America has five adversaries of significance: The People’s Republic of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela.
In his first year, President Trump crushed Iran’s nuclear weapons program by ordering the U.S. military to execute Operation Midnight Hammer, which it did with extraordinary precision and success. At the same time, Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign and the sanctions on Iran’s oil exports have devastated the Iranian economy because those sanctions smashed the country’s currency — the rial — and hyper-inflation within Iran has been the result. As the people of Iran once again take to the streets in protest over their impoverishment, the president has warned the Iranian dictator Ayatollah Khamenei that this time the mullahs are not enjoying the appeasement policies of former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Trump has told the Iranian tyrant he will act to protect the Iranian people if Khamenei or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps or the paramilitary Basij take up their weapons and begin mowing down civilians.
That threat sounded even more ominous after Midnight Hammer and especially so in these days following the extraordinary Operation Absolute Resolve, which saw the president dispatch the American military to arrest Nicolas Maduro and his wife and brought them to the U.S. where they now sit in a Brooklyn jail awaiting trial. The display of American military might was nothing short of dazzling and rest assured all of our enemies noted it.
The headless Maduro regime must now change its ways or have them changed for it via the embargo on its oil and the consequent collapse of its economy. Cuban “security forces” did not protect Maduro and they can’t protect the rest of his corrupt and criminal regime. It will change or be changed by its own people with an assist from America. As with Iran, so with Venezuela: Trump has been clear on the demand, open to productive negotiations, but he holds the enormous force of the American military in his hand, which he is willing to use in very precise ways.
Russia is seeing its future destroyed on the front lines in Ukraine. It is losing tens of thousands of men every month as the value of its oil it exports plummets and future American oil production is priced into the falling cost around the world. Putin is running out of men and money. Trump has offered him a way out. Putin has thus far refused to take it. The dazzling double strikes in Iran and Venezuela may finally work to bring Putin to reality. The oligarchs around Putin know the real score as well.
Which brings us to the People’s Republic of China and its client state North Korea. Xi Jinping is the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (“CCP”), and while he had an open field on which to run while Biden was president, Jinping now sees a completely different reality facing him.
The Iranian and Venezuelan oil exports of various types on which he and the CCP depend are imperiled. China has discovered vast reserves of oil and natural gas, but it will take years if not decades to develop it. Right now Jinping needs the oil over which America has exerted de facto control. China’s primary allies in the Middle East and South America have been pushed back on their heels. In less than a year, President Trump has put General Secretary Jinping into a very different strategic situation than that which existed a year ago.
Would Jinping like to absorb Taiwan? Of course. Dare he invade it given the extraordinary consequences that would follow a lurch to grab the island that contributes so much to the Chinese and world economy? Could Jinping survive the chaos that would create?
Trump and the American military have fundamentally remade the world in less than a year. The president has three more to go with a young team led by Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in the Executive Branch along with Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-WY), and Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and their colleagues in the Senate plus Speaker Mike Johnson and the GOP leadership team in the House. Trump is the opposite of a traditional second-term lame duck U.S. president. He’s rewritten the playbook of American politics.
This will come as news to many Americans blinkered by the almost unbelievable levels of hostility to Trump and his allies in the legacy media.
The degree of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” among legacy media has disabled their collective ability to understand basic American national security interests and the stability of the West. They fundamentally don’t “get it” and likely never will.
There are big differences between ignorance, stupidity, and duplicity. The audience for American media can’t read minds so they don’t know the motives of the would-be narrative-makers in the legacy media. The audience can and does, however, understand reflexive anti-Trump “questions” from anchors, columns from pundits, and posts by the Left and bots. They know it adds up to an anti-American “resting face” in legacy media, and the result is that the audience has already fled in large numbers and is now fleeing in larger ones.
The Carter-Clinton-Obama-Biden legacy in national security matters is a long litany of massive strategic failures. The GOP presidents have not always succeeded in their missions but they have succeeded sometimes and at least have always tried to defend the national interest and use military force when necessary to do so, which is what President Trump did, again, this past weekend. Bravo for him and his team.
THE MILITARY’S STAGGERING COMPETENCE UNDER TRUMP
Trump’s ordering the killing of the head of Iran’s IRGC’s Qasem Soleimani and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the rapid destruction of ISIS in his first term and now devastating Iran’s nuclear weapons program and taking many steps to turning the future of Venezuela toward free, fair, and frequent elections and free markets in his second are all unqualified goods. So too has been the president’s rapid lockdown of the southern border.
President Trump’s first year back in the Oval has seen success after success and fundamentally strengthened the U.S.’s position in the world. If your sources for news don’t report that, or worse, even understand it, find different sources of news. They are broken.
