President Trump Delivers Remarks at Republican Governors Association – February 20, 2025.
At LewRockwell.com, Karen Kwiatkowski analyzes President Donald Trump’s foreign policy actions and suggests that his view of peace stems from ownership, not armies. She notes Frederic Bastiat’s notion that “When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will,” and suggests Trump’s foreign policy is aligned with that notion despite his tariffs. She writes:
Donald Trump declared a triumphalist vision and a golden age for the United States this week. Yet, had it been an autopsy, the Democratic side of the chamber presented like a giant deflated left lung with just a touch of pink.
Trump has known for many years that the United States is not healthy, nor on a healthy track. “America is Back!” is aspirational, but it takes more than a good slogan to coax, push, and inspire an over-stressed, tired, broke-ass nation to peace and prosperity.
With his New York bluntness occasionally revealing a soft heart, Trump makes me think of Dr. Ron Paul – the kindest and wisest of men, with his fist cheerfully raised at the deep state for the past 50 years. Trump’s aim – to align America’s actions and principles with fairness, prosperity and peace – is Paulian. Both men share an energetic and uncontrived political radicalism in support of this vision. I don’t know if God saved Trump from a deep state bullet for a higher purpose in 2025, as he has mentioned. I do know that the limited government mantra that Ron Paul revived over 40 years ago, from the old anti-war Right, is the reason we have a populist President today, who wants to end wars, shrink the bureaucracy, and abandon serfdom to the state.
Trump’s foreign policy message to Congress was mainly about tariffs, and an incipient peace in Ukraine. Trump understands the existent Russian victory, he wants organic elections in Ukraine, and the end of the Zelensky era and NATO expansion. Trump’s approach is pragmatic, realistic, popular – and radical only because it simultaneously breaks up the revenue stream, the narrative, and the credibility of the corrupt oligarchies of Europe and America.
Trump mentioned another Republican president, economic protectionist and territorial expansionist William McKinley, first elected in 1896. Trump admires McKinley, and McKinley’s role in the 1896 Republican Party resurgence. Thomas DiLorenzo recently observed, “…the Republican party by that time stood for imperialism, emboldened by its conquest of the South and its campaign of genocide against the Plains Indians from 1865-1890.” McKinley, incidentally, was also responsible for the 1900 Gold Standard Act, making all issued paper dollars redeemable in gold, an act abrogated by FDR in 1933.
It is not hard to see Trump as more McKinley, and less Paul. Yet, despite his affection for tariffs and mercantilism, Trump seems to have simultaneously and schizophrenically internalized the opposing idea that “if goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.”
Trump’s explanation of his rare earth deal with Ukraine is as much Bastiat as it is crony imperialist McKinley. McKinley learned economics “as an Army supply officer in Lincoln’s army.” Trump learned economics from his successful father, and the rough and tumble New York real estate and construction world. McKinley launched troops to take Hawaii, to finish off the Plains Indians, and subdue the Philippines; Trump believes “if we are economically in Ukraine, it is more a deterrent of Russian or NATO violence [than a standing army would ever be].” To be fair, Trump’s “shared investment” in Ukrainian “rare earths” after a 2014 US-fomented coup and civil war reeks of American hypocrisy, disaster state-capitalism, and old style imperialism.
And yet, Trump implied he was late to Congress on Wednesday because he was waiting for confirmation that a Blackrock-led consortium had purchased two ports on both sides of the Panama Canal. Like it or not, Trump sees an American investment presence – American “ownership” as a healthy substitute for western armies, whether in Ukraine, in Panama, in Greenland, or in Gaza. He sees American “ownership” as a way to reduce military expenditures structurally and substantially, while enriching all sides.
Read more here.
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