David E. Sanger

We had the collapse of the Soviet Union.

We had 9-11.

And we began to think, as China rose, that it's really in the Indo-Pacific that we needed to concentrate our forces.

What this document is saying is it's time to come home again and to focus on our home region.

And when you read the actual document,

The president talks about building on the Monroe Doctrine and creating a sort of Trump corollary to it.

What it's saying is we are going to control access to the region.

We're going to stop drugs to the region.

And we're going to make sure that you see the U.S.

military in the region.

And here's where the document gets more specific than in almost any other place in the 30 pages.

There's a page where it says we're going to readjust our global military presence to address these urgent threats in our own hemisphere because we live here.

Well, that may not sound like a big decision, but we've had a succession of American presidents, Democrats, Republicans alike, who have said, we are going to go focus on the Indo-Pacific because that's where our future is, that's where our trade is, that's where China and India are, right?

So this would basically put a halt to that kind of expansion and

in a world of limited resources and bring those forces back home.

It says that we're going to design a more suitable Coast Guard and Navy presence to control sea lanes.

It says we're going to defeat cartels and put people at the border to do that.

and where necessary, the use of lethal force to replace the failed law enforcement-only strategy of the last several decades.

That's right.

It's giving a strategic rationale for things he has wanted to do and is doing anyway.