It’s the Spending, Stupid

The twenty-first century will be known as the Indo-Pacific century. It is already the scene of the most intense great power competition since the Cold War. China and the United States are battling for global preeminence, with the Indo-Pacific as the immediate theater of conflict. Open kinetic war is not inevitable. China would like to achieve global preeminence without fighting, as Sun Tzu counseled. The U.S. wants to maintain its global preeminence, also without fighting. Both sides likely recognize that war will benefit neither of them because in war things always go wrong. But that doesn’t mean that war is out of the question. Geopolitical competition can always drift into open conflict if leaders are not careful and flexible. It is best to be prepared. As George Washington said: “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.” Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our spring 2025 print magazine, which includes this article and others like it. Both the U.S. and China are making moves on the global chessboard, and President Donald Trump recognizes that moves to shore up our capability to defend the Americas will help to improve our ability to effectuate our Indo-Pacific strategy. Trump talks about acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal, in what some observers characterize as a “return” or the “rebirth” of the Monroe Doctrine. President Xi Jinping continues to seek “reunification” with Taiwan and to expand the geographical reach of the Belt and Road Initiative. Both great powers are using economic leverage to improve their geopolitical positions. China benefits from geography in the Indo-Pacific, just as we benefit from geography in the Western Hemisphere. The United States maintains its presence in the Indo-Pacific by alliances and sea and air power. China has built the world’s largest navy and is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal. The United States benefits from its alliances with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, and its improving relations with India and Vietnam.  China is increasingly challenging the Monroe Doctrine by improving diplomatic and economic relations with Central and South American countries. It is also growing closer to Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and looking to improve its position in the evolving scramble for minerals and trade in the Arctic Ocean. Chinese leaders are motivated by ideology (Marxism-Leninism-Maoism) and history (the Middle Kingdom, Tianxia, the century of humiliation). U.S. motivations alternate between Wilsonian idealism and geopolitical realism. Trump is a geopolitical realist.  American foreign policy has promised a “pivot” to Asia since the Obama years, but, aside from the last two years of Trump’s first term, the pivot was more rhetoric than reality. Trump will likely accelerate the pivot he started in 2018. His national security team is made up mostly of China hawks led by Michael Walz, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, John Ratcliffe, Peter Navarro, and Elbridge Colby.  Trump will likely shift resources from Europe (NATO) and the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific. Resolving the wars in Ukraine and Gaza will facilitate that shift, which is one motivation for doing so. Trump will likely avoid peripheral wars the way Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s in order to focus on the “main enemy” (China) and what Clausewitz called the “center of gravity” (the Indo-Pacific). Trump tried to reach out to Russia early in his first term, recognizing that better relations with the leaders in the Kremlin would improve our relative power position vis-à-vis China, but domestic politics (the Russia hoax) interfered with that effort. Expect Trump to revive that effort, especially if he can mediate an end to the Ukraine war. While “triangular diplomacy” Nixon-Kissinger style may not yet be possible, even slightly weakening the Sino-Russian “strategic partnership” makes geopolitical sense.  There is a “strategic logic” for the United States to acquire the Panama Canal and Greenland. Trump has signaled that he plans to reinvigorate U.S. enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine. Control of the Panama Canal, or at the very least lessening China’s influence there, is a first step. Efforts to improve relations with our Western Hemisphere neighbors will likely follow. Acquiring Greenland or at least acquiring more military bases on Greenland (we have a space force base there that was renamed to Pituffik Space Base as part of the Biden Pentagon’s DEI program) is another step.  The respected naval strategist James Holmes has already written about what he calls the “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.” Holmes writes that there is a “strategic logic” for the United States to acquire the Panama Canal and Greenland. “Greenland fronts on the Arctic, an emerging theater of strategic competition,” Holmes explains, “while abutting the Greenland-Iceland-U.K. gap, Russia’s access to the North Atlantic.” Greenland and the Arctic have plenty of critical minerals, Holmes continues, and “China has been nosing around for mining rights along with its other activities as a self-proclaimed ‘near-Arctic state.’” And if China were to shut the Panama Canal in times of war, it would make it more difficult for the United States to send warships and material to the Indo-Pacific theater. “Control of the two sites,” Holmes writes, “would bolster strategic defense of the Americas,” which is what the Monroe Doctrine is all about. Although named after the president who announced it in a message to Congress on December 2, 1823, the Monroe Doctrine was the brainchild of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. The Monroe Doctrine resulted from Adams’ concern that the European Holy Alliance would attempt by force and/or diplomacy to restore Spain’s and Portugal’s former colonies in the Americas to the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. In July 1823, Adams, with Monroe’s approval, summoned Russian minister Baron von Tuyll to the State Department, where he told him that the “American continents are no longer subjects for any new European colonial establishments.” Mindful of the inadequacies of the U.S. Navy, Adams consulted with British officials whose interests coincided with America’s on this issue. Monroe reached out to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who concurred that it was essential to get Great Britain on our side to help enforce such a policy.  Adams prepared a draft on the foreign policy portion of the president’s annual message to Congress. It was subsequently discussed at a Cabinet meeting, where Adams stated that the president would in a “moderate and conciliatory manner but with a firm and determined spirit … declare our expectation and hope that the European powers will … abstain from the attempt to spread their principles in the American hemisphere or to subject by force any part of these continents to their will.” As Adams biographer Randall Woods notes, “Here was the heart of what would become known as the Monroe Doctrine.”  Thereafter, the Monroe Doctrine evolved into a core principle of American foreign policy as presidents from James Polk to Andrew Johnson to Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt to John Kennedy to Ronald Reagan periodically invoked the Monroe Doctrine to support U.S. diplomatic and military actions. Yet the Obama administration declared in 2013 that the Monroe Doctrine was “dead,” which was an invitation to outside powers like China to gain footholds in the Western Hemisphere, and a signal to countries in the Western Hemisphere that they would suffer no backlash for doing business with America’s enemies. The roots of Obama’s abandonment of the Monroe Doctrine can be found in the widely accepted idea that China’s economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping would translate into political reforms that would enable China to join the so-called “rules-based international order.” This was a bipartisan error that led to China’s growing economic influence in Latin America. But China’s inroads in Latin America increased dramatically with the Belt and Road Initiative, which began in 2013, the very year that Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, announced the end of the Monroe Doctrine. President Xi Jinping has visited the region five times since 2013, and eight Latin American presidents visited China in 2023. China has entered into “comprehensive strategic partnerships” with Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Ecuador. But it is China’s growing influence in Panama that poses the greatest national security threat to the United States in Latin America. Panama was the first Latin American country to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative. U.S. Southern Command has warned that China’s construction of ports on both sides of the Panama Canal will enable China to readily shift its use from civilian to military purposes. In a recent article, John Yoo and Robert Delahunty write that “[e]ffective Chinese control of the Canal, even in peacetime, would be seriously detrimental to the US defense posture and threatening to our economy.” In wartime, it would inhibit our navy’s ability to move ships between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. And anything that inhibits the movement of our warships through the canal would negatively affect our ability to achieve victory in a conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific.  Greenland, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark, is situated in the northern part of the Western Hemisphere. It is geographically an island extension of the North American continent. America’s interest in Greenland dates back at least to 1868 when Secretary of State William Seward, after successfully purchasing Alaska from Russia, shifted his focus to Greenland. During World War II, after Germany took control of Denmark, the United States secured military base rights on the island and gained access to weather stations and important minerals for the war effort. During the Cold War, U.S. officials viewed Greenland as a strategic post for denying Soviet warships access to the Americas. This naval chokepoint was known as the Greenland–Iceland–U.K. gap.  In the twenty-first century, Greenland’s importance to U.S. security has increased as the Arctic Ocean warms, creating a new, if limited, maritime highway (the famed Northwest Passage) and enabling access to natural resources. The Arctic has vast oil and natural gas deposits. Russia’s lengthy Arctic coast and its growing fleet of icebreakers give it an edge in the Arctic geopolitical competition. In 2018, China declared itself a “near Arctic” power that intended to forge a “Polar Silk Road” as part of the Belt and Road Initiative. A recent RAND study noted that in the Arctic, Russia and China “are operating in increasingly close proximity to North America.” And the Sino-Russian Arctic partnership encompasses both economic and military cooperation. The RAND study suggests that this is an area where the United States can exploit potential rifts between China and Russia.  James Holmes is not the only naval strategist who thinks Greenland is important to U.S. national security. Former NATO Supreme Commander retired Admiral James Stavridis, no fan of Donald Trump, recently said that Greenland is a “strategic goldmine for the United States.” Stavridis noted that Greenland “sits at the very top of the North Atlantic. It protects approaches to our own country … It’s geographically very important. It’s full of strategic minerals, rare earth, probably a lot of gold.”  In the end, the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine is about securing the Western Hemisphere from potential adversaries, especially China. Just over two hundred years ago, President James Monroe and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams proposed to erect a geopolitical fence around the Western Hemisphere, and it was that geopolitical fence (once we acquired sufficient naval power to support it) that enabled the United States to intervene in two World Wars and to wage a successful Cold War in the twentieth century. China’s challenge in the Indo-Pacific comes at a time when Adams’ fence is rotting away due to bad decisions (the Carter administration’s ceding of the Panama Canal to Panama), wishful thinking (that China would become a stakeholder in the rules-based international order), and the public abandonment of the Monroe Doctrine by the Obama administration. Trump’s proposed reinvigoration of the Monroe Doctrine is, in the words of two legal/national security experts, “returning to one of the great principles of American foreign policy.” Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our spring 2025 print magazine. The post Trump’s Reinvigoration of the Monroe Doctrine Informs His Turn to Greenland appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

It’s graduation season. A time when caps fly, parents cry, and students briefly feel like the world is theirs — even if the real world couldn’t care less how they feel. At Fordham University this year, something extraordinary happened. Out walked Jimmy Fallon — not to give a speech, but to DJ. Sort of. “I’ve never done this before,” he joked to the crowd. “Can I just plug in my phone?” They laughed. Loudly. The good kind of laughter — the kind that’s free, not forced. He queued up “Blinding Lights” by The Weeknd, and just like that, the room transformed. In truth, the roof almost came off the building. Then the real magic happened. Out of nowhere, The Weeknd himself — real name Abel Tesfaye, arguably the biggest pop star on the planet — walked onto the stage. The look on the students’ faces? Sheer, unfiltered joy. Jaws dropped. Eyes lit up. People giggled uncontrollably, screamed like they never screamed before. (RELATED: David Brooks Still Can’t Say the Word ‘God’) Now, what’s my point? That moment mattered. Not because of who was onstage, but because of what it cut through. We live in a culture so poisoned by cynicism, politics, and digital sneering that something as simple as a surprise DJ set now feels like an act of rebellion. These are vitriolic times, where joy feels suspect, and neutrality is treated like betrayal. It’s become fashionable to hate on joy. To view everything, especially someone like Jimmy Fallon, through a lens of suspicion. Too mainstream. Too safe. Too silly. He doesn’t seethe like Colbert or John Oliver. He doesn’t sermonize like Kimmel. Unlike Seth Meyers, he doesn’t carry himself like an uptight DNC press secretary. Fallon made the conscious choice not to wade into the nightly low-blow politics that so many of his peers bathe in. Yes, he had Trump on his show. Yes, he ruffled his hair. And yes, he pokes fun at politicians. But not in a mean, divisive way. Not in the way that tells half the country they’re beneath laughter. Although no late-night host today holds a candle to Conan, who mastered the art of being absurd, brilliant, and subversive without ever being cruel, Fallon is the closest we’ve got when it comes to just being funny. (RELATED: The Politics of Comedy) Granted, Fallon’s brand of joy might be over-the-top, sometimes goofy, maybe even cloying to the irony-addled. But those subway sing-alongs? Those college pop-ins? The way he shows up with Ed Sheeran and busks in the middle of New York for no reason other than to see people smile? That’s not fake. That’s not manufactured. That’s real. The guy’s not trying to save the Republic — he’s just trying to remind people that it feels good to smile. Fallon isn’t dangerous. He’s not trying to dismantle institutions. He’s not waging war on MAGA. He’s not patronizing viewers, nor is he offering “edgy” social critiques. He’s just out here reminding us how to laugh like children. And if that bothers people, maybe the problem isn’t Fallon. It’s us. It’s the algorithm that rewards contempt. The moral purists who can’t smile without checking if it’s politically coherent. The performative left and the culture war right, both obsessed with being offended — for different reasons, but with equally dead eyes. We talk endlessly about unity, but we forget what it feels like. For a brief moment on a college campus, hundreds of people were completely united — not by ideology, not by grievance, but by a shared thrill. A why-is-this-happening surge of joy that didn’t need to be explained, defended, or dissected. That’s rare now. Far rarer than it should be. Yes, there are problems. Wokeness, backlash to wokeness, political theater, culture wars, spiraling debt, algorithmic derangement. But not everything needs to be viewed through that rotten lens. Strip away the tribalism, and most people, left, right, in between, are far more alike than unlike. We want safety, purpose, connection. We want to be surprised, delighted, moved. We want The Weeknd to crash our graduation. We want to laugh like a giddy toddler. We want to throw our heads back and forget about the outside world for a few minutes. And if that means Jimmy Fallon plugs in his phone and plays the same song a thousand DJs have played before, good. That’s the point. It’s familiar. It’s fun. It’s human. We’re told every day that we’re divided beyond repair. That we hate each other. That the lines are drawn, the tribes are fixed, and the other side is not just wrong, but dangerous. That there’s no common ground left, no language we all still speak. But then something like this happens, a moment of unfiltered fun, completely unscripted, and it reminds us: that’s not entirely true. Joy still works. It still hits like lightning. It still pulls people out of their silos, even if only for a song. These moments don’t fix everything. But they remind us there’s still something underneath the noise worth protecting. Something human. The roof can still come off. We just have to stop staring at the walls long enough to notice. READ MORE from John Mac Ghlionn: Pope Leo Is Tweeting David Brooks Still Can’t Say the Word ‘God’ Who’s Afraid of Christian Nationalism? The post Confessions of a Jimmy Fallon Fan appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

As of Friday, the United States is no longer a member of the elite club of top-tier debtors. Credit rating agency Moody’s has delivered its verdict: the U.S. government’s credit score has been downgraded from AAA to AA1. What’s most remarkable is not the downgrade itself, but the timing. First, a basic principle: There’s no such thing as a bad tax cut. Every dollar pried from the grip of the state and returned to the productive economy is a win for liberty. The Leviathan loses strength; the domain of freedom expands. It doesn’t matter where the state is forced to retreat, as long as it does. Tax Cuts: Big and Beautiful Much has been said lately about the American tax reform — Donald Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill.” To liberty-minded ears, this alliteration sounds like a theme from Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” — the first meaningful pushback against the ever-growing hypertrophic state. In essence, the proposed law would reduce the tax burden on corporations and households by $4.5 trillion over the next 10 years — more than Germany’s entire GDP. At the same time, federal spending would be trimmed by $2 trillion through budget cuts. (RELATED: Budget Hawks v. Tax Cutters: The Republican Dilemma) That leaves a gap of $2.5 trillion. Trump’s team intends to close it with tariff revenue. If the U.S. government succeeds in establishing a global baseline tariff of 10 percent on exports to the U.S., the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates this could generate precisely that $2.5 trillion over the next decade. Crude as the math may be, it points in a clear direction: a downsized public sector, and a private sector set free to breathe and grow. U.S. Industry Reboots Let’s set aside the fact that, even now, the U.S. is aggressively cutting taxes and deregulating to rebuild its decimated industrial base. Today, manufacturing accounts for just 10 percent of GDP. But its revival — driven by repatriation of capital and production — could soon provide Washington with the fiscal space it desperately needs to tame its ballooning national debt. (RELATED: Extending Tax Cut Provisions is Key for Manufacturers) This context also gives meaning to Trump’s recent trip to the Middle East. Ostensibly an economic charm offensive, it was also a shrewd financial maneuver. In Riyadh, Doha, and Abu Dhabi, the Trump administration secured commitments from some of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds to invest heavily in U.S. infrastructure and tech sectors. Saudi Arabia alone pledged $600 billion, alongside a $142 billion arms deal. Qatar and the UAE also promised significant investments — not just as passive shareholders, but as geopolitically motivated allies of the United States. This capital influx serves a dual purpose: It eases the federal government’s short-term budget constraints by financing infrastructure without adding debt. At the same time, it strengthens the geopolitical tether between authoritarian Gulf states and the U.S. economy — just as China tries to lure them into long-term dependency via its Belt and Road Initiative. (RELATED: President Trump Bonds With Saudi Arabia. Plane Not Required.) Discord From Wall Street But as always, events in life unfold with a grain of salt. While Trump was still in Doha, a bombshell hit New York: Moody’s downgraded U.S. sovereign debt from AAA to AA1, citing rising debt and soaring deficits. For the first time since 1949, the U.S. no longer holds a top rating from all three major rating agencies. What this means for the foundations of the world markets will be discussed elsewhere in due course. The substance of the criticism is hard to dispute. With federal debt nearing 120 percent of GDP and growing distress in the bond market, urgent action is clearly needed. Still, one might ask why Moody’s waited so long. Fitch and Standard & Poor’s downgraded the U.S. in 2011 and 2023, respectively. And what about the Biden administration’s repeated deficits exceeding 8 percent of GDP? Were those not sufficient grounds for reassessment? Tax Reform in Limbo The White House responded with outrage, calling Moody’s decision politically motivated — especially since it coincided with a budget committee vote that temporarily blocked Trump’s tax bill. The vote, 16 to 21 against, fueled speculation that opposition may be forming within the GOP itself. Is this a coordinated effort to sabotage Trump’s reform ahead of the midterms? Objections center largely on proposed cuts to Medicaid and food assistance (SNAP), which some Republicans fear could cost them reelection. With the midterms less than 18 months away, few are willing to touch politically sensitive programs. Trump didn’t mince words: “STOP TALKING, AND GET IT DONE,” he wrote in all caps on Truth Social. The goal is to pass the bill by July 4. His warning appears to have worked: By Sunday, after intense intra-party negotiations, the House Budget Committee reversed course, approving the bill by a narrow 17-16 vote. Four Republicans flipped. A compromise appears to have been reached — most likely involving reductions to green energy subsidies. A full House vote is expected later this week. Failure Is Not an Option Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” marks the first serious attempt by a major economy to reverse the decades-long trend of an expanding state. Step back, and you see what’s truly at stake: not just fiscal limits, but narrative dominance. Trump is challenging a vast political machine that has created powerful incentives for an ever-growing number of stakeholders to protect and expand the state’s role. In most Western democracies, the growing public sector reflects the self-reinforcing interests of welfare recipients, subsidy-hunters, and a bloated bureaucracy. The state has become a self-replicating organism — redistributing wealth while bleeding the private sector dry. In launching this reform, Trump has entered the arena with a Hydra. In ancient myth, Heracles cut off its heads and burned the stumps to prevent regrowth. If Trump fails, bond markets may exact their own punishment, pushing unreformed states into chaos. Let’s hope the pivot toward fiscal sanity succeeds — before it’s too late. READ MORE from Thomas Kolbe: German Chancellor Calls for ‘War Readiness’ German Decline: A Warning From Across the Atlantic Trump Exposes Fractures in the Global Order The post America Loses Top Credit Rating appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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The Council of Nicaea, the First Ecumenical Council of the ancient and undivided Catholic Church, bequeathed to the world far more than the one universally accepted creed in Christian history, though that is no small feat. Continue Reading...