Trump’s Fixation on Americas Dooms the US as a Superpower
They’re all his gulfs.
Photographer: Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images
As the Trump administration contemplates attacking Venezuela and ousting its regime, a pattern that began with Greenland and Canada in the north and Panama in the middle takes on more detailed contours. I’ll call it hemisphere-ism. In geopolitical terms, it marks a stunning shift in American foreign policy which Susan Rice, a former national security advisor, calls “superpower suicide: We’re going from being a global superpower to a regional great power.”
This hemisphere-ism doesn’t resemble the old Monroe Doctrine (which was about keeping European powers out of the Americas) so much as the cynical, Machiavellian mentality with which the great powers in the 19th century, or again at the Yalta Conference, once carved up the world into spheres of influence in order to dominate the one they considered their own.