Bill Koutalianos

Brandon Weichert: ‘The US🇺🇸 was NOT supposed to be an adventurous IMPERIAL POWER going abroad in search of monsters to destroy.’ ‘The reason I wrote the book is because last year, the Trump administration announced in their National Security Strategy memo and then again in their National Defense Strategy memo: judge us by the wars we don’t fight, not the wars we do fight. That’s what they said. And we were going to be focusing, they said, on the Western Hemisphere. Now, obviously, the Donroe Doctrine is not what I had in mind, but the idea that we were going to be doing Western Hemispheric defence on top of focusing on domestic issues here in the United States, that was what I thought was the Trump agenda, the Trump doctrine, if you will. But then by February 28th, as you know, the whole thing changed. It’s as if the President didn’t even read his National Security Strategy memo. So I felt compelled to write a book that reminded readers why we are not supposed to be this expeditionary, adventurous imperial power, going abroad in search of monsters to destroy, as John Quincy Adams once famously said, and we are supposed to be focused much closer to home. And now it’s a tripolar system internationally, trending multipolar. You could already say it is multipolar, but really there’s three main powers right now that are military and economic, and that’s the United States, China, and Russia. We need to have a better strategy than the one we’ve been using since 1991, because that one was predicated on hegemony. Well, we can’t be a hegemon anymore. We have spheres of influence, and we’re going to need to enforce the spheres of influence. China’s doing that in their part of the world. Russia’s doing that in their part of the world. We haven’t been doing it in our part of the world. And the key thing here is when I say enforce the sphere of influence, it’s not military first. It’s not send CIA paramilitaries to a country we don’t like in Latin America and knock off the country. The whole currency of the realm in 21st century international affairs is geoeconomics. It’s trade. First and foremost, it’s the economy, and so you have to be able to make your first point of contact in terms of foreign policy the economic front. The United States used to be good at this. This was what the founders wanted us to do. I quote George Washington effusively in the book. This goes back to the founding, a commercial republic, and that’s what we need to go back to. And unfortunately, under this President, we’ve lost sight of that completely.’ —@WeTheBrandon, Author of ‘Fortress Americas: A New Monroe Doctrine’ Watch the full interview in the quoted post below 👇