America needs to continue alliances

BREAKTHROUGH

- ELFREN S. CRUZ

The United States, under Trump, is conducting a foreign policy that can best be described as isolationist. In fact, its foreign trade policy has set off trade wars that have antagonized its closest allies. Then, for some strange reason, Trump has used imperialist language even against its closest allies. For example, it has proposed that Canada become its 51st state and that Greenland be transferred from sovereignty of Denmark and be a territory of the United States.

Some observers have said that US foreign policy is parallel to President Trump's narcissistic personality that believes that the United States is not only the most powerful country in the world but can literally force other countries to submit to its will.

At one press conference, Trump literally predicted that when he increased the tariffs on other countries, every nation in the world was being forced to submit to America's tariff wars and, as he described it, every leader in the world was "kissing (his) ass."

American strategists must confront the risk that the United States could find itself in the position of the United Kingdom a century ago. The British experience offers both lessons and warning. The British Empire, once the most powerful empire in the world, suffered through two world wars and a severe economic depression and ended up as a European power and not a global power.