The national security strategy that Republicans – including Donald Trump, JD Vance & Marco Rubio – have laid out is not what a strong, strategic world power would do.

 

It’s what an empire in decline would do.

 

There is no chance that a plan allowing China (in Asia) and Russia (in Europe/Eurasia) to operate unrestrained while the United States runs around the Western Hemisphere invading countries, overthrowing leaders, and just taking everyone else’s stuff ends in anything but total disaster.

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That’s not a Strategy, that’s Superpower Suicide.

 

 

Everything these guys do is designed to move us backward. They are obsessed with the past. Donald Trump, JD Vance, Marco Rubio and congressional Republicans long for the days when U.S. military bases were named after Confederate generals, women and black people were second-class citizens, and the Redskins and Indians took the field. They love the days when there were no emissions standards or wimpy toilets, and coal was king. They yearn for the time when Alcatraz was in full swing, police officers could beat people up, kids didn’t have to be in stupid car seats, and there was a secretary of war. They pine for the days when Joseph McCarthy went after “communists,” you could grab women by the p$$#, fly on a pedophile’s jet without worry, and diversity wasn’t yet a thing.

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Their isolationist, imperialistic national security strategy prioritizes U.S. sovereignty over multilateral alliances and collective security, harkening back to the days when the world was carved up into spheres of influence. Taking the position of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” it seems they have no problem with China and Russia dictating the rules in their own backyards as long as the United States has the freedom to do whatever we want to have total dominion over the entire Western Hemisphere.

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In this Cold War-inspired mindset, strategic interests are key, which explains the Venezuela invasion and The Donald’s obsession with the U.S. “owning” Greenland. And don’t be fooled, locking down strategic assets is exactly why President Trump is doing these things – using the same logic that Vladimir Putin used when he brutally invaded Ukraine in 2022 in the first major land offensive for territorial advantage in Europe since World War II.

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Even though Marco Rubio, the late Senator Lindsey Graham, and other Trump enablers turned themselves into pretzels trying to convince us that Venezuela was about “narcotrafficking,” President Trump toppled Nicolás Maduro while pardoning ex-Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who actually said – out loud – that he wanted to “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses”.… which is why the narcotrafficking explanation made no sense from the jump.

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What made perfect sense – and came as no surprise – was President Trump’s announcement in late August 2026 that he had cut what he called the “biggest oil deal in world history” with President Delcy Rodríguez for preferential rights to 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil reserves. Essentially, America will take a 35 percent stake in a private company run by Alejandro Betancourt, a Venezuelan businessman who Swiss authorities have issued a warrant for in connection with a money laundering investigation. His company, North American Blue Energy Partners, will have the right to develop those 65 billion in reserves and America will have the right to 20 percent of what they produce at the cost of production. Colonialism at its finest.

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In his role as Lord over the Western Hemisphere, President Trump believes Canada should be our 51st state; the Gulf of Mexico should be the Gulf of America; and we should control the Panama Canal. He endorsed political candidates in elections in Honduras and Chile; gave his buddy President Javier Milei of Argentina a $20 billion bailout; and, after his snatch and grab in Venezuela, turned his sites to U.S. intervention in Cuba, Colombia and even Mexico.

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Then there’s Greenland. Always Greenland. Without question, the allure of this semiautonomous territory of the kingdom of Denmark is understandable at a time when there is a worldwide scramble for the Arctic, both economically and militarily. The world’s largest island, around three times the size of Texas, is located on the North American continent, to Canada’s northeast, and is situated between North America, Western Europe and Russia. It is positioned along what is known as the GIUK Gap, a Cold War term that indicates a critical point between Greenland, Iceland and Britain that can protect the North Atlantic from Russian ships and submarines.

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China and Russia – who have agreed to work together to develop new Arctic shipping routes – are clamoring to take advantage of the island’s position as global warming opens more trade routes (an estimated 11,000 square miles of Greenland’s ice sheets and glaciers have melted over the past thirty years).

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The location of Greenland is especially useful to China and its “Polar Silk Road,” as it creates shorter distances for China to ship goods via the Arctic and lets them avoid bottlenecks at the Suez Canal and the Malacca Strait.​ Melting ice will also bring more opportunities to drill for Greenland’s 17.5 billion untapped barrels of oil and 148.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and increase opportunities to mine its 1.5 million tons of reserves of rare-earth elements.​

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From a national security perspective, the U.S. military base located on Greenland, Pituffik Space Base, is strategically located for missile defense and space surveillance missions and includes a radar station that is part of our ballistic missile early-warning system… but we are far from alone in the Arctic. Russia has already reopened dozens of old Soviet military bases; its Northern Fleet and its main submarine base are headquartered on the Barents Sea near Murmansk; and its vessels operate freely in the North Atlantic. Russia is also playing Arctic wargames that include amphibious assaults in the glacial seas.

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So, okay, sure. It would be awesome to “own” Greenland. But they have made it very clear it’s not for sale. Either way, the bully posturing, tantrums and threats are unnecessary because, under a 1951 agreement, the U.S. maintains “the right of free access to and movement between the defense areas through Greenland” by land, air, and sea. Plus, the agreement doesn’t impose a specified numerical cap on U.S. personnel at Pituffik.

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Not to mention that carrying out Donald Trump’s Greenland “vision” by force would run headlong into U.S. law. The Senate ratified the North Atlantic Treaty, making it part of the “supreme Law of the Land” under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. And Article 1 explicitly requires NATO members to settle international disputes peacefully and refrain from the threat or use of force inconsistent with the U.N. Charter (and shockingly, seizing territory from a fellow NATO ally is not among our treaty obligations).

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In case there was any doubt of their intentions, the Trump/Vance administration actually wrote their thoughts down in a November 2025 National Security Strategy document. In what they called the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine (named for President James Monroe’s 1823 declaration that said the U.S. would not stand for outside powers interfering in the Western Hemisphere) they made it known that 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” and that they “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.”

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The “Trump Corollary” mirrors the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine when, in 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt said the United States would not only block European meddling in the Hemisphere but act as an “international police power” to intervene in countries vulnerable to debt crises, chronic instability, or what Roosevelt regarded as governmental “wrongdoing or impotence.” Ultimately, in the early 20th century, the United States used the “Roosevelt Corollary” to justify U.S. military interventions and occupations in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic.

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The Monroe Doctrine – which was neither a treaty nor a law, but a unilateral statement of American foreign policy – came at a time when the United States was still a young republic of around ten million people and 24 states, with a small military and limited ability to project power around the world. Two hundred years later, the United States is the world’s preeminent military and financial power. So, invoking Monroe today is not a return to the geopolitical circumstances of 1823; it’s the world’s most powerful country invoking a doctrine conceived when America was not yet powerful enough to enforce it on its own.