The Trump Doctrine and America's Strategic Imperative
Part One: The Anatomy of American Vulnerability
"The first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden."
— Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (1999)
I’m about to do something I don’t like to do, but I’ve tried writing about this for months now, and it’s so information dense, I am afraid I have to split it up to make it all make sense. I want to take you on a deep dive into what I think the evolving “Trump Doctrine” really looks like, and why it is existentially important for America to get behind. This, therefore, is the first of a three-part series I will endeavor to publish this week in full on the Trump Doctrine, what it means, how it works, and why we’d all better get behind it. I suspect I’m about to catch a lot of flak for this one. I intend to make some statements that, under rational examination, are inarguable. That means the arguments launched against this will be appeals to emotion and the typical agenda-driven rage we see from the anti-Trump crowd. Because of that, let me start with some assurances.
A word about format and analytic tradecraft: While this series will be written in my normal conversational tone, I need you to understand there’s been about three months of analysis feeding the conversation. Since late January, I’ve been looking at and analyzing President Trump’s actions, his picks for appointee positions, his targets for efficiencies and cuts, his trade priorities, his speeches about which sectors of American industry need to be bolstered, and more. I’ve applied a number of analytic techniques to assessing just how and why his actions might make sense, and what they might reveal about the bigger picture of his overarching strategic agenda. I’ve looked at it through the lens of history’s major treatises on war and statecraft, mapped what I’m seeing today to the events of recent history, and run the analytic processes again. While I’m going to refrain from academic citations and formality in the format, I do want you to know that what you’re reading here has been through some analytic rigor, leveraging the tools and techniques I learned through a career in intelligence, and applying modern tools like AI (ChatGPT and Grok, specifically) for both the research and to sharp-shoot my methodology and conclusions. With all of that out of the way, let’s dive in.
Not every interaction between world powers relates to war. But it is a truism that war is an extension of politics, and engaging in statecraft with other nations means making damned sure we do so from a position of strength. There was a time when America's dominance was measured in clear, unambiguous terms: manufacturing output, energy production, maritime supremacy, and unity of national will. Enemies could study our capabilities and know that they faced a fortress of industry, spirit, and resilience. Today, the picture is far less certain.
A nation ready and able to fight a war against another great power must possess certain attributes. It must have a robust and independent industrial base capable of sustaining prolonged conflict. It must control its own energy production to fuel its military and economy without reliance on foreign adversaries. Its supply chains must be resilient and redundant, not dependent on a single source or vulnerable to disruption. Its population must be unified by a common identity and purpose, and its government must be stable, capable, and morally legitimate. Strategic depth—geographical, economic, and societal—must allow for recovery and adaptation in the face of setbacks. And its military must not only be technologically advanced but able to sustain prolonged operations across multiple domains: land, sea, air, space, and cyber.
America's strategic depth — the vital reserves of strength and resilience that determine whether a nation can survive and prevail in war — has been dangerously eroded. Our industrial base has been offshored. Our energy independence sabotaged by regulatory strangulation. Our supply chains optimized for efficiency, not survivability. And I hate to break it to you - the Walmart model doesn’t win wars.
The battlefield itself has expanded. It is no longer confined to oceans, borders, or traditional theaters. As Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui warned in Unrestricted Warfare, the new battlefield is everywhere, and everything is a weapon: financial markets, social media feeds, shipping lanes, semiconductors, the very bandwidth of our social and cultural coherence.
This is not theoretical. It is already happening.
China has understood this far better than most American politicians have dared to admit. The ones who do admit it are modern-day Cassandras, their voices lost in a sea of lucrative fundraising opportunities that might dry up if we actually addressed the issue. There’s an adage in Washington that I’m convinced was once meant wryly but which is now so true and ubiquitous, it makes my head spin: “You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem; if you can’t be part of the solution, then there’s awful good money to be made in prolonging the problem.” The Chinese see this as readily and plainly as we do, and they have methodically targeted every soft spot in our national armor.
They hollowed out our industrial base by taking advantage of trade policies that favored offshoring over national resilience, luring American corporations with cheap labor and regulatory ease until our critical manufacturing sectors withered. They undercut our energy security by embedding themselves in global energy supply chains through Belt and Road investments, ensuring that in times of crisis, America would struggle to access critical resources. They dominated our supply chains, gaining near-total control over rare earth elements, pharmaceuticals, and vital electronic components. They challenged our maritime strength with a rapidly expanding navy aimed at pushing the United States out of the Pacific sphere. They compromised our cyber integrity through relentless, largely effective espionage, intellectual property theft, and cyber warfare attacks. And they fractured our cultural morale through influence operations designed to sow division, fuel distrust, and weaken the national spirit from within.
But it’s not enough to say this in the abstract. Let's deal in specifics.
China didn’t hollow out our industrial base through market competition alone. They leveraged America’s 2001 decision to support China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), securing Most Favored Nation status with promises of fair trade, transparency, and market reforms — promises that were almost immediately broken. While American manufacturers abided by labor laws, environmental protections, and financial regulations, Chinese state-owned enterprises flooded global markets with artificially cheap goods, heavily subsidized by their government and backed by political fiat, not market realities.
These subsidies weren’t investments. They were weapons. In sectors ranging from steel to solar panels to telecommunications, Chinese companies operated at massive, state-backed losses, driving foreign competitors — including critical U.S. industries — out of business. Once dominance was secured, prices were raised again, and dependency was locked in. Entire American towns built around manufacturing fell into ruin because Beijing understood something Washington conveniently pretended that it forgot: control the means of production, and you control the means of power. To the Chinese way of thinking, money was cheap, people were expendable, and power was everything.
Meanwhile, Belt and Road investments promised prosperity to developing nations. Inevitably, the terms of these deals revealed the true intent. Chinese financing often came without due diligence, environmental standards, or realistic repayment plans. Most of the time, nobody even bothered to find out if the 'beneficiary' nation was capable of sustaining the projects. Capability didn’t matter. Only leverage did. When countries inevitably defaulted, China seized strategic assets: ports, mines, energy infrastructure. Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka and Djibouti's naval facilities are textbook examples — and warnings. I used to see half-finished, abandoned projects like this all over Africa when I traveled there. Local workers were out of luck, heavy equipment, tools, and materials were abandoned, and the Chinese were swooping back in to snatch it all up, all according to plan.
On Wall Street, Chinese firms exploited American capital markets by listing on U.S. exchanges without complying with basic disclosure and transparency requirements that American companies are mandated to follow. To the casual reader, this might seem like some trivial paperwork or administrative issue, but far from it. For decades, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board was forbidden from inspecting audits of Chinese firms. Investors were left blind — until massive scandals like Luckin Coffee’s $300 million accounting fraud exposed the scale of deception. The fraud was only one aspect of this exploitative behavior. American competitors also had to sink disproportionately high overhead costs into compliance with the regulations the Chinese simply ignored, making the playing field still more uneven.
Behind the scenes of this economic onslaught stood an even darker reality: the Chinese government’s use of forced labor. Entire industries, especially textiles, solar panels, and electronics, have been credibly tied to Uyghur slave labor in Xinjiang. U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Withhold Release Orders (WROs) targeting goods produced with forced labor barely scratch the surface of the moral rot behind Beijing’s “economic miracle.” And if we are honest, part of the reason they get away with it is because we let them.
We have grown comfortable subsidizing our lifestyles on the backs of unseen slaves, so long as the suffering is buried deep enough in the supply chain that we don't have to confront it. Cheap smartphones, cheap shirts, cheap batteries — all bought at the cost of real human lives we pretend not to see. Slavery, it turns out, didn’t disappear.
It just got exported. And whitewashed with the glossy branding of “global commerce.”
Even debt, that oldest weapon of empires, has been twisted into new forms. Chinese “investment” isn’t always backed by real currency or enforceable contracts; it often operates more like political tribute. Massive loans are issued, construction projects are green-lit, and when repayment inevitably fails, the debts are quietly erased—only after strategic concessions are extracted.
None of this is theory. None of this is accidental.
It is truly unrestricted warfare, applied with the patience of a civilization that thinks in generations, against a rival that barely thinks beyond the next news cycle.
The "so what" is simple, brutal, and urgent: America cannot survive a great power confrontation, let alone prevail, if these vulnerabilities are not repaired — now. Our enemies know it, and that’s why they’ve specifically taken aggressive measures to undermine and exploit these vulnerabilities for a generation.
This is where the strategic calculus of the Trump Doctrine enters the field.
Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump personally, it must be understood that his administration's initiatives were not haphazard fits of nationalism or economic belligerence. He is not flying by the seat of his pants, nor is he making decisions that are impulsive. You’re not seeing a reactionary series of moves. You’re seeing defensive fortifications—however incomplete—against a type of war that had already been declared against us.
Trump's tariffs were not mere economic policy. They were defensive economic warfare, designed to weaken China's ability to extract wealth from our economy and re-anchor American industry back onto American soil. His push for energy independence was not a side note—it was a conscious effort to rebuild strategic depth, ensuring that America could fuel itself and fight, if necessary, without begging rivals for access to oil or gas. His focus on immigration controls was not cruelty—it was the preservation and strengthening of national cohesion, the idea that a nation must define and defend its citizenry if it is to remain a nation at all. His efforts to rebuild military strength were a direct investment in restoring hard deterrence, making it clear that while America prefers peace, it will never again enter a conflict as a hollow giant. His crackdowns on Chinese technology companies were not protectionism—they were essential moves to secure the informational battlespace, ensuring that American data, communications, and critical infrastructure would not be quietly colonized by hostile foreign actors.
This isn’t isolationism. It is strategic triage.
Trump Doctrine, properly understood, was and is an attempt to rebuild the sinews of national survival: to reforge America's industrial strength, protect its borders, and reignite the national will before it’s too late.
Before we close, I need to address something critical, because the response to this series will not come solely from reasoned disagreement. It will come far more vehemently from reflexive outrage — outrage that, whether knowingly or not, plays directly into the hands of our adversaries.
Understand this: China has not only targeted our factories and our supply chains. It has targeted our cultural cohesion itself. Through social media manipulation, ideological infiltration of academic institutions, and strategic influence campaigns, they have fanned every ember of division they could find within American society — race, class, politics, gender, history. They didn't create all of these divisions. But they recognized them, stoked them, and weaponized them, and they continue to play that hand masterfully.
And so today, when someone rejects a policy not on its merits, but simply because it bears the name Trump — when they oppose a restoration of national strength out of tribal loyalty to weakness — they are, knowingly or not, doing the work of our enemies for them.
Honest debate is not the enemy. Honest criticism sharpens nations and strengthens ideas. But blind, performative resistance — the hatred that screams first and thinks later — is nothing but strategic self-sabotage wearing the mask of moral superiority. Nobody is asking you to like Donald Trump, especially me. I’m not even asking you to agree with Donald Trump. I’m asking you to look beyond the man, beyond the noise, and honestly assess what’s at stake. Look at the chessboard with clear eyes. Study the threats and our adversaries’ actions with a sober mind. Ask yourself: Would we be stronger if we keep going the way we have? Would we be safer? Or have we traded strength for spite, and security for slogans?
America needs adults in the room again. Adults who can argue without betraying themselves. Adults who can recognize that securing our future matters more than satisfying old grudges. Like families that argue behind closed doors but rally when an outside threat shows up, let’s get our act together and deal with the real threat first, effectively, cohesively. We can go back to picking on each other after.
In Part II of this series, I will map how the Trump Administration's actions aligned with classical principles of warfare, from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz to the modern architects of multi-domain operations, and why these measures, far from radical, were the bare minimum necessary to survive the unrestricted wars of the 21st century.
And in Part III, we will examine the price of failure—historic examples where nations ignored the early signs, misread the evolving character of conflict, and paid the ultimate price for their illusions.
The clock is running, China has a head start, and as the Gray Beards of War often say, those who refuse to see the battlefield for what it is will find themselves conquered upon it.