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Trump's threats of war, sanctions and promises to make America great again could be dismissed as the ranting of an eccentric politician. But this isn't all about Trump. What he advocates is representative of much of the US elite.
The president and his generation of Americans grew up in a world where the USA was the greatest superpower in human history. It was not just their vast arsenal of nuclear weapons and their war machine but, in 1945,
around 50 percent of the entire world's economy was in the United States of America, with
Britain and the
USSR hobbling along with around 10 percent each. America dwarfed the power that the British empire had in the 19th century.
In the years that followed, America would intervene all over the world, not to spread democracy, but to overthrow governments that were not working in America's commercial interests. Whether it was the coup that removed the government of Iran in 1953 and brought back the dictatorship of the Shah; or the military coup in Brazil in 1964 that overthrew a socialist, democratically elected government; or the dozens of other coups around the world, America crushed any opposition to its economic interests.
Comment: It's safe to say at this point in US politics that if a US president doesn't automatically accept the 'deep state' running things, then they are literally locked out of foreign policy. Trump's foreign policy tweets and statements like the above just show that he has accepted this deal. This explains why he sounds increasingly crazy on foreign affairs. He really does have no idea what's going on at specific fronts on the empire's 'frontier', and he couldn't care less.
So from now on, Trump is president of the United States, but not of US foreign policy, which he learns about after the fact like the rest of us.