In his speech in Riyadh in May, President Trump set out his rationale to his transactional mode of policy formulation - making peace through commerce, rather than war.
The language in the 4 December US National Security Strategy (NSS) takes this several steps further: It is couched in the terms of 'regions of influence', rather than hegemony, and of managing stakeholder financial interests. It abandons the phraseology of a rules-based order and eschews appeals to democracy and Western values.
But what does this 'peace through commerce' really mean?
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
The core to the Trump geo-politics is revealed in the NSS as the risk of imperial collapse looming in the future. It talks about Atlas holding the globe aloft - and emphasises that the United States can no longer continue to shoulder the burden of empire.
The NSS, therefore, is ultimately centred around resolving the economic contradictions that has brought the US to this pass - burgeoning debt and an out-of-control fiscal matrix which, absent a solution, ordains that Empire will fold.
The core issue therefore becomes how to finance 'Empire' against a badly skewed and distorted economic reality. Clearly, the start point was to acknowledge that sanctions have failed. The attempt to lock China (and by extension Russia) out of the economic loop has failed, because they adapted - and strengthened their internal economies; and in China's case enhanced their relevance to international supply chains.
So, we are seeing a marked shift to a different imperial 'model'. The NSS indirectly suggests that without the dominance which allows Big Money and infrastructure investment being coerced into the US economy, and without continued dollar hegemony, the US is in big trouble.
The NSS therefore is not a pivot from Empire; it does, nonetheless, conclude that the means to (albeit) attenuated American domination does require a 'Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine'.
In its introductory remarks, the NSS states that:
"American foreign policy elites, convinced that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country ... [had] overestimated America's ability to fund, simultaneously, a massive welfare regulatory-administrative state alongside a massive military, diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign aid complex".
Here, the NSS put the issue of funding US foreign policy front and foremost.
Significantly, in context of the funding shortfall, the strategy document takes a swipe at the free trade system:
"They placed hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called 'free trade', that hollowed out the very middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military pre-eminence depend".
This aspect perhaps constitutes the most radical change of course envisioned by the NSS. It concerns two alternative architectures of economics: On the one hand, the British system of 'free trade' as espoused by Adam Smith, versus the 'American System' as advocated by Alexander Hamilton. The NSS document includes an explicit rejection of the 'free trade' system and even mentions the name of Alexander Hamilton - giving a clear indication of the direction in which Trump is travelling (at least aspirationally).