David E. Sanger

And it's those areas where I think the president wants to get that replaced with American hardware and software.

There is certainly a split in MAGA world about isolationism and interventionism.

And there are a lot of the president's followers who would like to just build big walls around the continental United States, maybe include Hawaii and Alaska in that, and basically say, everybody stay away and we're not going to mess in your business.

You saw MAGA members who were opposed to taking out the nuclear facilities in Iran.

The president basically told them to sit down and shut up while he bombed them and then came home.

But what we're discussing in Latin America is really pulling MAGA apart here because they see in our conflicts over the boats, in the president's promise repeated just this week that there would be land strikes, that we could end up in forever wars in our own neighborhood.

Well, one possibility of what we get out of it is basically a spheres of influence kind of organization of the world, something we haven't really seen since the late 1800s.

This is a world in which the United States dominates its own territory, that China dominates the Pacific.

and that the Europeans dominate Europe, but if they don't get their act together, maybe Vladimir Putin dominates Europe.

It establishes essentially that we each carve up the globe and sort of respect the other territories as the other guy's problem.

And, of course, this is a vision that coincides with another vision

world leaders' idea of how the globe should be organized.

And that's Putin himself, who has frequently talked about this spheres of influence kind of organization of the world.

I think this is where we see the America first doctrine becoming something closer to America's first.

With an S. America's with an S, that he views the region as basically the subsidiary of the United States.

And, you know, I've traveled with President Trump.

I've covered five American presidents since I got back to Washington from a life as a foreign correspondent.

And my takeaway is that Trump is really not an isolationist.

He never has been.

He's actually more of a unilateralist.