Donald Trump once said, “I run the country and the world,” and his critics quickly pounced on America’s imperial president, and the man who would be king. Like many things POTUS says, this needs to be taken with a grain of salt mixed in with a lot of context. It used to be a truism that the American President ran the world, or at least much of it — with the phrase “leader of the free world” ubiquitous across party lines.
Indeed, the American President did run the world from the end of the Cold War to around when Russia began to reassert itself 15 or so years ago within its former Soviet territories. From the end of WWII through the fall of the Berlin Wall, America ran half the world — and it was the most economically productive half, so much so that by the end of the Cold War, the other half of the planet wanted to join our side. From the Soviet collapse in 1991 through to the Twin Towers’ collapse on 9/11, America did rule the world, or most of it anyway. But since around 2014, when Russia began its re-expansion, America’s supremacy has been gradually eroded — fueled more by China’s meteoric global rise than Russia’s more limited resurgence — with a potential bifurcation of world politics into familiar Cold War era blocs underway.
Indeed, President Trump’s “America First” vision as it translates into foreign, defense, and security policy is increasingly hemispheric in its focus (with new potential “hotspots” for armed confrontation being in the Americas, such as our old military stomping ground in Panama or new ones like Greenland and maybe even Canada), with his “Liberation Day” tariffs potentially decoupling America’s economy from the global economy. Indeed, before long, the President may be back to running just the Americas (and potentially, only North America) as in the days of the Monroe Doctrine.
Whether the American President runs our planet has a lot to do with what state the world is in: Is it wartime? If so, our military power combined with both our economic vitality and insulated heartland geography makes it true regardless of which party holds the White House, or how much the President wants to run the planet. George W. Bush wanted to reset American foreign, defense, and security policy through a hemispheric lens (much as President Trump campaigned to do and is now implementing) — but 9/11 came along and dragged him kicking and screaming into a global military-diplomatic leadership role at the head of a vast coalition of diverse countries united in a war against the roots of terror, facing off against an asymmetric array of non-state actors and rogue regimes opposed to western values. President Clinton, in contrast, came to office after the Cold War ended, so he could focus on economic issues, including expanding the globalized economic system. It’s mostly about timing and whether fate cooperates with the POTUS or thwarts his or her ambitions.
AT via Magic Studio” class=”post-image-right” src=”https://images.americanthinker.com/pp/ppj1tzuccto9vv7lrdmn_640.jpg” width=”450″ />Some American presidents come to power craving the mantle of Lincoln or Roosevelt, becoming a larger-than-life historical figure destined to be memorialized on Mt. Rushmore. Others are focused on domestic issues such as the economy, or furthering the social justice/civil rights movement, and completing the story of America’s march toward greater equality and inclusivity.
But in the end, it has more to do with what fate throws their way and whether they rise to meet the challenge or not. For instance, President Obama ran for the Presidency to fulfill the dreams of millions of civil rights marchers and achieve the vision that Martin Luther King, Jr. had for America. But he made a competent wartime president, hunting down and dispatching arch-terror master Osama bin Laden, and crushing ISIS through a shadow war waged around the world and in the fractured postwar landscapes of post-Saddam Iraq and civil-war embroiled Syria, while sustaining for his full eight years the long, slow and increasingly attritional war in Afghanistan against the Taliban.
Looking back on Trump 1.0, we see a world in which multiple wars came to an end, and in which humanity could unite to battle the COVID-19 global pandemic, closing borders and mothballing our entire economy while fast-tracking innovative vaccine development through Project Warp Speed. Now, with a renewed emphasis on hemispheric security and restoring the American heartland to economic vitality (and decoupling America from the globalized system that turned the heartland into a broken-hearted land), we’ll likely see the part of the world that Trump 2.0 will run being much closer to home than during the period of globalist expansion after the Cold War — but by making peace with the world’s great powers regardless of their domestic political values, American influence will still be felt around the world, even in those places where we don’t “run the world.”
So, does President Trump run the world? His critics might say this is a typo, that he does not run but instead “ru[i]ns” the world. But the President Trump I admire is the one who rallied the American heartland to stand up and stop the assault on American values, American faith, and American liberty. By tackling the shallow and self-serving “deep state” (as many refer to the insular government bureaucracies that have become unaccountable and self-perpetuating through their undemocratic networks of cronyism and nepotism) and the “DEI mafia,” President Trump is prioritizing his administration’s effort to bring America back from the brink of self-inflicted ruin and back onto the path of renewal. His focus is first and foremost on “Making America Great Again,” not running the world — hence his willingness to put America’s interests and its values first, to the surprise of many allies who came to perceive the American government as decoupled from the American people and thus easily swayed to subvert the interests and values of the people. President Trump is aware of America’s military supremacy, our unlimited imagination, and our enduring economic vitality, and is therefore aware of how great the world perceives America to be, which is the foundation of our enduring influence. It’s nice to have a President who is proud of America and willing to put America first again.
Critics of President Trump toss around the term “imperial” – and his own policy ideas on reclaiming the Panama Canal, annexing Greenland, Canada becoming our 51st state, or taking over Gaza and depopulating it certainly encourage discussion of a neo-imperial America and a President who governs like a king — but if you look at the substance of his policies, we see a President willing to truly put America and its people first, and letting the world beyond North America take inspiration — not orders — from us.
Image: AT via Magic Studio
This article was originally published at www.americanthinker.com
