The Theory That Gives Trump a Blank Check for Aggression

[Celerity]

The true meaning of “flexible realism” — abroad and at home.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/09/magazine/trump-venezuela-foreign-policy-realism-greenland.html

https://archive.ph/lgn3h



In an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN on Monday, President Trump’s aide Stephen Miller blithely articulated the outlook that has taken hold of the White House. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

His words seemed to deliberately echo Trump’s statement on Saturday that the capture and extradition of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his wife, Cilia Flores, was the product of “the iron laws that have always determined global power.” Not international laws, which prohibit the use of force to threaten the independence and territorial integrity of another sovereign state. Trump, for his part, said in a recent interview with The Times, “I don’t need international law.”

“America will never allow foreign powers to rob our people or drive us back into and out of our own hemisphere,” Trump said on Saturday. To that end, the administration is reviving the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in its neighborhood. “Under our new National Security Strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” the president said.

That National Security Strategy, released in early December, gave a name to one of the organizing principles supposedly governing the administration’s foreign policy: “flexible realism.” The document stated that the United States would pursue “peace through strength,” have a “predisposition to non-interventionism” and safeguard the “sovereign rights of nations,” first and foremost those of the United States. It would reassert American dominance over the Western Hemisphere.

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