as well as many of his own ideological stripe) there is an added wrinkle. He perceives that the ability of the United States to maintain a position of world leadership, to manage this multi-polar ecosphere, is rapidly diminishing. I am coming to the realization that the President of the United States sincerely believes this country can no longer make things happen, that the position of global leadership it has held since the end of World War II can no longer be maintained. We are just spread too thin. Whether this is true or not really doesn’t matter, it is what he believes and he is working for.

His reasons for this are varied; we simply can’t afford to do this any more, we are broke and going into debt. Our people have become lazy and soft, too “woke”. We have given away too much of our wealth and power, and surrendered too much of our resources supporting a network of alliances and trade networks designed to erect distant defenses for us, but which have drained our ability to defend ourselves, not just militarily, but economically and politically as well. The European states have becoming obsessed with their welfare states and subsidized lifestyles and dependent on the US nuclear umbrella. Our Western Pacific allies have developed their economies and now threaten our dominance of world markets and our access to natural resources. We have allowed our major world rival, China, to prosper and grow by selling us cheap high quality goods which we suddenly find we cannot produce for ourselves any more. And we have unwittingly fostered a world wide demand for consumer goods, endless credit, too much freedom and in his own recent words, “political correctness”; that
cripples our entrepreneurs and corporations to the point where they cannot compete with those in the countries we once dominated.

In the Trumpian world view, we are in a position similar to that of the Roman Empire of the 4th century (although I doubt he characterizes it in this way). We simply are too big, too over-extended, too broke and too lazy to continue as before. We can’t split the Empire into two parts the way they did, so the best we can do is call the legions home, and pull back to more defensible frontiers.

In modern terms, this means gradually give up our overseas bases and alliances, or trade them for short term economic deals that will allow us to continue plundering our foreign sources without having to pledge to defend them for as long as possible. Part of the plan is to retreat to the New World, where the effects of distance work in our favor and where the local states are too weak and disorganized to put up any meaningful resistance, or even any friendly competition. This will provide us with a newer, but more manageable empire, buy America time, and perhaps let China and Russia inevitably come to blows. Eurasia and Africa clearly aren’t big enough for both of them, and certainly not if we add India to the mix. We will be safe behind the two great oceans of the world. We’ll at least be safe for a time; the loss of the great democratic civilization of Europe and the free and prosperous states of the Western Pacific will just be the price we have to pay to buy us that time.

Those of you who have studied the great geopolitical geographers of the 19th century, the Mahans and Mackinders, may recognize some of these ideas, albeit shifted from the World Heartland to the Americas. I believe they survive in modern conservative political geography, they certainly play a role in Putin’s fantasies of a great Russian Empire and China’s memories of her own Middle Kingdom. And I believe they are manifest in Donald Trump. He may not have thought it all out in great detail, but I am convinced his actions fit the theory, and I suspect he is surrounded by many who have given it much thought.

No one can predict the future, and sometimes the great motivations and philosophies of history are not obvious to those who play a role in carrying them out and are being shaped by them. This is the essence of the 2026 Strategic Initiative, and it dovetails neatly into the Project 2025 domestic policy document. Trump no longer sees America as the City on the Hill, the logical result of the Enlightenment, the future of freedom and prosperity for all mankind. I think he’ll settle for retreat and another century of relative quiet until our enemies wipe each other out.