Trump's Strategy

An interesting piece at The Hill, authored by Scott Taylor, explains Trump's overall strategy. In a nutshell:

    The post-1945 liberal international order is gone. When the Napoleonic order, the Victorian order and the colonial order were replaced, it was never effected by a smooth baton-transfer. Rather, conflict, chaos, and dominance of world powers created the new rules. The American-led post World War Two order produced the longest peace in modern history without great power conflict. The rules on trade, finance, military alliances and nuclear deterrence held because the referee, America, held the biggest stick and the credibility to use it.

    But that order, already fraying for decades, has now fully dissolved. Trump didn’t destroy it — rather, he came to power because it was already over.

    The question before us now is not whether a new order will arise — one always must. The question is who will write its rules. Trump arrived at the world order’s dissolution as a willing and decisive actor, taking the steps of a nation that intends to write the next world order the same way it wrote the last one. If his actions seem confusing, just consider that every single one of his moves over the last year has been about making sure America is the one holding the pen.    

He's probably correct that the post-WWII liberal international order is over. But that itself was a transitional stage between the European-based world order before WWII and ... whatever is coming. When the U.S. stepped in during WWII and after, it still represented Western Civilization  as a member of the Anglosphere even if it not exactly European. But now what is the U.S.? We are late-stage Rome overrun by peoples from beyond our borders and ruled over by a cosmopolitan elite that have no interest in preserving either the culture or the native peoples. To the Ruling Class, we are interchangeable economic units. Can a unified culture come out of that? Perhaps, but I think not.