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 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 under way.
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 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.
Magic Studio
Jesus Christ is King
