The Greatest (Geo-Political) Showman’s ‘Inside Out’ Political Solution

Alastair Crooke, 30 January 2025

How to do the impossible? America is instinctively an expansionist power, needing new fields to conquer; new financial horizons to master and to exploit. The US is built that way. Always was.

But -- if you are Trump, wanting to withdraw from wars on the empire's periphery, yet nonetheless wanting too, to cast a shiny image of a muscular America expanding and leading global politics and finance -- how to do it?

Well, President Trump -- ever the showman -- has a solution. Disdain the now-discredited intellectual ideology of muscular American global hegemony; suggest rather, that these earlier ‘forever wars’ should never really have been ‘our wars’; and, as Alon Mizrahi has advanced and suggested, set about re-colonising that which was already colonised: Canada, Greenland, Panama -- and Europe too, of course.

America thus will be bigger. Act with decisive muscularity (i.e. as in Colombia); make a big ‘show’ of things; but at the same time, shrink the mainstream US security interest to centre on the Western Hemisphere. As Trump keeps observing, Americans live in the ‘Western Hemisphere’, not in the Middle East or elsewhere.

Trump thus attempts to detach from the American expansionist war periphery -- ‘the outside’ -- to proclaim that the ‘inside’ (i.e. the western hemisphere’s sphere), has become bigger and is unquestionably American. And that is what matters.