?BREAKING: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announces that the U.S. Military can now perform special ops against Mexican cartels, following President Trump’s designation of them as terrorist organizations.
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) January 31, 2025
“All options are on the table.”
pic.twitter.com/BnhJwkgMEp
NOW – White House: United States will impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and 10% on China, all effective tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/9M9tVyQzQM
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) January 31, 2025
Broadly speaking, the Gilded Age is back in American foreign policy.
WSJ:
“When Donald Trump won his sweeping victory in November, he received a mandate to put America first. In the realm of diplomacy, this means paying closer attention to our own neighborhood—the Western Hemisphere.
It’s no accident that my first trip abroad as secretary of state, to Central America on Friday, will keep me in the hemisphere. This is rare among secretaries of state over the past century. For many reasons, U.S. foreign policy has long focused on other regions while overlooking our own. As a result, we’ve let problems fester, missed opportunities and neglected partners. That ends now. …”
From the Civil War until World War I, the United States was the hegemon of the Western hemisphere. Americans didn’t fight in Eurasian wars until Woodrow Wilson and FDR constructed liberal internationalism and oriented our foreign policy toward Eurasia.
In this long period, America built the Panama Canal, bought Alaska and the U.S. Virgin Islands, seized control of Hawaii, nearly acquired the Dominican Republic, fought the Spanish-American War, acquired Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines and occupied Cuba. We invaded Mexico to capture the Mexican bandit Pancho Villa. We occupied Haiti.
This was the era of Smedley Butler, the United Fruit Company and the Banana Wars, gunboat diplomacy and dollar diplomacy. Liberals remember it as “isolationism” because the United States didn’t aspire to world domination and refused to join Wilson’s League of Nations. It was FDR who sold America on modern liberalism.
What would happen if the United States gave up on its “leadership role” in the so-called “rules-based international order” and ceded to other Eurasian powers their own spheres of influence? It would look pretty much like this.
War for Southern Independence sir. ? TGIF and cheers to the gilded age 2.0 and let’s hope it can help kickoff the balkanization of the US and a free and independent Dixie.