Now that things have settled down somewhat after Drumpf took a page out of the Sicilian Mafia’s playbook and made Nicolas Maduro a deal he couldn’t refuse, the general thrust of American foreign policy under God-Emperor 2.0 is becoming relatively clear, at least in outline form. Basically, the FUSA has dropped any and all pretence about this ridiculous “rules-based international order” that the neolibtards keep going on about, and has straightforwardly said to its near-periphery:

“You give us what we want, or we take it by force.”

At one level, of course, this is horrifying. The entire “Westphalian Order” which has existed for nearly 400 years – often quite tenuously, given that countries have invaded the sovereign territories of their neighbours countless times in that interval – has been upended. We now live in the world of Lex Fortissimus – the Law of the Strong. This is nothing new, actually, but we always had these masks and disguises wrapped around it to make the bitter pill a bit easier for most of us to swallow.

At another level, though, this is actually quite refreshing in its honesty.

The new “Donroe Doctrine”, as some are calling it, strips away the bluster and blarney about “coalitions of the wiling” and “the alliance of free nations”, and cuts right to the point. There are things the FUSA wants, and it will get those, by hook or by crook (usually the latter). The FUSA is the Great Power in the Western Hemisphere, and makes no bones about this fact. It will not tolerate ANY attempts by other Great Powers to infringe upon its own territorial interests and resources.

However, that doctrine comes with the rather interesting balancing note, that the FUSA will also (tacitly, at least) avoid interfering in the spheres of interest of other Great Powers. Specifically, there appears to be a growing acceptance within the American elites that Russia has a legitimate sphere of interest in Eastern Europe – due in no small part to the fact that Russia is winning the 404 War, and is mercilessly and systematically smashing both Ukraine and NATO to pieces.

The latest National Security Strategy document lends credence to this view. If you take the time to read that document – and doing so is well worth the time, given it is only 33 pages long – you will see that the author has inserted the “Trump Corollary” to the original American “Monroe Doctrine”. That doctrine is, of course, the outcome of a widely misunderstood speech by President Monroe from 1823, made in response to turmoil in continental Europe.

The “Monroe Doctrine” stems from the following passage in that speech:

The citizens of the United States cherish sentiments the most friendly in favor of the liberty and happiness of their fellow-men on that side of the Atlantic. In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy to do so. It is only when our rights are invaded or seriously menaced that we resent injuries or make preparation for our defense. With the movements in this hemisphere we are of necessity more immediately connected, and by causes which must be obvious to all enlightened and impartial observers. The political system of the allied powers is essentially different in this respect from that of America. This difference proceeds from that which exists in their respective Governments; and to the defense of our own, which has been achieved by the loss of so much blood and treasure, and matured by the wisdom of their most enlightened citizens, and under which we have enjoyed unexampled felicity, this whole nation is devoted. We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintain it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.

The Monroe Doctrine, as originally understood, essentially said that the US would not interfere with the affairs of continental European powers, nor would it attempt in any way to get involved with their colonies around the world. In exchange, the US would brook no interference in its own hemisphere by other powers, and would not tolerate attempts by European powers to suppress those former colonies in America’s hemisphere that had declared independence.

Never mind, of course, that the US government almost immediately broke those promises to the former Spanish colonies in Central and South America. And never mind that a large part of the southern US is essentially conquered land, taken through victory in war against Mexico, at gunpoint. That is simply the way of things.

The “Trump Corollary” from the new NSS document comes from this particular snippet:

After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.

That is all well and good, but of course it depends on whether the FUSA has the industrial and economic base to sustain a hemisphere entirely on its own. It is becoming increasingly clear that the FUSA does not have these things, and that it is in the midst of a late-stage imperial collapse.

If you continue to read the document, you will find – despite the disclaimers right up front about how US national security strategy of the past has been rooted in wishful thinking and silly platitudes – a whole lot of platitudes about American capabilities. Supposedly, America still has: the world’s largest and most innovative economy and tech sector (false – the Chinese have caught up substantially, and in AI are somewhat ahead of the US); the world’s most powerful military (absolutely false – the US has nearly zero sustainment capability in the event of a serious conflict); and a still nimble political system (totally false – the US is a gerontocracy where political change is basically impossible, and it does not matter how you vote).

There is also a lot of nonsense about that tired old trope around PISS THRU STRENF. This is the Reagan-era doctrine about building a military so strong and so powerful that NOBODY can possibly mess with the US. And, back in the 1980s, that idea worked – because America still had the scientific-technological-industrial base to sustain something like that. Today, however, it is total nonsense. The US is not only years behind its rivals – especially Russia – in terms of hypersonic missiles and air defence, it is GENERATIONS behind. Worse, the US is far behind China in terms of its development of the latest weapons and technologies at mass scale. China is already testing what military analysts call “sixth-generation” combat aircraft – though this is suspect, to say the least, given these “fighter generations” are largely marketing hype.

Much of this document is inherently deeply self-contradictory. Supposedly, the US will respect the rights and sovereignty of other nations, while demanding that they respect American sovereignty in turn. Yet, the US will also reserve the right to intervene militarily and politically against any nation that it, and it alone, judges to be “too big for its britches”.

There is also some real red meat about how the US needs to secure critical resources. According to this document, the US must ensure free access to energy, minerals, and trade routes. That is all well and good – though of course it implies that the US will happily throw its weight around, in the spheres of influence of other nations and powers, to secure whatever it wants.

The whole document is basically a reflection of the personality of Donald J. Trump – contradictory, surface-level, and often deeply frustrating. It has very little of real substance behind it, because it is incapable of recognising America’s inherent limitations and problems. It is all about show.

And that is precisely what we see in this new world that Don Trumponi has pressed upon us.

The Venezuela operation was essentially a snatch-and-grab executed against a backward, corrupt, unprepared opponent. We now know that the Venezuelans did not even have their Russian-made S-300 and Buk air defence systems operating or switched on, despite MONTHS of provocations and warnings. We know that the American Chinook helicopters, which are BIG NOISY LUMBERING beasts, were flying low and slow over Caracas – where they should have been choice targets for any halfway serious AD system. And we know that parts of Maduro’s inner circle were bribed and cajoled into supporting the operation.

In other words, it was your typical American show of force – 95% show, 5% force. The whole point of it was to reduce the risk to actual American troops down to near-zero, while maximising shock value.

But it achieved almost nothing of real substance.

Venezuela’s oil remains very difficult to extract and move onto international markets. The CEO of ExxonMobil rather severely cheesed off Ornj Boi with his rather honest remarks about the investments and efforts needed to bring Venezuelan heavy sour crude out of the Orinoco basin and into international oil markets:

We see the exact same pattern over and over again from Trump’s foreign policy engagements since June of last year, when he sent B-2 bombers to attack Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities at Fordow. Supposedly, that was some great victory and triumph of American planning, technology, and military aviation – until we learned shortly afterwards that the Iranians had already moved their enriched nuclear materials out of that facility, and had tacitly ordered their air defences to stand down and permit the attack. The entire point of that attack was basically to put an end to a war between Israel and Iran, that the former was losing extremely badly, by “escalating to de-escalate”. All it did was to push the inevitable resumption of the conflict farther down the line.

Indeed, we are now at the point where renewed strikes against Iran are almost an inevitability. The Dread Pirate Donald has now moved another carrier battle group from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, because the Arab nations in the Gulf refused to allow him to launch airstrikes from bases in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The difference between Iran and Venezuela, of course, is that Iran is a “no-fail” matter for Russia and China. Iran is a member of BRICS+. The Chinese invested considerable political and diplomatic capital into settling the long-running proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran – the two centres of Sunni and Shi’a Izzlam, respectively.

Russia has provided new top-of-the-line Su-35S “4++-generation” fighters to Iran, along with modernised air defence systems that far exceed the capabilities of the domestically produced Bavar knock-offs. The Chinese have provided financial and economic assistance, and almost certainly have given the Persians military assistance under the table too.

The bottom line is that, unless the mullahs are far stupider than I think, a second attack on Iran will end in disaster – which is probably why Trump is holding back on launching one.

We also see this style-over-substance approach in Greenland. For all his bluster and big talk, Trump walked away from the WEF summit in Davos with nothing much more than a commitment to permit more and larger American bases on Greenlander soil. Critically, that commitment does include sovereign immunity for those bases, which means they are effectively extensions of America on the territory of Greenland. In exchange, Ornj Boi desisted on imposing additional 10% tariffs on the YURPEENS.

Most critics see this as another TACO-style climbdown. That misses the wood for the trees. Ultimately, the FUSA WILL take over Greenland. It is an inevitability. There are less than 60,000 people on that entire ice-covered hunk of rock in the North Atlantic, and the Danish “navy”, such as it is, consists of a handful of obsolete and ancient frigates and a few patrol boats.

A single Marine Expeditionary Unit would be about 10 times the amount of force needed to conquer a territory like that.

And that brings us neatly to the issue of Ukraine and the 404 War.

The Neo-Tsar said some very clever things recently in connection with Greenland:

If you cut through the legalese, what he basically said was:

America takes Greenland – doesn’t bother us. In exchange, though, we get Ukraine.

That is an extremely clever position. It plays directly into Drumpf’s seeming mental view of the world being divided into roughly 3 major spheres – the American, Russian, and Chinese.

As far as America is concerned, the Russians can handle affairs on their own in their sphere of influence. They pose no threat to the Americans. They do pose a threat to the European slave-states, but that is of little concern to the US.

It is China that is the problem. And it is to China that the FUSA now wants to divert its attention and resources.

Never mind, of course, that the FUSA lacks any and all ability to impose its will on China any longer. The Chinese have spent the past 10 years significantly shoring up their economy’s ability to handle tariffs and sanctions – indeed, they proved, beautifully, that they, and not the Americans, have the whip hand when it comes to tariffs, by simply cutting off all rare-earth mineral exports. They have also bolstered their financial system, and are preparing to roll out their interbank payments system, CIPS, across the BRICS nations. That system is increasingly compatible with national payment systems in other countries – such as the Russian SFPS, which I suspect is more advanced, but lacks the scale and power of the Chinese one – and can likely onboard systems in India, Iran, and other nations, to provide a real and serious competitor to the Western SWIFT system.

The US, to repeat, does not have the industrial, financial, military, economic, or political ability to seriously hurt China any more.

Indeed, if you look for a historical parallel to what we are seeing today, you will quickly realise that America is now essentially where the Roman Empire was in roughly 400 AD.

At that time, the Roman Emperor Honorius supposedly sent a letter to the Britons, declaring that the Roman Empire could no longer protect its northern extremes, and that the Angles would henceforth be responsible for their own defence. The Romans pulled out of Britain shortly thereafter.

Then, in 410 AD, Alaric the Goth sacked Rome – the capital of the empire having long since moved to Ravenna, which was more defensible and manageable than the original mother-city. In 451 AD, the “Roman” (really, half-Scythian, which is to say, of Roumano-Bulgar origins) general Flavius Aetius stopped the Huns under Attila (barely), at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains (Chalons). By 476 AD, the Western Roman Empire was so far gone that Odoacer – a former Roman general of Germanic origin – basically walked up to the last Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, and the latter simply stepped off the throne and handed over the crown.

It is worth noting in passing that the last “Roman” Emperor was himself almost certainly not Roman. His family hailed from Pannonia, which is today split up between Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, and Serbia. In other words, he was essentially a proto-Slav.

The parallels to the modern day are absolutely clear.

Drumpf, through his generals and ambassadors, has essentially told the European slaves that they are on their own with Ukraine. The US will no longer supply military aid and intelligence for free. The YURPEENS must now pay for it on their own. At the same time, Ornj Boi has made it very clear that if any European state has something he wants, he will take it – diplomacy and alliances be damned. Any resistance will be met with tariffs and military force.

The European slaves are utterly horrified by this. They were stupid enough to think that the warm fuzzy feeling in their lower extremities came from having good relations with America, which treated them as an equal. They have only now realised that it actually comes from a heated buttplug, which the Americans are in the process of jamming in much harder – without lubrication.

All of this masks severe fundamental weaknesses in America. I argue that the US has been in a low-grade civil war ever since Obama’s second term, and that war is threatening to go hot, due to the blatantly unconstitutional and extremely violent actions of ICE goons against American citizens, alongside their absolutely legitimate missions to round up and arrest illegals.

The American economy is gutted and hollowed-out. It consists of an outsized FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) sector that substitutes “making money on money” for actual production and manufacturing. It is all very well to attempt to secure rare-earth elements for American industry, but when you do not have the actual ability to refine and process these things at scale, then the point is moot.

That is before we get to the actually extremely weak state of the American military. As I have said many times before, the US military is multiple generations behind its key rivals, Russia and China, in several critical areas.

For all of Drumpf’s boasting about “the greatest fighting force in history” (which, in fairness, goes beyond him and all the way back to at least Dubya), the reality of the US military is of a sclerotic, bloated, unwieldy, doctrinally obsolete organisation that has not fought a real war against a near-peer adversary since WWII, and loses all of its actual wars even against rubbish opponents.

Simply put, the US under Trump 2.0 is an empire in terminal decline, and the Dread Pirate Donald is basically trying to disguise that fact through a lot of nonsensical moves that are full of sound and fury, but signify absolutely nothing.

Capturing Maduro changes nothing to build up America’s resource base – the amount of investment required to bring Venezuela’s oil fields back up to capacity is prohibitive, especially given the global oil market right now has an issue of OVERSUPPLY.

Taking Greenland does nothing to help the US exploit Arctic resources – it does not have the necessary icebreaker fleets, and does not have the processing plants for rare-earth elements.

Abandoning Ukraine is about the only wise policy the Trump Administration has come up with, thus far. And even there, Drumpf is too chicken to actually do what is necessary and simply let Russia win.

Attacking Iran a second time will almost certainly result in a bloodbath – the first attack happened with tacit Persian permission, but there is little reason to think they will permit another go-round, especially given that they know perfectly well how the CIA and Mossad just tried to overthrow their government, again, through massive and extremely violent protests across western Iran.

Everything comes down to image over reality, noise over calm, tactics over strategy. In the process, the FUSA is transforming itself from a global Great Power, into a nation of pirates.

This is not a “Make America Great Again” strategy. It is not a strategy at all. It is simply an attempt to keep a rapidly collapsing empire together, against multiple crises both at home and abroad.