The U.S. Regime Just Declared Itself an Axis Power
The money wranglers are perfectly happy turning the world into an axis of authoritarian powers
In December 2024, I discussed how the American presidential election began America’s transition into an Axis power for the 21st Century (see Notes). There, I argued that Russian and Chinese political pundits were eager for a Trump presidency so that a new world order could be established.
In this new world order, Russia would have one zone of influence, China another, and the United States a third. An uneasy truce would remain among the three nations, if not a formal alliance between one or more of them. The common thread between all three nations would be authoritarianism and regional empires.
Late last week, about a year later, the Trump regime codified the transition by releasing a foreign policy manifesto in the dark of night called the “National Security Strategy.”
(I refer to it henceforth as the NSS, since we know Kegsbreath likes to use the letters “SS” wherever possible.1)

As with almost everything Trump, conservative Republicans broadcast the plans outlined in the NSS through Project 2025 before the election.
Power User Tip: If you want to anticipate the next awful move from the regime, read the Project 2025 document in its entirety. Or better yet, subscribe to Ruminato, since I’ve already read most of the 900+ page tome from hell.
Unlike Project 2025, the NSS is a formal document of the United States government signed with the pubic hair signature of the mad clown:
The document, not written by the illiterate mad clown, is designed to stand as a guidepost for U.S. foreign and security policy moving forward. The full document, stored on government servers (for now — you never know with these guys), can be found here (PDF).
Let’s check out a few highlights of the document and then, when appropriate, reference some of the foreign policy escapades we’ve seen that should have warned us something like this was coming.
1. End the Western Alliance
, Substack’s resident historian, reports the following in her December 5 entry:Today, Gram Slattery and Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters reported that Pentagon officials this week told European diplomats in Washington, D.C., that the U.S. wants Europe to take over most of NATO’s defense capabilities by 2027.2
The catalyst for this stems from a directive from Project 2025 (page 94):
“Transform NATO so that U.S. allies are capable of fielding the great majority of the conventional forces required to deter Russia while relying on the United States primarily for our nuclear deterrent, and select other capabilities while reducing the U.S. force posture in Europe.”
I’ve read much of Project 2025, so I’m not surprised by any of this, just like I haven’t been surprised by any other of the many attacks on our senses.3
The NSS formalizes the transition away from NATO, unsurprisingly, in terms right out of the handbook Stephen Miller created one day, sitting on the pooper while chanting words from Mein Kampf:
Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies. Many of these nations are currently doubling down on their present path. We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation…
…Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.
Look at it this way, loyal readers, this means we aren’t really disengaging from Europe. We’re disengaging from Africa! Praise the Lord!
The document formally codifies “the great white replacement theory” with a new term, “civilizational erasure,” which it says lies in Europe’s immediate future because it is being invaded by the filthy hordes from the Middle East and Africa.
If you’re not familiar with “the great white replacement theory,” you’re in for a treat. Originating in France, it’s the fear that white people are being replaced worldwide by hordes of people with a tad higher concentration of melanin in their skin. Honestly, I’d pay good money (if I had any) to inject some eumelanin into my white, blotchy, adult-acne riddled unhealthy skin. I’m not sure where the attraction to unhealthy-looking skin comes from.
Why do these people want to look like zombies or vampires? I guess that’s another topic.
What’s even more fun about this is that believers in the theory think the plot been orchestrated by Jewish and leftist cabals somewhere. (“We support Israel with an almost obsessive intensity, but never forget… they’re Jews! “).
The NSS document leads off its policy proposals with subservience to the mad clown’s puppeteer, Vlad Putin:
Our broad policy for Europe should prioritize:
Reestablishing conditions of stability within Europe and strategic stability with Russia;
That’s the first bullet point.
Vlad must have an absolute treasure trove of Epstein goodies tucked away in his Kremlin basement.
The document formalizes what I talked about in my December article and what Heather Cox Richardson refers to as “spheres of influence,” where the big powers split the world into chunks that each one dominates. For this reason, for example, the Trump regime is fine leaving the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Japan to fend for themselves because American policy now cedes that sphere of influence to China.
The same, ultimately, is true with Europe, which, like in a bad game of Risk, goes to Russia.
This is an old power politics game played by the likes of Hans Morgenthau, a realpolitik foreign policy strategist from the Cold War years whose usefulness died after World War Two. Eventually, this kind of thinking usually leads to a major war or three.
Morgenthau believed that every country yearns for imperialism of some kind, and the entire world chessboard involves competition among the best players in the game. Even if they know they can’t attain imperialistic aims with military muscle, weaker nations play the game, too, using tools like cultural imperialism, where the culture of one nation rubs off on a neighbor (“How was your morning breakfast taco, honey?”).4
Cultural imperialism is, of course, also practiced by the big players, with hip hop blaring out of Moscow nightclubs and Taylor Swift on every Spotify playlist in Shanghai.
There’s commercial imperialism, too, with, for example, a Starbucks or McDonald’s in every nation’s capital.
As the world’s international political system matured, the hegemony of Morgenthau’s approach to foreign relations was replaced to a great extent by the writings of Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, who, to make a long story short, suggested that interdependence gave us a better chance at peace than power politics in a nuclear-tipped world. So instead of the domino of Vietnam, we were given China and its transition from a peasant economy to 700 million middle-class wage earners in the world’s largest car market.
Thus, Nixon played ping pong with China, and now the two nations face mutually assured destruction not by nukes, but by the kind of conflict that would end their mutually beneficial supply chains, along with their economies, which have deep and complex dependencies with each other. It’s worth noting here that the Trump regime aims to do precisely that by declaring China an enemy before leaving its sphere of influence.
The NSS document rattles off a few bullet points about leaving the Western alliance, which has always been a goal of the mad clown, even before his brain turned into the equivalent of rotten eggs. The document spells out the desire to end the alliance by:
Ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance;
This gives cover to Russia as the mad clown tries to cede Ukrainian territory to Putin and acquiesce to Putin’s demand that Ukraine remain apart from NATO.
The rest of the document’s treatment of Europe borders on wild hysteria that considers its nations in league with barbarian hordes from the south to persecute those with lower concentrations of melanin. Maybe, the document posits, we should just let the process complete and get the hell out of there so we can focus on disappearing darker-skinned people in our own country.
2. Kick around South America, like any good empire should
Remember the Monroe Doctrine? If you’re over a certain age (they no longer seem to teach history in schools), you’ll recall that was when the U.S. told the world to keep its filthy mittens out of other countries in the Western Hemisphere. Foreign navies were forbidden as a matter of U.S. policy.
Back when President James Monroe announced it in 1823, the U.S. didn’t have much capacity for enforcing its edict. Things change, of course, and the U.S. became the most powerful nation on earth, with the possible exception of the Cayman Islands, where all the tax-dodging oligarchs hide their wealth and hoard their kiddie trafficking cash.
The NSS adds a kicker to the Monroe Doctrine: We’re taking over. And we are going to extract every mineral resource we can out of you while we do it. If you think Kegsbreath was having fun blowing away and dismembering people in Caribbean fishing boats and pleasure craft before, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
The Amazon forests await.
The NSS document says:
The U.S. Government will identify strategic acquisition and investment opportunities for American companies in the region and present these opportunities for assessment by every U.S. Government financing program, including but not limited to those within the Departments of State, War, and Energy; the Small Business Administration; the International Development Finance Corporation; the Export-Import Bank; and the Millennium Challenge Corporation. We should also partner with regional governments and businesses to build scalable and resilient energy infrastructure, invest in critical mineral access, and harden existing and future cyber communications networks that take full advantage of American encryption and security potential. The aforementioned U.S. Government entities should be used to finance some of the costs of purchasing U.S. goods abroad.”
As pundits like to say, there’s a lot to unpack here. The TL;DR version of the unpacking effort is that the U.S. is determined to leverage every government agency at its disposal, whether it’s been sabotaged and gutted by DOGE and Russell Vought or not, to extract every ounce of mineral wealth it can find in South America.
There’s a lot of mineral wealth south of the border, including under the Amazon forest canopy. There are also massive oil fields at the bottom of an increasingly fragile ocean off the South American coast. The NSS takes a look at all that and says, “Yummy. It’s ours now, suckers.”
The NSS calls its twist to the Monroe Doctrine the “Trump Corollary,” which is named after a known child predator:
After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere. Hemisphere. This “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine is a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.
Potent! Thank you, AI!
Wait, there’s more:
Our goals for the Western Hemisphere can be summarized as “Enlist and Expand.”
One word: Ruh-roh.
After a brief discussion about the necessity of coercing governments to bend to America’s5 will, the AI-generated text6 states that the U.S. will militarize the oceans of the Western hemisphere. The NSS declares several related goals, including:
A readjustment of our global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere, especially the missions identified in this strategy, and away from theaters whose relative import to American national security has declined in recent decades or years;
This is AI-speak for, “We’ll send our biggest, baddest new aircraft carrier fleet and hunt down Caribbean vacationers while calling them cartel drug-runners.”
There is surprisingly limited outrage over this piece of the doctrine, which has already been implemented. Many Americans are buying the argument that only drug runners are being pursued. But even if that’s true (highly unlikely), that isn’t even what the regime is saying.
The regime is claiming that the 80 people who have already been killed by the likes of Admiral Bradley and his special forces marauders are at war with the U.S. But international law is clear on this: Drug dealers are subject to police actions, not executions without judicial process by military forces.
Bradley’s activities would be akin to Coast Guard boats gunning down boaters on Lake Michigan because they’ve been accused of selling dope on the South Side of Chicago.
The military realignment, of course, means that, since even the American armed forces have limited resources, the U.S. will need to divert resources away from areas like the Pacific, where China has established a growing belligerence and presence.
The document continues with a few more ominous objectives:
• A more suitable Coast Guard and Navy presence to control sea lanes, to thwart illegal and other unwanted migration, to reduce human and drug trafficking, and to control key transit routes in a crisis;
• Targeted deployments to secure the border and defeat cartels, including where necessary the use of lethal force to replace the failed law enforcement-only strategy of the last several decades; and
• Establishing or expanding access in strategically important locations.
Does this mean the Coast Guard will also be asked to commit murder? We don’t know yet, but at least you won’t be surprised now if when it happens.
It is here where the regime reaffirms its intent to turn the high seas into a killing field: “the use of lethal force to replace the failed law enforcement-only strategy of the last several decades.”
No courts, no arrests, just murder and execution in the name of saving the lives of future Matthew Perrys, which should be a noble goal, if it were a serious one.
But when the same snake oil salesman who initiates these policies pardons a former Honduran president directly responsible for trafficking 400 tons of cocaine into the United States,7 it’s not possible to take his drug policy seriously. No, folks, this is nothing more than a freak show of drunk (literally, thanks to Kegsbreath) power.
It’s a weapon of intimidation that tells South and Central American citizens that the most basic activities they’ve taken for granted in their ocean waters for years are now potentially lethal. Even if every single one of those 80 people murdered by Hegseth and Bradley under the direction of the mad clown were drug dealers, would you, as a law-abiding citizen, take your chances on an afternoon sailboat ride through the Caribbean?
These are the actions of an Axis superpower determined to push less powerful countries around. In the case of Mexico and Central and South America, that’s all of them.
The last bullet point is important, too:
Establishing or expanding access in strategically important locations.
In the regime’s version of world order, strategically important locations should be translated to mean areas where Trump grift can be capitalized, with the help of the U.S. Armed Forces if necessary.
Heather Scott Richardson again:8
Rubio noted that the administration is “more than willing to use America’s considerable leverage to protect our interests.”
That’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, he of “gimme a water!” fame, who is among the large cast of Republican characters who once regularly derided the mad clown but who have since invested in a decade's supply of knee pads.
The NSS then pivots from hardcore military adventurism and imperialism to Trumpy grift. This is important because if you read more than a couple of Substacks a day, you know that the Grifter-in-Chief’s crime family has already profited directly from various corrupt policies to the tune of several billion dollars.
The precise numbers are impossible to ascertain, so they vary wildly. Only a congressional committee established after Democrats win the midterms will be able to unlock anything close to real numbers. What we do know is that everywhere we look, members of the Trump family have their fingers all over the world map, yanking money out of countries ranging from Qatar to Russia and funneling it into Trump family bank accounts.
3. Fund the grift with Middle East oil
The NSS comes disturbingly close to sexualizing the profit potential of Middle Eastern oil. Oligarchs reading the document’s description of the region’s cash potential must feel as if they’re reading soft porn:
America’s historic reason for focusing on the Middle East will recede. Instead, the region will increasingly become a source and destination of international investment, and in industries well beyond oil and gas—including nuclear energy, AI, and defense technologies. We can also work with Middle East partners to advance other economic interests, from securing supply chains to bolstering opportunities to develop friendly and open markets in other parts of the world such as Africa.
Instead of contemplating the future of a ruined Palestinian nation that just lost 70,000 of its people to Netanyahu’s war machine, the Trump regime is already counting its money as it plots how to capitalize on the misery.
The regime wants to extend its grift to Africa, and specifically pats itself on the back for ending aid there:
The United States should transition from an aid-focused relationship with Africa to a trade- and investment-focused relationship, favoring partnerships with capable, reliable states committed to opening their markets to U.S. goods and services.
More broadly, the document proclaims:
The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.
This isn’t the worst goal in the world, and if it’s the only part of this policy statement that lives past Trump, maybe some use can come out of it. But the NSS simply wants to replace American meddling with grift. Even the so-called Ukrainian peace plan is full of grift, with direct plans to create investment opportunities with Russian oligarchs after the war ends:
More ominously, the document makes its rare nod to history when it declares that Alexander Hamilton demanded that the United States never allow itself to be dependent on foreign resources (like rare earth minerals used for tech gadgets):
This will require expanding American access to critical minerals and materials while countering predatory economic practices.
It is no coincidence that the mad clown has set his sights on Greenland, the thawing home of a new pile of rare earth minerals.
The grift is epic, but the price we all might pay in a world with three major authoritarian powers about to enter the age of AI and Quantum computing is the stuff of dystopian science fiction.
Clearly, it’s time for Chuck Schumer to write another urgent memo.
Notes
I first discussed the emerging axis in December 2024:
And Just Like That, the Price of Eggs Rose and Democracy Fell
To state what may be obvious to some of you, we are in the twilight of democracy. But it didn’t start with the price of eggs. It’s been a long oligarchical process that, believe it or not, is not only about the United States. The United States isn’t even at the forefront of it all.
Image notes
Image of a screaming man licensed from Adobe Stock
Image of Matthew Perry by Office of National Drug Control Policy, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Image of Scooby Doo licensed from Adobe Stock
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes
Ibrahim, Nur. 2025. “Pete Hegseth’s Title Was Misspelled as ‘Ssecretary of War’ on Nameplate.” Snopes. Snopes.com. December 3, 2025. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hegseth-ssecretary-of-war-name-plate/.
Richardson, Heather Cox. 2025. “December 5, 2025.” Substack.com. Letters from an American. December 6, 2025.
Interestingly, there’s a debate within the Project 2025 document itself between Kent Lassman and Peter Navarro over tariffs, where Lassman says on page 800: “When people try something repeatedly and it still doesn’t work, they should stop doing it—especially when the consequences turn out to be just what conservative economists have long predicted they would be. With tariffs, the proper reform is not only to get rid of the individual tariffs that have backfired, but also to build institutional safeguards against future abuse.”
The debate ended almost the minute Trump slithered into the Oval Office. Peter Navarro became a key advisor to the administration, and Lassman limped home to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, where he is officially on mute.
Morgenthau tended to think that this kind of cultural imperialism was not benign, nor organic. I am probably adding too much between the lines of his writing, but I’d guess he would believe that the Mexican people all refuse to absorb American culture as a matter of principle so that they can push theirs ever deeper into American territory.
Yes, I know, they’re ALL America. I don’t know how the U.S. managed to co-opt that name, but here we are, so I’m using it, too.
Almost every major document that gets spit out of the Trump regime is written by AI, in my humble opinion.
Jaffe, Alan. 2025. “Examining Trump’s Pardon of Former Honduran President Convicted of Trafficking Drugs to U.S. - FactCheck.org.” FactCheck.org. December 4, 2025. https://www.factcheck.org/2025/12/examining-trumps-pardon-of-former-honduran-president-convicted-of-trafficking-drugs-to-u-s/.
Heather Cox Richardson; ibid









Incredible, just fucking incredible! Quick, somebody name something after him!