Donald Trump’s new national security strategy placed greater emphasis on the homeland (unneeded and even ominous for the health of the U.S. republic) and the Western Hemisphere (potentially beneficial) at the expense of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Since World War II—starting with the 40-plus-year, worldwide, grandiose Cold War instituted by Harry Truman and the subsequent war on terrorism—the U.S. superpower has worried more about threats to Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East than the countries in those regions. The tragic result was unneeded wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and two wars with Iraq. And those are just the largest quagmires the United States got itself into during that period; countless smaller military interventions were conducted in far-flung countries. Some of these wars were the antecedents for the retaliatory 9/11 attacks that then triggered the U.S. war on terrorism. With all this attention focused elsewhere, often the important Western Hemisphere—the closest region to the otherwise relatively geographically isolated and therefore intrinsically secure United States—was usually treated as a backwater of lesser significance.

Yet in practice, the Trump administration’s higher priority for the Western Hemisphere has involved implied or overt neo-imperial coercion rather than restoring the more benign Good Neighbor Policy of the Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt........

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